Pomegranate

Nine years after Percy's father disappeared at the time of the great Techno-Crash, her quiet life with her mother is shaken when she receives a birthday gift from him.

Though her mother distrusts technology, Percy loves her new electronic journal. She names it the "Pomegranate" but is frustrated by its missing password. On the advice of her friend Jessie, she seeks help from the instructor of an underground computer class.

Mr. Hayden replaces the journal's program, and it works but something is still wrong. Its guide dog, Byte is asking a lot of questions about Percy's family, and he knows things that Percy has never revealed to anyone.

When Mr. Hayden locks her in the basement of an old technology building, she uses skill and ingenuity to escape.

Then she contacts her father with the Pomegranate, and Mr. Hayden is captured.

As her family reunites, Percy realizes that they will need to live with a careful balance that supports her mother's ideals for a living planet and her father's commitment to the development of technology.

...And that is also a necessary balancing act for our own time in history.

"Pomegranate" is the second of Lynda's "Agent C Series" to be published as a paperback. The "C" stands for "catalyst," something that causes drastic changes and moves the plot of a story forward. Agent C is a little man who appears in each of the series' books to present a special object, the catalyst, to the main character. In Pomegranate, he appears as the deliveryman who brings Percy her gift.