After modern science turns every human into a genetic time bomb with men dying at age twenty-five and women dying at age twenty, girls are kidnapped and married off in order to repopulate the world.

Bright, imaginative, eleven-year-old Pram lives with two aunts who run a retirement home, hiding the fact that she can talk with ghosts--but not the spirit of her mother--and after befriending Clarence, who also lost his mother, she decides to find her father in hopes he can answer her questions.