What would you do if Russ­ian mob­sters want­ed to tor­ture and kill your entire fam­i­ly? Natal­ie Lan­cast­er grabs her sons Bill, 13, and Tom­my, 11, and they run for their lives. They must leave every­thing behind—their pos­ses­sions and their past—in a des­per­ate attempt to survive.

To throw the killers off their trail, they buy false iden­ti­ties from a shady deal­er. But the only iden­ti­ties avail­able for the boys are as mid­dle-school girls. Unwill­ing­ly they mas­quer­ade as girls and con­tin­ue run­ning. But chang­ing cities, names, ages, cloth­ing, and even their gen­der, can’t keep the truth from themselves—they nev­er real­ly were the peo­ple they thought they were.

The broth­ers make a Pact to stay boys, no mat­ter what. But Tom­my finds that act­ing like a girl has stopped being an act, that he may be trans­gen­der, while Bill doesn’t want any part of the mas­quer­ade. Mean­while, the killers get closer …

A Com­pan­ion to the books Des­per­ate Mea­sures and The Net­work.