11 year old Mariana has a gift. Since the age of 2, she has been able to communicate telepathically with any animal she wants. A mysterious and delightful ability that allows her to speak to anything from the largest mammal to the smallest rodent As she ages, her gift becomes more powerful; and much more dangerous. At the age of 5, her parents were killed in front of her and she was taken and held for nearly a year in a place she knows only as "The Lab." They performed exhaustive tests with her trying to get her to reveal her gift, but she refused. Becoming more frustrated by the day, the Chief of Operations for the lab, Herald Newberg, a very evil man, gets her to show her gift...at great personal expense. Finally able to escape the lab with the assistance of the very animals kept imprisoned there, she travels with her older brother Jack as they flee from the man and a much more insidious force tracking them down. Those evil beings want to use the animals of the world to take power over all humans, and they need her gift to do it. Mariana and her brother move from place to place, city to city, all the while heading in one direction; toward their fathers cabin in Washington state. They hoped it would be a place of refuge, but Mariana new differently - they were headed for a showdown. It would be violent. It would take the lives of humans and animals - but it was unavoidable. At 11 years old, Mariana knew the day was coming she would be asked to save the world.