It didn’t take long. The snake was hungry. It squeezed the tiny mouse and Aida squeezed Giles’s mousy arm and Mr. Wormer squeezed his thin lips until they broke into the slightest smile under his skimpy little moustache. Then, like Mr. Wormer knew what was about to happen, his dully elated eyes rose slowly from the coiled ball in the tank and looked directly at Giles.
“I’M SORT OF special myself, you know. Not to beat anyone over the head with it. I mean not to look at me, maybe. Not at first. But it’s there. Stuffed away. Secret. Supposedly.”
Ennead is a collection of cities built by the best scientific minds on earth solely for themselves and their descendents. It’s all that remains of our world. Whatever prompted its creation happened several generations before Elizabeth Turner finds herself on a late-night transport rushing from Ennead Centre to one of the nine satellites—the social science city of Kabete—on a secret mission. Turner is a young, rookie agent, uncertain of the particulars of her mission, and of herself. Find and bring in a “subtly special child” is all she really knows.
Except that she’s an unlikely choice for the mission, Turner’s not sure about much—her target, her cover, her plan, herself. Soon, with no kid standing out as all that likely a choice either and clear threats closing in, the young agent makes a risky alliance with a washed-up celebrity scientist and his science-doc producer sidekick. Together they defy Turner’s superiors and spirit all six kids out to the darkest parts of Ennead.
Between the missing robotics instructor, the doomsaying old gypsy, the slinking principal’s assistant, the truth wizard, the toymaker, the brain specialist, the inhumanly gorgeous prince of the underworld, and just about everybody else, it’s not clear who wants to protect this “special” kid and who wants something quite different. One thing’s for sure: to make it through this, Turner’s group will have to all be pretty extraordinary.