Don't Touch Her

2:26

The door opens and the man from the corridor walks into her room. He doesn't want to hurt her — he wants what's inside her. With a wave of his hand he forces her power awake, and for the first time Mara feels what she is: something that drains everything around it, and she can't switch it off. The walls crack. The lights explode. She drops to her knees in her own room, used like a weapon she never asked to be. Then Caelen arrives — and for the first time, someone stands between her and the dark. But the stranger leaves her with a question that poisons everything: ask Caelen why he really brought you here.

Everyone Knows

2:33

The morning after, Mara has to walk out of her room into a school that now knows exactly what she is. The corridors empty as she passes. The dining hall goes silent the second she enters. Yesterday she was invisible; today she's the thing three hundred people are afraid of — and she did nothing to deserve either. Then one person crosses the silent hall and sits down across from her like it's the most normal thing in the world: Senna, the first friend, the only one who isn't afraid. For one warm moment, Mara isn't alone. Until she looks across the hall — and sees the man who hunted her, sitting calmly among the students, watching. And no one else can see him.

Weeks

2:36

Shaken by a threat only she can see, Mara does the last thing she wants to do: she goes looking for Caelen, the one person who knows what's happening to her. But before she can reach him, she overhears him — and learns he's been lying about far more than she knew. He didn't notice her on her first day. He flagged her file weeks before she ever arrived. She wasn't admitted to this school. She was brought here. And as the truth detonates between them, the lights die all at once — and a voice rises from the dark to tell her exactly who put her name on the list.

The Same

2:18

Cornered between the man who's been lying to her and the voice in the dark that never has, Mara does the one thing neither of them expects — she runs from both. Through the black of the west wing, through doors she's never seen, into a candlelit chapel where Veyron is already waiting. Because the running was the plan. The lights, the voice, the lie — all of it, theater, built to drive her exactly here. And as the doors seal behind her and Caelen breaks through too late, Veyron gives her the truth that shatters everything she thought she knew: she is not the only one of her kind. She's been standing next to the other one since her first day.