Book II: The Fracture

Eli Lawrence returns to Mudwick for a second year with a story everyone around him agrees on. The bad thing is over. The people responsible are gone. The school sent an email, the matter is closed, and he's supposed to settle in, find his friends, and learn to carry what he can do.

He can already tell it's a lie. Something in the school's hidden network is dragging, a stutter under everything, a weight hanging off a system nobody can explain. He feels it the moment he arrives, in a place that isn't supposed to be able to feel wrong. And folded into a book in his bag is a note he chose not to think about all summer, from someone who told him he'd finally see these people for what they are, and that when he was ready to do something about it, there was help waiting.

Trouble is, the adults he's meant to trust are the same ones who are always kind, always patient, always holding something back. The deeper Eli looks, the harder it gets to tell who's protecting him and who's managing him, and the more he understands that the rot he thought he'd found the bottom of goes down further than anyone let him believe. Book 2 is the year the ground gives. Friendships get tested, the cost of what he can do keeps climbing, and every warm moment starts carrying a weight he can't quite name.

It's a darker, tighter turn of the screw, still grounded, still sensory, still a story about a teenager learning to feel everything in a place that would rather he stopped asking what it's all for.

Book II: The Fracture

Table of Contents

Every World. Story. Chapter. Word.