Trouble begins for twelve-year-old Lydia Henson when her family move to Tarwich in Yorkshire and she changes school. After refusing to take the initiation test of a girl’s gang, which was to take a sports cup and hide it in her locker for a day, Lydia herself is accused of stealing the cup when it is found in her locker the next day. Her best friend Frankie abandons her for Anne, her spiteful former best friend and Lydia’s enemy. She also suffers at the hands of a large number of school bullies, who are never seen by the teachers.
Matters become a lot worse when Frankie falls over an icy slope and Lydia is accused of pushing her, so she decides to run away to the moors.Suddenly she is caught up in a mysterious electrical storm from nowhere. A moor pony knocks her down and she is sucked into the sky by a violent gust of wind. Then she finds herself in the same place in the moors, and comes across a girl who looks exactly like Frankie, only she is not. Fran (the girl she meets) takes her to the town that was once Tarwich, and Lydiafinds out that she has travelled forward forty years. The once beautifultown is now a run-down, battered place where soldiers called the NightGuards terrorise the townspeople, and a cruel tyrant rules everyone. Thistyrant turns out to be Lydia’s little brother Daniel, much to her horror.
Lydia surrenders herself to the Night Guards and comes face to face with her brother, who is now a middle-aged man. Daniel eventually believes that she is who she says she is, and tells her that although Lydia was believed to have been killed in a car accident, the future Lydia is actually still alive, and Daniel brings the two Lydias face to face. Old Lydia tells young Lydia about her hatred of everyone who lived in Tarwich, but young Lydia is now determined to change the future of Tarwich, so that the world she has entered would never exist. So Daniel drives her back to the moors,where the mysterious electrical storm appears, but little do they know that there is a resistance army who will do anything to eliminate the Henson family.. Trouble begins for twelve-year-old Lydia Henson when her family move to Tarwich in Yorkshire and she changes school. After refusing to take the initiation test of a girl’s gang, which was to take a sports cup and hide it in her locker for a day, Lydia herself is accused of stealing the cup when it is found in her locker the next day. Her best friend Frankie abandons her for Anne, her spiteful former best friend and Lydia’s enemy. She also suffers at the hands of a large number of school bullies, who are never seen by the teachers.