As a jungle is clear cut in the far east, a team from a drug company work desperately to find plants that may be turned into medicines. But they find something altogether different and truly spectacular: a group of six abandoned infants. They aren’t human…and they aren’t apes, either.

The scientists spirit them off to the United States and raise them in extreme secrecy in a facility in Texas. They’re highly intelligent and because they’re not human the company involved realizes they can be bought and sold. They could be used in all sorts of applications as virtually free labor. They’ll be far easier and cheaper to retrain than artificial intelligence robots are to reprogram and reconfigure.

They are incredibly valuable, but only if they will breed offspring, and that’s a problem.

Primate specialist Beth Cooke is brought in to get them making babies. But she finds the company’s plans a grotesque nightmare.

Enter her husband Charlie, an Army Ranger in Iraq and a wild-haired risk taker. He proposes to get them out by force. But the facility they’re in is a fortress, its guards heavily armed.

And if they are released, what will happen to these six strange and brilliant creatures when they face the modern world?

This is a story unlike any other, about hope, about courage in an impossible situation, and, above all, about looking up at the sky for the first time, with eyes that are truly new.