Shantavia Lerogaski expected a quiet gap year after graduating as valedictorian, but her sister’s disappearance from The Commons drags her into the elite twenty-second-century school that now governs the world.
There, students live or die by how common they appear, and an eighteen-year-old prodigy is treated as a threat for thinking too sharply.
To search for her sister, she must enroll, suppress her intelligence, and survive six inhumane orientation tests across the school’s guarded study zones, knowing failure means elimination to an unnamed fate.
Her survival soon rests with Pesh, the most formidable Patron in the system, whose power she needs and whose loyalty she cannot measure.
Attraction to him is as dangerous as the tests themselves, and trust is a luxury she cannot spare for friends, rivals, or even her own instincts.
If she cannot uncover what The Commons is hiding, she will lose her sister, and perhaps everyone else she still hopes to save.
