Seventeen-year-old Wolfgang “Wolf” Clyde is used to things going wrong. A grieving mother, a damp Westminster council flat and a catastrophic late-night crypto crash have left him certain he’s cursed to fail. But on the day of his A-Level results, the world stops behaving like the world he knows.

Wolf’s A-Level results are impossibly high – strange, considering he barely studied – and there’s a strange man following him through Pimlico. The man tells Wolf he has been recruited – not for university, but for a covert Ministry of Defence training programme housed in an unmarked building behind Trafalgar Square.

Wolf finds himself one of six young people assembled for an eight-week residential training camp in the countryside. Officially, they’re being evaluated for a cybersecurity initiative – to find out if they can hack into the government’s secretive XB8 blockchain platform. During their training, however, it becomes clear that all of them have very unusual gifts… flashes of second sight, clairvoyance, clairsentience and other forms of psychic knowledge.

Wolf – whose light domestic magic has always been used casually, almost lazily – begins to realise that his abilities run far deeper than he ever understood. Passed down through his mother’s lineage, Wolf’s inherited gifts are from a tradition the world once called… witchcraft.

Eventually, the teens realise they were never meant to break into the system at all. They were chosen to test whether their psychic abilities could survive its suppressive design.

Now, Wolf and his cohort must stop a system designed to reshape an entire generation. To do that, Wolf must confront the legacy of his family’s forbidden gifts and the consequences of his great-grandmother’s wartime actions — before the same machinery of control claims him, and everyone like him, next.