Left without a job and evicted from the house she so carefully turned into a home, Aria is offered two choices: move back in with her brother . . . or take the job her brother's best friend offers her.

After watching my mother succumb to a mysterious illness, I promised myself two things. I'd find the cure for what ravaged her and leave the godforsaken city where she abandoned me. Four years later, I received an acceptance letter from Dracadia University, one of the oldest most prestigious schools in the country. Nestled on a secluded island off the coast of Maine, it's rumored to be haunted by the souls of the mental patients exiled there centuries before, those whose bones are said to make up the island's white sandy shores. And restless ghosts aren't even its most daunting peculiarity.

Avi's into old-school emo bands, true crime, and cryptids. And if not many others share his interests, he's cool with that, as long as he doesn't run out of weed. But then he moves from Brooklyn to Boston with his mom, which isn't a big deal . . . until she announces she's seeing someone and he happens to have a son Avi's age. As his mom's relationship gets more serious, they all move in together, and under the same roof as his future stepbrother, Avi's never felt more out of place.

Even though she's not one of them, Brynn has spent her life among the Alaha, training to be a guard and waiting for the chance to attend the annual market hosted by the Kenta—the very same people who exiled her adopted community to a life at sea. Going to the market is a rite of passage eagerly anticipated by all young guards, but Brynn does not anticipate breaking a century-long peace treaty while there.

Cameron Mortem has a problem—he can't stop killing his partners. Officially labeled clinically insane, he's also one of the most lethal assets in the Dark Forces, a brutal underground military operation built on obedience, survival, and silence. But an experimental drug has fractured his control, making him a liability whenever someone else is on the field. As punishment, he's thrown back into the Under Trials—a merciless boot camp designed to break the weak and sharpen the ruthless. His one directive? Don't kill the new girl.