Tucker Feye watches as his father seems to disappear into thin air. Tucker remembers seeing a disk that seems to suck whatever it encounters into its maw. His minister father returns an hour later with Lahlia, a girl he claims to have found wandering alone downtown. He also returns with a crisis of faith, no longer believing in the existence of God. As Tucker's father becomes increasingly depressed and his mother seems to be drawn into an obsession with counting and numbers, Tucker engages in reckless behaviors with his neighbor friends. When he returns from an outing one day, his parents have disappeared, and he has been left in the care of his uncle Kosh, a man he barely knows. While living in his reconstructed barn, Tucker sees another disk. When he follows it, he ends up at top of one of the Twin Towers along with his uncle. When he seizes the chance to enter the disk once again, he realizes that these disks apparently provide paths to the past and to the future, and he desperately searches for his parents as he moves from place to place while surviving several attempts on his life.

It's hard to rate a book that is part of a trilogy without having read the rest of the books that go with the trilogy so I may end up going back and changing my rating after the next two titles have been published. This one is satisfying enough on its own merits, but there's quite a lot going on in the book. Most promising of all is Hautman's hints that society's obsession with numbers and computers has caused mental and emotional problems for its citizens. In the case of Tucker's mother, it was her incessant scratching of numbers in Sudoku puzzles that pushed her over the edge into what doctors diagnose as Rapid-onset Autism-like Disorder. There is plenty of food for thought here, but it seems as though Hautman is trying to do too much in this one--with time travel, disorders brought on by technology, prophets, and extinct species that aren't extinct after all. We'll see what happens in the next titles.