At first, after Thad Compton time travels to the twenty-first century, he's not sure if it's been worth the bother. But once he and Chloe Murray go back to Wahmurra, his 1833 home, they find an intriguing set of messages from the past. The messages are written in what seems to be an indecipherable code. As he and Chloe work on cracking the code, Thad starts school and almost immediately makes an enemy of its resident bully. What do the messages mean? Why has their writer gone to such extremes to make them so difficult to figure out? And when it looks like Thad's destiny is intertwined with the bully's, will good or evil prevail?