A teenage girl stumbles out of an alley in Ottawa, concussed, with no memory of her life. Fleeing sword-wielding operatives with inexplicable mental abilities, she soon learns that her name is Zoe, and that she not only possesses the same abilities, but is extraordinarily skilled in martial arts. As she scours Toronto for clues about her identity, she finds others like her, and is given refuge at the Academy, an international school for Telepaths. As fragments of her childhood return, she begins to suspect that she may not like who she once was-that she may be part of a shadowy organization more powerful than anyone suspects, and that she will soon be swept up in events that are thousands of years in the making.

At the age of sixteen Frances Hodgson Burnett moved to Tennessee with her bankrupt family and began writing for American magazines as means to support herself. Over two decades later Burnett published "Little Lord Fauntleroy," modeling the character after her son Vivian. Burnett's text and Reginald Birch's original illustrations helped popularize a very romantic style of dress for boys -- a velvet suit with a broad lace collar -- in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.