In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, a secret Government facility, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents – telekinesis, telepathy – who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha and Nick, George and Iris, ten-year-old Avery Dixon. The director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal.  Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help…but no one has ever escaped from the Institute…