Chance was only two years old when the Poormans discovered him asleep on a grassy mound just outside the polluted industrial city of Littleton. They searched high and low for the boy's parents, but to no avail. When no one claimed him, they accepted him into their lives and loved him as their own.

Despite the Poormans' kindness, Chance lives a miserable life. At seven years old, he is small for his age-the smallest boy in first grade, as a matter of fact-and his peers picked on him mercilessly. Lonely and abandoned, Chance has nothing but his size and the mysterious clay amulet that was...