Fifteen-year-old Will Drake has made a career of breaking out from high-security prisons. His talents have landed him at the Rig, a specialist juvenile holding facility in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. No one can escape from the Rig. No one except for Drake.

Kamet, a secretary and slave to his Mede master, has the ambition and the means to become one of the most powerful people in the Empire. But with a whispered warning the future he envisioned is wrenched away, and he is forced onto a very different path.

When fourteen-year-old Alex is framed for murder, he becomes an inmate in the Furnace Penitentiary, where brutal inmates and sadistic guards reign, boys who disappear in the middle of the night sometimes return weirdly altered, and escape might just be possible.

Since he was captured by the Glorious Path, a militant religion based on the teachings of a former soldier, fifteen-year-old Cal has served the Path in its brutal war with the remains of the United States government, and tried to survive and protect his younger brother but when he kills an officer to protect a stray dog, Cal is forced take his brother and the dog and run.

Seventh-grader Charley Decker's mother is on vacation with her boyfriend, and Charley plans to spend the weekend watching movies with her best friends Wade and Oona and her older brother, Greg; but Greg has a date and takes their mother's boyfriend's expensive, rare automobile, than manages to get it towed; Charley and her friends hatch a plan to get the car back--but things go seriously wrong when they discover somebody called Mitch hiding from a...