Wright's new fantasy is about five orphans, raised in a strict British boarding school, who discover they are not ordinary human beings. The students at the school do not age, while the world outside does. The teenagers begin to make sinister discoveries about themselves. Amelia is apparently a fourth dimensional being; Victor can control the molecular arrangement of matter around him; Vanity can find secret passageways through solid walls where none had previously been; Colin is a psychic; Quentin is a warlock. Each power comes from a different paradigm or view of the inexplicable universe - and they should not be able to co-exist. The orphans have been kidnapped from their true parents, robbed of their powers and memories, and raised in ignorance by super-beings: pagan gods or fairy-queens, Cyclops, sea-monsters, witches, or things even stranger than this. The children must experiment with, and learn to control, their strange abilities in order to escape their captors.