Instead of spending six weeks sunning herself on a tropical beach, Thea finds herself unceremoniously packed up and sent off to stay with a grandfather she barely knows for the entire summer But when he has a strange reunion with a mysterious childhood friend, Thea gets the opportunity to visit a world beyond the stars, and become Earth's first student to enrol in an experimental Interplanetary Education Programme at the Firestone Academy, where lessons in telepathy and astral projection are part of the curriculum. Things, however, are not as straightforward as they seem. Not only is she having increasingly disturbing dreams, one of her fellow students despises her and will stop at nothing to make her leave, and as for that hideously deformed cave-dwelling creature, what can it possibly want with her?