Anna Hart is a twelve-year-old from Flemington, New Jersey, who attends a school for gifted children. She is a true prodigy, yet her brilliance comes with a stubborn streak: she can be a clever kleptomaniac who teases her teachers, and she endures headaches when she fixates on fires or flickering lights. Her nights are haunted by strange, prophetic dreams that hint at something larger lurking behind her family’s history. When a piano teacher named Michaela Dupont moves in next door, Anna’s world begins to tilt even more. Michaela has been watching Anna closely and keeps photos of her—and of a lookalike girl from 1970—tied to a past that seems to echo in the present. Then, a shocking moment arrives: Anna sees her exact double on local TV after a commuter plane makes a forced landing nearby. The other girl is named Anna Smithson, and she shares a family background that mirrors Anna’s—born from a scientist and a musician’s union of talents.
As Anna digs deeper, she uncovers a path that connects her to a woman named Anna Zimmerman, who died twenty years earlier. She learns that she herself was part of Zimmerman’s cloning project and that she is fated to grow into a replica of Zimmerman. The revelations do not stop there: Anna discovers that her mother volunteered for the cloning endeavor, while her father refused to participate. The more Anna probes into this lineage, the more she dreams of Zimmerman’s past—growing up in Nazi-occupied Germany during World War II, where she, like Anna, was a pianist and a child prodigy who might have played a role in the Nazis’ plans for engineering the future of humanity. With this heavier sense of identity, Anna begins to behave more like a typical child, all while continuing to search for the truth with the quiet help of her brother Rowan and the secret support from Michaela.
When Anna’s mother and father decide to take her to a facility on Albacore Island for a few days of evaluation, the investigation takes a darker turn. Inside the island compound, Anna finds the phone in her room blocked and ends up locked in her chamber. She manages to bolt the door from the inside and, while sneaking around, notices other rooms where the other Annas are housed. The atmosphere grows tense as she overhears Dr. Barrett and a nurse discussing failed experiments and the plan to dispose of the girls.
Rowan helps by calling Anna and pretending to be Dr. Jelliff, and he somehow sneaks into the facility to reunite with his sister. The siblings confront Dr. Jelliff, the man who has continued Zimmerman’s cloning program, who claims that Anna is now a “normal” person and even suggests she change her name to begin a new life. Yet the danger isn’t over for long. After Anna and Rowan depart, Jelliff reveals, to Michaela (the person tasked with guiding each Anna’s progress), that he has been secretly grooming another Anna to become the future Zimmerman and that their plan is to wipe out the remaining five Annas—including Hart and her family.
The plot twists dramatically when Michaela unveils her true identity as Anna Parkhurst, the original product of Zimmerman’s cloning project and the girl who resembled Anna in the 1970 photograph. Parkhurst’s anger at the experiments—and her intimate knowledge of how to create a replicator—gives her leverage. She offers Jelliff a deal: the plans for the replicator in exchange for the safety of all the Annas and a secure location where she can continue her work unimpeded, along with a sealed report to be released should anyone come to harm. The story ends with Jelliff weighing this unexpected proposal, his plans now caught in a high-stakes balancing act between control and survival for everyone involved in the shadowy world of cloned lives.
