The Measure

Koby Ashar is twelve, and everyone he came from is gone. St. Mary's takes him in — two lakes, two football pitches, and a folder with his name hand-written wrong, crossed out, and written wrong again. Somebody, somewhere, has been trying to get it right.

Then somebody arrives who already has.

Cairn is a school on a world that had to be taught to move, under a gold sky that changes when the world does. There, gravity is not a force and nothing is ever thrown — you simply change which way down is, and something, somewhere, pays for it. Koby is good at this. He is better at it than anyone wants him to be.

But two organisations have been looking for him for years, and only one of them needed a puzzle to do it. Working out which is which will cost him more than he knows how to count.