The book opens with Devon McWilliams' escape from one such facility. He's a plant talker, which feels like a pretty lame "power" to have, especially when you are an average teen-aged boy in every other way. Although his escape was plotted with several other psions, including his best friend, Colton Weaver, it seems none of the others made it. As he scrambles across the desert in search of his contact with the Psionic Underground Network, a group who can help him hide, he is captured by a group of bruisers dressed in all black and tossed into an airplane, on the way to God-knows-where, with a motley crew of other teen-aged psions.
Everyone is tight-lipped at first, but then they start talking, especially once a beautiful Asian warrior named Bai Lee Chen gets brought in, only to take down her guards in short order in a brutal beatdown, followed by her vicious recapture. The group soon realizes that they are all headed somewhere pretty bad and they must band together if they have any hope of escape. They all soon learn that Bai Lee is a telepath and they can communicate inside of their heads without alerting the guards. She proposes a plan. If she can dig around in each psion's head and see just what brought them to this situation, she'll judge whether they are worthy to continue on in her mission to escape. Because of Bai Lee's power, everyone will get to experience these events as if they were there as well. Naturally, Devon resists because he doesn't want people here to know him as "Plant boy," as he was called, but eventually everyone takes their turn and shares their stories.
There's Vahn de Montague, a psi-blade who is basically a modern day gladiator fighting in battles known as The Psi Games in the hopes of being reunited with Emily, the love of his life who was spirited away from their facility. Nevada was originally Allison Wingate, the privileged daughter of a Senator and a girl prone to flamboyant behavior to spite her parents. At only 18, she's been married a few times, but mostly to create trouble for her rich and powerful parents. She's a windwalker and has finally married for love, but not if her mother has anything to say about it. Romanian twins Alya, a healer and Aleksei (Alek), a teleport, were separated a decade before when Alya was brought to heal Viktor, the son of a wealthy and dangerous man, of his debilitating leukemia. Alya takes on others' diseases to heal them, so she is quite weak as she tries to recover, and her brother Alek is very protective of her, since they have only recently been reunited. Then there's young Miguel from Guatemala, a devout Catholic and an untrained telepath who is captured to aid the government in telepathic interrogations. The problem is, he doesn't want to help them, he doesn't want to hurt the people they want interrogated, and most importantly, he's not sure how his power works. Fortunately, someone recognizes his untapped power and wants him to go to America to meet up with the Psionic Underground Network.
The one thing that connects all of the kids on the plane, besides the fact that they are all psions, is that all were either trying to meet up with the Psionic Underground Network, or had just connected with them. And now they are all here. Could there be a traitor in their midst?
As each teen's story unfolds, they learn more about one another. Their behavior is the stuff of typical teenagers - teen angst, bad attitudes, rebellion and bravado, and over the top romance, especially Devon, who finds himself madly in love with Alya by the end of the story. Freaks of Nature is definitely directed at the young adult audience, and while it can be enjoyed by an older audience as well, the dialogue and personalities of the characters fall squarely in the YA category.
I am interested to see where the series takes this interesting group of powered teens as they increase their abilities and fight back against the baselines and the government trying to hunt them down.
