Kids run away for many reasons; abusive parents, a bad environment, poverty, lack of love or respect at home. A few run away for adventure. Others hope to find a better life, but most discover that life on the street is cold, hungry and lonely. It's also a jungle of predators. The smarter - or luckier - kids usually find that no matter how bad things were at home, at least they had a bed to sleep in and a chance to really escape by going to school and preparing themselves to win life's battles. Most runaways are heard from again, days, weeks, even months later. But a few kids just disappear, and only their faces on milk cartons, or images on "missing" websites prove they once existed.

Collin Thatcher, thirteen-years-old in Oakland, California, has a reason for running away: his self-righteous Aunt Bulah, a part-time social worker and full-time fool, wants to put him in a boot camp for being "lazy and obese," take him away from his "dreamer" father, who was wounded in the Army, given a wheelchair along with a medal, and survives by writing books for kids. With the help of his best friend Ralpa, whose family fled political oppression in Tibet, Collin hopes to defeat his aunt's schemes. He and Ralpa are unexpectedly aided by a homeless boy named Tyger who survives by fishing in a battered old boat. Tyger introduces Collin to the Asian inner-city, a vastly different 'hood from Collin's, yet also plagued by gangs and violence. Collin's plan seems to be working. But then, he and his friends are captured by men who use kids for actors in "films about kids, but not for kids." The boys are also forced to model for comic book covers and VR games. Physically helpless against the men, Collin, Ralpa and Tyger must use their minds and computer skills to escape this dirty cartoon prison and also free the other kids.