The ground didn’t move.
But I did.
I stood in the clearing where everything had burned—documents, directives, the scaffolding of a life I once thought I built on my own. The wind stirred the ash like ghosts refusing to stay buried.
And still, nothing about me felt the same.
Not even my bones.
It wasn’t just the truth about the mark or the engineered bond, or that the Elders knew what I was before I ever learned to crawl.
It was that my entire life had been fabricated. Not by accident.
By design.
I wasn’t just some fluke of bloodline and rebellion. I was their contingency plan gone rogue. The failure they never planned for.
Cassian crouched near what was left of the firepit, his posture too still. He hadn’t slept. Neither had I. The howl that echoed through the trees last night was
