Benjamin Casey and The Twelve Golden Cages

Benjamin Casey has spent a summer burning, shredding, hiding, or otherwise doing away with some very important letters. Yet it takes only a letter, this time not for him but his grandfather, and a brief moment of curiosity to shatter all his hard work: The Council has arrived, and they are going to make him do exactly what he's been avoiding all along.

He is going to have to go to school

Imenand Academy was the kind of place where anything could happen; and Benjamin was starting to think that if it could, it would.

It was supposed to be a school for raising up a modern generation of Leonardo Davincis, of Isaac Newtons, of great thinkers and great doers who would 'advance mankind'. Only, by the time Benjamin Casey shows up for his first year, everyone there seems intent on doing exactly the opposite.
His classmates have been breeding deathly-poisonous plants without antidotes, someone has loosed a genetically engineered monster into the marshes, and apparently the madman that lives in the lighthouse makes a regular habit of sending out Morse code messages.

And he just so happens to know Benjamin Casey by name.