reikoandgardenias
Meet Marzelline Warner-Anderson. The girl the world was never meant to see. Aaron Warner's younger sister. Paris Anderson's daughter. The capital's most obedient ghost.
Marzelline has lived her entire life beneath the bright, merciless lights of the Reestablishment, where loyalty is measured in silence and fear is stitched into the walls. Her father calls her his finest creation, but Marzelline knows better. She is not honored. She is contained. A power like hers can't be celebrated. It can only be controlled.
So when Anderson informs her of her newest assignment...
To travel to Sector 45,
to observe a girl with a lethal touch,
to trace the pulse of a rising rebellion,
Marzelline hesitates for the first time in years.
But it is also where Aaron is. And the hope of seeing her brother again is the closest thing she has felt to warmth in a long, long time.
Not that she has a choice.
Her father's commands are not invitations. They are laws written into her bones, enforced by the cold circuitry woven into her mind. Machinery designed to keep her in line, to remind her that her power, terrifying and unfathomable as it is, belongs to him. He cannot use her ability, but he can use HER, and that is enough to keep Marzelline tethered to his will.
After all, it is difficult to rebel when pain itself becomes a cage.
Difficult to run when the world has made you unbreakable.
And impossible for Marzelline to take her own life when immortality feels less like a gift
and more like a sentence.