The silence in Oakhaven wasn't actually silent.

  If you asked anyone else—the "normals," the ones whose DNA hadn’t been re-stitched by the passing of the Ikeya-Zhang comet back in 2002—they would tell you that Oakhaven, Missouri, was a quiet place. They would talk about the wind through the Ozark oaks, the distant hum of a lawnmower on Blackwood Drive, or the soft chirp of a morning bird. They lived in a world of clean sounds.

  But for me, silence was a lie.

  I lay in bed, my eyes tracing a hairline crack in the ceiling of my room at 1242 Blackwood Drive. It was 5:58 AM. I didn't need an alarm clock; I could feel the electricity in the walls. To me, the world was a vibrating mess of frequencies. The copper wiring behind the drywall hummed in a low B-flat. The plumbing in the floorboards thrummed with the erratic pressure of water. Everything was moving. Everything was shaking.

  And my job—my only job in this life—was to make sure I didn't shake with it.

  I sat up slowly, my black hair—longer now, a messy modcut that I used as a curtain to hide behind—falling over my eyes. I focused on a single dust mote dancing in a sliver of grey morning light. I reached out a hand, my fingers trembling slightly. Not from nerves, but from the energy that lived under my skin, like a swarm of bees trying to find a way out.

  Stay still, I thought.

  I projected a thought of absolute stillness, of freezing time. The dust mote stopped its erratic dance. For a second, it hung perfectly frozen in the air. Then, my focus wavered. The "bees" under my skin buzzed louder, and the dust mote didn't just move—it vibrated so violently that it vanished, incinerated by a microscopic burst of kinetic friction.

  I pulled my hand back, tucking it under my armpit. My heart was thumping against my ribs.

  "Just a day," I whispered to the empty room. "Just get through one day without breaking the world."

  The comet hadn't brought magic. People liked to think of it that way—like some cosmic fairy tale that granted wishes. But the Ikeya-Zhang was a radiation-drenched scar across the sky. It had left something behind, a lingering frequency that only reacted to the volatile cocktail of hormones and cortisol in people like me. Adolescents. The ones whose bodies were already a construction site of change.

  The N.E.A.—the National Environmental Agency—called it "The Echo." They said it was an environmental sickness. They said they were here to help. But the white vans I saw patrolling the outskirts of Oakhaven Heights High didn't look like ambulances. They looked like cages.

  I pulled on my armor: a thick, oversized black hoodie. I made sure the sleeves were long enough to cover my palms. I needed the weight of the fabric; it felt like a lead vest, something to keep my molecules from drifting apart.

  I headed downstairs.

  The kitchen was a masterpiece of suburban perfection. My mother, Eleanor, was already there, moving with a mechanical grace that felt like a performance. She was rearranging the spice jars—alphabetical, labels facing forward. It was her way of coping. If the world outside was chaotic and filled with "Echoes," her kitchen would be a fortress of order.

  My father, Arthur, sat at the head of the table. He wore a crisp, button-down shirt, even though it was a Tuesday. He was scrolling through his tablet, the blue light reflecting off his glasses, making his eyes look like cold, glowing orbs.

  I slid into my seat. The chair scraped against the tile. The sound set my teeth on edge—a jagged, yellow frequency.

  "You're late, Jace," my father said without looking up.

  "Two minutes," I muttered.

  "Two minutes is the difference between being noticed and being invisible," he replied. His voice was like a whetstone—sharp and dry. He finally looked at me, his gaze scanning my face, searching for any sign of "the twitch."

  Eleanor placed a plate of eggs in front of me. She didn't look at me directly. She looked at my hands. She always looked at my hands.

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  "Did you hear about the Henderson girl?" my father asked, his tone casual, as if he were discussing the weather.

  I froze, a piece of toast halfway to my mouth. I knew Sarah Henderson. She sat three rows behind me in Chemistry. She was quiet. She liked to draw.

  "No," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

  "The N.E.A. picked her up last night. At the Kroger on 5th," Arthur said, taking a slow sip of his black coffee. "Apparently, she had a... disagreement with a cashier. The next thing anyone knew, the entire frozen food section had shattered. Glass, ice, plastic—everything pulverized into sand. She didn't even touch them. She just screamed, and the molecules gave up."

  The juice in my glass started to ripple. Tiny, concentric circles began to form, vibrating outward from the center. My cortisol was spiking. My power was answering the fear in my chest.

  Stop it, I commanded myself. Be lead. Be stone. Be nothing.

  I gripped the edge of the table so hard my fingernails dug into the wood. I forced the energy down, back into the marrow of my bones. The ripples in the juice slowed, then stopped.

