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My mother only ever made the bedtime tea for me. Never my brother—just me, every night, because I was the gifted one, the daughter she "worried about."
The night before the scholarship exam, my one shot at college, she brought me a cup like always.
The next day I collapsed in the middle of the test. I'd never been sick a day in my life. I failed.
Don't worry, she said. We'll try again next year. A...

That admissions season, Lily — a poor student who couldn't even clear the state university cutoff — insisted on dragging my two childhood friends off to the worst community college in the state, just so she wouldn't have to go alone.

Ethan held an offer from Yale. Ryan had been accepted to Stanford. Yet the two of them, as if under a spell, were ready to throw away those schools just to follow he...

We had earned countless merits in war.

I could crush refined steel with my bare hands. My comrades could manipulate metal, hack electronic devices, and phase through concrete walls.

But what was the price?

Bone calcification, organ failure, every breath feeling like swallowing razor blades.

Ever since we broke into that laboratory,

For seventy years, we've been hiding in the gutters like rats...

“Why is Elara dying on my stream?”

Sienna Vale laughed in front of half a million viewers while my heroine glitched on-screen, wearing the ring I designed and speaking the line I wrote.

Caleb didn’t ask if I was okay. He shoved the emergency laptop toward me and said, “Fix it before the investors panic.”

So I opened the live build.

But instead of saving his launch, I patched one line into the ...