Magnolia is a factory girl in the Satellite — the slum cast off from the City of Ascension above. She rivets canisters, sleeps three bunks high, and has long since learned not to want anything beyond a stale piece of smuggled candy and a few quiet hours with her journal.
Then a boy with violet stars in his eyes stabs her with a syringe and tells her she has two days before a catastrophe awakens what's now inside her.
The catastrophe comes on schedule, in the form of a noble heir who decides she would look better tied to his bed. By the time it ends, Loric Jhael is a corpse in his own ruined garden, three of his Miracle-wielding house chefs are dead beside him, and Magnolia is running barefoot through a city she doesn't know, with a foreign voice laughing inside her skull.
He calls himself King. He sits on a throne of bone in a garden of black wisteria deep inside her head. He says he was once supposed to save her kind. He won't say what that means, only that the rent for his stay in her body is steep, his patience is short, and the Peacekeepers chasing her are far, far worse than anything she has imagined.
Her gift is the power to reshape her own body at the molecular level. Skin, bone, organs, all of it editable.
She has a roof, for now. A quiet man named Yi who pulled her off the street and asks no questions. A small dog. A floating, deeply unhinged stuffed pig that has decided they are best friends. A reason to live she didn't have a month ago.
The Peacekeepers already know exactly where she is.
What to expect:
- A working-class protagonist with no birthright, no patron, and no training, only a body she can rewrite and a foreign entity borrowing space inside her head. - Powers are inherited, unique, and personal. A kraken summoner. A man whose body turns to oil. A swordsman who moves at super speed. And one factory girl who can rebuild her own flesh from the inside out- Body horror as a core feature- Class warfare against a floating city of nobles- A slow-burn romance with a soft-spoken man whose own ambitions died young and who carries a darker fold than he lets show- A dead rebellion called the Black Wisteria, a state holiday celebrating its defeat, and the strong suspicion that its leader is not as dead as the history books claim
