Every person in the city carries a Mark — a living piece of the Corelight that glows, moves, and tells the world exactly who you are.
Elias Vale has never had one. At sixteen he has spent his entire life as the absence in a room full of light. He knows how to make himself small. He knows how to disappear inside a crowd. He knows how to look like the Unmarked label in his file is the whole story.
It isn't. Running up both arms, from wrist to elbow, are fracture lines — thin gold-white cracks in his skin that glow from within. Lines that absorb the Corelight around him instead of producing it. Lines that the old texts, buried in the school archive, call by a different name entirely.
The Corelight has been broken for sixty years. Whatever broke it is still underground. And Elias Vale, the boy who was supposed to have nothing, is the only person alive who can put it back together.
But before he can fix what broke, he has to survive what broke it — and whoever made sure it stayed that way.