Sufficiently Analysed Magic

The last thing the hyper-advanced Human Confederation expected to encounter on Darius - a far distant and long lost colony world - was actual magic, sorcerers and magicians and other inexplicable feats that the most advanced technology could not duplicate. Determined to discover the source of the mystery, the Confederation dispatched a survey team to Darius and eventually discovered that the human settlers had tapped into the Darius Machine, an inexplicable piece of alien technology that granted supernatural powers to those capable of calling upon its aid. The Darius Machine was accidentally destroyed, seemingly rendering the former godlike humans powerless, but leaving behind a number of children with strange and often frightening powers of their own.

That was seventeen years ago.

Since then, the Darius Children have been raised on Clarke, an isolated world where they can be studied as well as protected from the remainder of the human race. Their powers appear simplistic and yet very dangerous, provoking fear as well as awe in their teachers; their attempts to expand their abilities, and bring others into their mental network, threaten the very fabric of reality itself. As they start to demand the right to leave their homeworld, a sociopath strikes and kidnaps one of the Children, intending to sell her to the highest bidder. Another Child must go in pursuit ...

And hidden in the shadows, an unseen manipulator lays the seeds of a galaxy-wide conflagration.

Following on from Sufficiently Advanced Technology, this is the second book in Christopher G. Nuttall's epic Inverse Shadows universe.