It's 1984 and Samantha Ryan Blake - "unruly" foster child - sees things: murder, crime...and sometimes...otherworldly "beings". She doesn't have a family. Not since her mother was institutionalized and her father went missing ten years ago in Vietnam. What she does have is a secret. Now she's been made an offer - to receive "special tutoring" by a British couple - on the grounds of a heavily guarded American nuclear reactor testing facility. 

Two facts seem certain: She faces prison if she refuses the offer - and she needs help. Sam's court file paints her as a promiscuous teenage thief with a high IQ - until Bennie, a very strange boy also living behind the gates, tells her she's not the "person" she thinks. To save herself and Earth, she's forced to embark on a personal and perilous journey that uncovers long-buried secrets about the world she thought she knew - secrets that stretch across generations and the universe, all the way to Ninmah's Portal, home of the Astral Weavers. Confronting her past, Sam will be forced to relearn everything she thought she knew about life. From rural Midwest Ohio to the upper echelons of government controlled "unacknowledged special access projects" and beyond, Red Bird explores - with sharp insight and fierce humor - the resilience of the human spirit, even during times of political chaos.