  "They had the area cordoned off in under five minutes," my father continued, his eyes locking onto mine. "The N.E.A. knows what to look for now, Jace. They have sensors in the public grids. They monitor the atmosphere for spikes. They take the 'unstable elements' and they 'restore' them. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "Yes, sir," I said, my throat feeling like it was filled with dry sand.

  "We have worked too hard to keep this family respectable," he said, leaning in. "You are a Thorne. You will be a straight-A student. You will be a ghost. If you vibrate, if you flicker, if you so much as hum in a way their sensors can pick up... I cannot protect you. Your mother cannot protect you. You'll just be another 'incident' in the morning report."

  He went back to his tablet. The conversation was over.

  I couldn't eat. I got up, grabbed my backpack, and headed for the door. I needed to leave before the pressure in the house made me explode.

  The moment I stepped onto the porch of Blackwood Drive, the Ozark air hit me—cool and damp. I started walking, but I didn't get far before a familiar, chaotic energy shattered the silence.

  "THOOOOOOOORNE!"

  Ollie Miller came barreling down the sidewalk on his battered BMX bike, skidding to a halt right in front of me. He was a whirlwind of messy brown hair and a backpack covered in band patches.

  "Jace! Buddy! My man! Tell me you finished that History essay," Ollie chirped, hopping off his bike and throwing an arm around my shoulder. I winced, my body tensing at the contact, but I didn't pull away. He was the only person who dared to touch me.

  "Did you hear?" Ollie lowered his voice, though for him, "lowering his voice" still meant everyone within a block could hear him. "The N.E.A. vans were out by the Kroger last night. My dad said it looked like a bomb went off in the aisles. Crazy, right? They say some 'Eco' just lost it."

  I kept my eyes on the pavement, counting the cracks. One, two, three.

  "Yeah," I whispered. "Crazy."

  "I don't get why they’re so scared of them," Ollie mused, kicking a loose stone. "I mean, if I could blow up stuff with my mind, I'd at least use it for something cool. Like opening sodas or... I don't know, flying."

  "It's not cool, Ollie," I said, a bit sharper than I intended. "It's a disease. That's what the N.E.A. says. It's an instability."

  Ollie looked at me, his brow furrowing for a rare second of seriousness. "Hey, man. You okay? You look like you haven't slept in a week."

  "I'm fine. Just... the SATs. My parents are on my back."

  "Classic Thorne parents," Ollie sighed, bumping his shoulder against mine. "Don't sweat it, Jace. You’re the smartest guy I know. You’re gonna be a doctor or a rocket scientist or something, and I’m gonna be your highly-paid professional hype man."

  I tried to smile. It felt fake, like a mask that didn't quite fit.

  As we reached the school, I saw the N.E.A. presence. They weren't scanning us with hand-held devices—they didn't have that kind of targeted technology yet. Instead, they had a white SUV parked near the entrance with a tripod mounted on the roof. On top of the tripod was a delicate, rotating cylinder—an atmospheric seismograph. It didn't look for people; it looked for "ripples" in the air, the kind of kinetic distortion that happened when an Echo’s molecules began to excite the surrounding oxygen.

  They were waiting for someone to make a mistake.

  We entered the halls of Oakhaven Heights. The hum was deafening. Twelve hundred students, all vibrating at different frequencies. In the center of the hall, the "normals" laughed and shouted. In the fringes, near the lockers, the shadows were deeper. Kids like me—hooded, silent, terrified.

  I saw a girl clutching her books, her face pale. The air around her locker was beginning to haze, a subtle shimmering like heat over a desert road.

  "Don't look, Ollie," I whispered, pulling him along. "Just keep walking."

  If that girl lost control, the sensors outside would pick up the spike. They wouldn't know it was her, not at first. But they would lock down the East Wing. They would start the "random" screenings.

  We made it to our homeroom just as the bell rang. The sound was a jagged edge of iron that tore through my skull. I slumped into my seat, burying my face in my hands.

  "Alright, class," the teacher’s voice droned.

  I focused on the pencil sitting on my desk. I could feel every atom in the wood. I could feel the graphite core yearning to vibrate, to dance, to shatter.

  Stay quiet, I told the pencil. Stay quiet, Jace.

  Behind me, someone began to tap their foot. Tap. Tap. Tap. A fast, nervous rhythm. The static in the room began to rise, a thick, invisible fog of tension. Someone was losing their grip.

  I looked out the window at the white SUV in the distance. One of the agents was leaning in, looking at a monitor. The needles on the roof were starting to twitch.

  The world was about to get very, very loud.