Shadow series (Orson Scott Card)

You can't step into the same river twice, but Card has gracefully dipped twice into the same inkwellAonce for Ender's Game and again for this stand-alone "parallel novel." The course readers will follow this time is of the superhuman child Bean. Raised on streets ruled by starving children's gangs, he was too weak, at age four, to hold peanuts in his hand, but ingenious enough to trick the other children into civilizing themselvesAand to keep himself...

Peter Wiggin, leader of the worldwide government in the aftermath of the victory over the alien Formics, makes a tactical error when he arranges for the rescue of his archenemy Achilles who is being held by the Chinese, only to learn Achilles is insane and determined to kill Bean, the genetic anomaly who served as second-in-command during the conflict.

Bean moves with three of his children into a derelict space colony ship where they hope for a cure to engineered genes that give them high intelligence and short lives, a situation that is complicated when space-time distortions cause them to be forgotten by humanity.