First Born (novel)

First Born was the sixteenth release in the BBC Torchwood Novels series. It served as a prequel to TV: The New World.

Publisher's summary
Gwen and Rhys are on the run. Rhys was hoping this meant a windswept cottage on a cliff top, but he's had to settle for a miserable caravan in the isolated village of Rawbone. With the locals taking an unhealthy interest in their daughter, Gwen and Rhys start to realise that something is very wrong.

As they uncover the village's terrible past, Gwen discovers that Torchwood will never leave her behind, and now she and Rhys stand alone in defence of the Earth. And the children of Rawbone can only bring her closer to the secret forces that want her out of the way.

Plot
Gwen and Rhys flee from security forces in Cardiff and, after moving between Torchwood safe houses for two months, move to a caravan in North Wales with their newborn, Anwen. Three weeks later, they visit the pub in the nearby village of Rawbone and Gwen is disturbed by the interest that the locals take in Anwen and her health, particularly Sasha who tends to Anwen whilst Gwen is in a shop several days later. Davydd, Sasha's husband, visits Gwen afterwards to explain that Sasha is struggling because of her infertility and kisses her, earning him a punch from Rhys when he walks in.

Gwen is sexually assaulted by Constable Brown, but Peter, a teenager, saves her and takes her to Mrs Harries's house before fetching Rhys. Mrs Harries recounts how births in Rawbone stopped in 1987 and that since then those who have wanted children have been given perfect teenagers who never age called Scions; now that Gwen and Rhys are here, some of the villagers want to have children with them, but Gwen refuses to move. Rhys sneaks out at night to beat Constable Brown and the Scion Jenny intervenes to protect Rhys from him.

Taking Anwen with her, Gwen visits the weather monitoring station at the abandoned army base in the hopes of getting a tour to look around, but Tom refuses her. Meanwhile, Rhys suffers a mental attack when he tries to question the Scions at school despite Mrs Harries trying to stop them and passes out. She tells him once he comes around that the Scions have the power to influence people, a power which unwittingly affects Gwen and gives her a dream of the Scion Billy being abused by Sasha because he will not cry like a human child. She goes with Tom and his boss, Eloise, to take the damaged Billy to the airbase and is shown the Juniper Tree.

The Juniper Tree is a spacecraft sent to Earth in response to the Voyager probes which is capable of creating Scions and which has caused stink thistles to grow around Rawbone, although Eloise does not know why. It was recovered by Torchwood and given by Jack to the British government, who hoped to turn the first Scion, Sebastian, into a soldier. He was instead taken to Rawbone in 1991, ten years after his creation, to tend to the Juniper Tree as it provided children for the infertile villagers, although Gwen cannot understand why.

After Anwen is kidnapped by Jenny, Rhys searches for her with the rest of the village and tells Gwen that they will leave once she has been found and never look into Torchwood business again. Peter eventually agrees to use his connection with Jenny to find her and she apologises, explaining that she took Anwen in the hope that having a baby would finally make her grow up. Eloise is ordered to kill Sebastian, who is replaced by a newborn Sebastian II who has the other Scions kill Sasha by forcing her into a boiling hot bath as she had done to Billy as retribution. Leaving Anwen with Mrs Harries, Gwen returns to the weather station to investigate.

Sebastian locks Gwen, Eloise and Tom up in a shed, but they manage to escape and use the Juniper Tree to send a message to those who sent it to Earth. They communicate through the tree and are horrified at what Sebastian and the children have become and how the humans tried to use them to create an army. When Sebastian snaps Eloise's neck, the tree dies as his "real parents" want nothing to do with him and the Scions arrive, led by a grown-up Jenny who causes him to wither and die when he tries to hurt her. Tom exposes Corporal Bailey, the woman behind the project, and demands money for a treatment that Jenny has devised to make the people of Rawbone fertile again, having discovered that the village was deliberately made sterile by an weapons test.

With the Scions taken in by people of the village once again and capable of growing up, Gwen and Rhys decide to leave, although they do not know where they will be going. They say goodbye to Tom and his boyfriend, Josh, who were the only ones willing to take Billy in after Sasha's death, and head off, with Gwen driving and Rhys reading the map as Anwen sleeps in the back.

Torchwood

 * Gwen Cooper
 * Rhys Williams
 * Anwen Williams

Inhabitants of Rawbone

 * Josh
 * Sasha
 * Davydd Hope
 * Nerys
 * Mrs Meredith
 * Megan Harries

Scions

 * Sebastian
 * Jenny Meredith
 * Peter Harries
 * Paul Harries
 * Billy
 * Sebastian II

Juniper Project

 * Corporal Jasmine Bailey
 * Elena Hilda Al-Qatari
 * Eloise
 * Tom
 * PC Tony Brown

Continuity

 * Gwen has a nightmare about the death of Ianto Jones and Jack Harkness. (TV: Children of Earth: Day Four)
 * Gwen also has a nightmare about Abaddon's shadow, (TV: End of Days) the Blaidd Drwg nuclear station (TV: Boom Town, PROSE: Another Life), the Large Hadron Collider, (AUDIO: Lost Souls) cannibal cults (TV: Countrycide) and the 456. (TV: Children of Earth)

Audio release

 * The story was released as an audiobook on download only from the AudioGo website read by Clare Corbett, Kai Owen, Katherine Fenton, Joe Jameson, Carole Boyd, Michael Stevens and Susie Riddell.