The Undersong

Aldergate Academy finds gifted teenagers, promises to teach them mastery, and takes it all back at the ceremony that ends their schooling: the power, and every memory tied to it. Most students never learn the price until the day it comes due. Cass Mercer learned it three years ago, when her brother went in whole and came home a polite stranger who calls her by a name he never used.

Cass has a gift the school would very much like to meter and mute. She opens locked things. Doors first. Then the wards nobody is supposed to touch. Her suppression brand stopped working two years ago, and she has faked the ceremony pain ever since, because a flagged brand means early graduation, and early graduation means going out like Theo.

Then the Provost changes the ritual and stands watching her row.

For one heartbeat, in a chapel full of witnesses, Cass slips. Something far below the floor turns toward her. She survives, tells no one, and that night the vent above her bed says her name in her brother’s voice.

Theo was erased three years ago. Theo cannot be in the vents. And yet.

Chasing that voice pulls Cass into the Undersong, the school’s underground of students who have learned to slip the brand and hide the evidence, who map the tunnels the faculty pretend do not exist, who know exactly what the ceremony is for. They have rules. Never descend alone. Never write a name down. And whatever you do, do not get flagged, because the school has just called a second ceremony in nine weeks, run a new way, one that acting cannot survive.

When the price of the underground lands on one of her own, Cass has to decide how far down she is willing to go, and how much of herself she is willing to show the only people who could get her killed.

The gift is real. The mastery is a lie. And the countdown to her own erasure is already on the calendar.

Every gift should cost something. At Aldergate, someone else always pays. Start here. The doors open in order.