Luna Marlowe is known for three things at Forks High: her unnerving brilliance, her refusal to shut up in the face of authority, and the time she brought a snake to the emergency room and told a surgeon to fix it. At seventeen, Luna is strange, sharp, and impossible to pin down - the kind of girl who quotes Sylvia Plath in math class and hides her grief beneath sarcasm and combat boots. After losing her sister, Luna stopped trying to fit into the world around her. She started noticing the cracks in it instead. The flickers in the mirror. The way time skips sometimes when certain people walk by. When she meets Dr. Carlisle Cullen - calm, impossibly kind, and far too composed for someone who looks barely older than her - she's drawn in, fast and dangerously. There's something not quite human about him. Something familiar. Like he's a question she's been asking her whole life. As Luna digs deeper, she uncovers secrets far older than Forks - about the Cullens, about herself, about her sisters fate. And the more she learns, the more impossible it becomes to pretend she's just a girl with a dead sister and a sharp tongue.

Juliette Smith is aware that everything she does is on borrowed time. Her popularity, her relationship with her father, with her friends... all of it is on borrowed time. Her existence as she knows it is so fragile. With the revelation of one secret, all of it could go up in flames, but there's never been any reason for her to disclose it, and there has been every reason for her to hide it; it protects her image. Esme Panchak is, by definition, a poison to her image. She is everything that Juliette isn't. She's undermotivated, crass, and unapologetically her own person. She's everything that Juliette has trained herself to loathe, and everything she has successfully avoided for three years... but she's enchanting, enticing. Whenever they're together, she can feel her grip slipping bit by bit. So, when Juliette ends up stuck with Esme as her lab partner, she realizes just how quickly the secrets she's trying to outrun can catch up with her.