There are no men in the city of Kleisut. There are only boys, but each of them disappears at midnight on his eighteenth birthday. The ground shakes, the wind howls, and a blinding light appears... where they disappear. They call it the Kidnapping. Gray Witherbee's eighteenth birthday is just a few months away, and he's ready to face his fate, until he finds a note from his mother, and does not begin to doubt what he believed: the Council of Leaders, their apparent secrets, what the Abduction means and what lies beyond the walls surrounding the city of Kleisut, which no one can cross without surviving. Climbing the wall is suicide, but perhaps after the Abduction everything will be much worse. Should he sit back and wait until they take him away, or should he succumb to the risk in the hope of salvation on the other side of the wall?