Learning (The Ten Worlds, #3)

Meet Walter: he is the thought-ape responsible for the management of the young psyche of one Anna Mae Champion. Walter has managed many young sentient minds across many planets throughout the universe. He is confident that Anna's mind will turn out to be interesting if unchallenging.

He is wrong. As Anna's Ten Worlds are born in her young brain, the order of their arrival is unusual...and alarming. As Anna matures, Walter and her Ten Worlds come to understand that they will be challenged as never before...

Anna has no sense of empathy. She shares no sense of connection with any of the human beings with which she comes into contact. Quite the contrary: she detests people. One of her talents, though, is an innate ability to charm, to control, and to manipulate. Her first targets are her parents. Then her oldest sibling, her brother, Alex. Her first three targets are easy. But then, she turns her "super power" on her other brother, Matt, and he's not buying it. You see, Matt has been watching Anna carefully since she started to interact with others. He is accused of being jealous of his baby sister, but that's not what is at the heart of his suspicion. He doesn't like her. Her heartless manipulation of the rest of his family disgusts him. He and Anna have a relationship of mutual distrust, something that plants a poison germ in the heart of the entire family.

Anna's mother eventually finds a highly recommended psychiatrist to counsel her daughter - because Anna asks her to. It is another ploy she intends to use to appear sophisticated and complicated in order to gain the interest of the popular girls at school. The ploy works for her at school...and then the counselling begins to work for her on a very personal level.

Anna is very intelligent; she skips two grades before she is eleven years old. In order to avoid any more accelerations in her education progress - she doesn't want to catch up and maybe even surpass Matt - she begins to make errors on tests and in assignments on purpose. She is precocious. And, as she approaches puberty, she becomes sexually precocious as well: something that gets her into serious trouble. She is abducted and abused by a group of men who are related to each other by only one thing: their depraved sexual interest in very young girls. Anna is smart: she manages to outwit the men and makes her escape. Once physically safe and reunited with her family, she cold-bloodedly plots her revenge. These men deserve to die for what they did to her. And she intends to wreak this revenge personally.

Her Ten Worlds are intimately involved in creating and growing Anna's urges: her World of Hunger, the first to be born, is her dominant World. But it is the World who was born second which becomes the key to Anna's success: the World of Learning. Since Anna does not have normal human emotions, Learning teaches her how to behave. Learning shows her how to avoid bad consequences, even if she can't entirely stop Anna from making bad causes . Learning. Anna slowly, begrudgingly, accepts one lesson and then another. Will it be enough to allow her to live a comfortable life? Can Learning prove to Anna that life is precious and that her own is worth living? Can Learning keep Anna out of prison for multiple murders?

Walter and the Ten Worlds unite to save Anna from the dire fate that her actions have led her to...will it be enough? As Walter says, "It's not her fault. She was born this way. Her karma is so black, so damaged, that she was set up for failure in this lifetime. Can the Universe really be this cruel? Let's fight it. Let's fight for our human. She only has us between her and the darkest of consequences."