Graduation erases you, and Cass Mercer is running out of time to prove it. She knows now that the voice in the vents is her brother, or the part of him Aldergate poured into the dark and never gave back.
Then the Board sends an Assessor with a thirty-day mandate: read every brand on campus, one by one, and find the student the instruments felt in the chapel. Cass has thirty days to be no one.
But the crew is digging, a first-year’s brand still will not take, and out in the tidy houses where the school keeps its graduates, a girl who was wiped clean keeps a letter she cannot read and hums a tune with no name. The Settled are not as empty as the school swears.
If Cass can prove it, she can get her brother back. If the Assessor proves what she is first, she graduates early.
The deaths are real.
