Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer braves the mysterious dangers of the Territories, a surreal parallel world, in his quest--across the United States-for the Talisman, the only hope for his dying mother and for his own survival.

A rare silver coin and a mysterious red-haired boy seem entangled in eleven-year-old Jacob "Deb" Corey's fate when he is laid up with a badly broken leg on his family's farm in the mid-1800s, just after performing a hex to cure his wanderlust.