Like most things in his life, it started at a funeral.
Like most things in her life, it started with a chase.

Echo doesn't remember much of her past, but she has embraced her new life with Mama Gama, the woman who took her in, and little Lu, the other young orphan whose secret they are all guarding.
It is a death sentence to bear the mark of the curse, and Lu's features do nothing to hide it.
Surviving in the Seyat is becoming harder each day, but Echo has a plan. There's one market day every three months when the city gates open.
She has nothing to sell but she can steal enough to buy her small family a crossing to the free North.

When market day comes, it coincides with a funeral. Another orphan girl from Pleiades, the academy of the seven orders, is dead.

Echo thinks the funeral proceedings are the distraction her plan needs, except that everything goes wrong. Very horribly wrong.
She ends up in the last place someone like her should be in. The academy where her kind have been dying one by one, and she believes she knows who is doing it. The doubler, the next Kardinal. The vicious boy who already wears the mark of the Imperial Vylone.

She doesn't know why he is killing the girls, but she is certain that she is next. Except she is not going to let it happen. She will get him before he has the chance to kill her as well.