Melissa Vaughn is a New York City social worker increasingly frustrated with the ineffectiveness and heartlessness of the modern urban bureaucracy. Then the boy named Adam enters her life. Discovered scrounging amid the tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, Adam is a feral child, a product of a murky, subterranean world of violence. Marked by a completely hairless head and commanding silvery eyes, he is cursed with a mute, autistic nature, yet blessed with uncanny powers, only gradually be revealed.