Twelve-year-old Ellie flies over the Atlantic Ocean in a Pod Fighter. She is fleeing Mal Gorman, the man who kidnapped her over a year ago. Gorman questions his security officers about how Ellie escaped the space station where she had been kept and disabled the rest of the Pod Fighters. He is particularly upset that she knows “The Secret” and has escaped with a “live black-capped capuchin monkey” (4). Gorman orders his men to kill her.

Ellie remembers her kidnapping: being taken from the street by masked men, dosed with a sedative, and waking up a prisoner on a space station. Once Gorman reveals to her The Secret, she knows he will never let her go, and she decides to escape. Now, nearing England, she sees The Wall, a massive concrete structure enclosing all of Northern Europe, Russia and Canada, a structure built during “The Plague” to keep out infected, ravenous animals. With a live monkey—Puck—in the back of her Pod Fighter, Ellie aims to prove that humans have nothing to fear from animals. As she flies over The Wall, dozens of Pod Fighters are waiting. She engages them in a chase through the urban canyons of London.