Martin Maple

Martin is the main character of the novel. He lives in isolation with his father on an island at the start of the book, but when his father sails onto the mainland to get a piece to finish a mysterious machine he is building, he never returns. Martin sets out to the mainland himself a couple years after his father disappears to find that almost everyone has disappeared except for a small group of children around his age. He unites with a group of children around his age who have built a society called Xibalba.

Martin comes to realize over time that his father's machine might be the key to bringing everybody back from wherever they went. This leads him to feel an inflated sense of power as he tries to rally all the kids of Xibalba to work on the machine together, even though he does...