This was a great story! Darcy is not quite an ordinary foster child. She was found outside a Chicago Fire Hall when she was five. She had no memory of how she got there. In the next eleven years she bounced around to a number of foster homes. She has been at Marsha's for two years now which is something of a personal record.She is starting her junior year of high school and happy to be with her three friends - Lily, Jims, and Raphael. They have formed their own little group in the high school. But then Conn arrives. Conn is a senior, good looking, and interested in Darcy. They work together on a school project and get to know each other and like each other. Just as the project is concluding, Conn betrays her. He arrests her and takes her home to his Chicago which is an alternate world to the one where Darcy grew up. In his Chicago, there never was a Great Chicago Fire and there exist beings known as Shades who are domestic terrorists. Conn works for the Interdimensional Bureau of Investigation. He was sent to arrest her when she was spotted through one of the portals that link the two worlds. Now Darcy is stuck in a world she knows nothing about and learns that she is some sort of alien being who is supposed to be able to become a ghost. She is forced by the IBI to spy on the Shadow Society and in return she will be allowed to return to her Chicago. She does decide to make contact with the Shadow Society because she wants to find out about herself. She wants to know how she was abandoned in Chicago as a five-year-old. Darcy is a wonderful character. She is strong and resilient. She is also caring and curious. She has the unique ability to have an outsider's point of view as she sees both the Shadow Society and the IBI. She sees that there are factions in both groups who want to destroy each other. But she also sees factions who want to find some way to get along and to end the war between the two groups. In the Shadow Society, she is taught what she needs to know by a young man named Orion. At first he is a sympathetic character who seems to want what is best for Darcy. Darcy tries out a relationship with him because they have so much more in common than she and Conn. But through it all Conn is the one she loves. Together Darcy and Conn have to find a way for their two groups to work together to foil a terrorist plot being hatched by extremists in the Shadow Society.I recommend this book to science fiction fans and any readers who are looking for a good love story. I can't wait to share this one with my students.
