Tor Books, $23.95

Review by L.D. Meagher

(CNN) -- There's something different about Helix. It's more than her eyes, which are a startling shade of blue, or her olive skin, or her short dark hair. It's even more than her extra pair of arms. Helix knows she's different, but she doesn't know why.

The young woman's quest for answers is the driving force of "Accidental Creatures", the second novel by Anne Harris. It's set in 21st century Detroit, a city dominated by a single industry. It's not the automobile industry, however, since the internal combustion engine has been rendered obsolete by advancing technology. It's the industry of biopolymer production. Biopolymer is an artificial, organic fabric that's grown in enormous vats. A company called GeneSys is the leading manufacturer, and has its headquarters in what was the Fischer Building, an Art Deco skyscraper in Detroit.

Helix lives in the Fischer Building, with her adoptive father Hector Martin, a research scientist who works for GeneSys. She remembers little about her life before Hector came into it. The most persistent memory is a painful one -- being subjected to abuse by the other children at the orphanage because she was so different.

"In her mind she heard the shrieks and cries of her classmates as they surrounded her on the playground, Chet and Carla and Tim and Darron darting in from the circle to each one of her arms and then run, around and around, laughing and spinning her until she was sick and her arm sockets were sore. She remembered the whirling faces, contorted with joyous hate, and their voices, like the harsh cried of birds, calling, calling in monotonous cacophony, 'Freak Girl! Freak Girl!' And she, the eye of the vortex, screaming back, wordlessly, just screaming and screaming, her mouth wide open to show all of them her gleaming fangs."

When Hector adopts her, she settles into his apartment in the Fischer Building, and pretty much stays there for a long time. She rarely leaves it. No one visits. She takes classes over a 3-D computer network, which also provides interactive entertainment. Her life is quiet and self-contained. Then, one day she decides to go outside.

Chango is different, too. Her eyes, one blue and one green, brand her as a "sport", a genetic mutation. Her parents were vatdivers, harvesting the biopolymer for GeneSys. The growth medium that produces the stuff also produces changes in the DNA of anyone it touches. Chango's mismatched eyes are one legacy of their dangerous profession. Another is vat sickness, the occupational hazard of the divers. Despite whatever safety measures GeneSys employs, the growth medium eventually disrupts the genetic pattern of the divers, and they die horrible deaths. It claimed both of Chango's parents and her older sister, who was exposed to growth medium in a mysterious vatdiving accident.

Chango lives by her wits. Mostly, she's a petty thief, and when she first sees Helix, she considers her an easy mark. But Helix falls prey to more violent criminals, and Chango rescues her from the back alley where she had been badly beaten. Chango takes her to Vattown, the working class ghetto populated by divers and those who cater to them. She nurses Helix back to health, and is captivated by her complete "otherness."

For the first time, Helix gets a look at the real world. She meets the denizens of Vattown, goes to clubs, and socializes with divers. The stench of growth medium that pervades the district affects her like a heady perfume. She is drawn inexorably to the vats. Against the advice of Chango and in defiance of the veteran divers, Helix goes to work for GeneSys. The first time she plunges into the growth medium, she feels as if she has come home.

Harris sets the story against a bleak backdrop of urban decay and isolation borne of technology. She could easily have turned it into a cyberpunk nightmare landscape, and presented Chango and Helix as a cyberpunk "Thelma and Louise". Instead, she paints a vivid picture of life at opposite ends of the social spectrum and the tensions that arise inevitably between the haves and the have-nots.

Helix feels suspended, and torn, between the two worlds. But eventually she begins to understand the truth about herself. She really is different. She is Hector Martin's daughter in more ways than one. She's the fruit of a long-running experiment designed to develop a biological mechanism that can replace human vatdivers. The idea came to Hector in a dream.

"She stood before him, silent, motionless. She was beautiful. He would have liked to touch her, hold her, make love to her. She smiled slowly and nodded her head, once, and then walked towards him. But as she approached, she got smaller. Smaller and smaller until she was no bigger than a gum ball, and she hung in the middle of the air in front of his face. Hector opened his mouth, she climbed inside, and he swallowed her."

That dream is given life in Hector's laboratory. The more Helix learns about him, the more she comes to understand that everything he ever told her about herself was a lie. She sets off in search of the truth, which could kill her. Chango follows her into the bowels of GeneSys (figuratively and literally) where they confront her past, and try to assure her future, while battling the forces of corporate greed, and coming to terms with the new lifeform that has taken over Hector's lab.

L.D. Meagher is a senior writer at CNN Headline News. He has worked in broadcasting for 30 years.