Ray, an adventurous and mischievous 15-year-old girl, initiates a Monarch rescue at a cottage on Lake Erie, igniting a desire to follow the Monarchs all the way down to Mexico. Ray claims there’s a new lead that points to her Father's (Fa's) last whereabouts being in Mexico. After this near-disastrous attempt at deception, Ray briefly renounces her mischievous ways and Jordi agrees to pilot the new Magnetic Nuclear Resonance (MNR)-equipped ultralight, called the Q-Bee, down the spine of North America with Ray as co-pilot.

In one adventure during their flight over Abilene Texas, all four of the major Monarch flyways converge over Dyess Air Force Base right in the middle of the test of a new START-mandated single-warhead ICBM launch. Monarch Watch is not monitoring the US military or flight communications channels and the military is not following the progress of the monarch migration. After forty million years of migration an unparalleled extinction event is about to take place and only Ray and Jordi, following the Monarchs in their Q-Bee, can change the course of history. Ray and Jordi encounter both beauty and danger; they crash land in the crater of a volcano in the midst of a drug plantation and are taken hostage by a drug cartel. They are rescued by a rogue priest and end up at an eco-village where they meet allies and adversaries on adventure after adventure following the Butterfly Way.