The Weight of Touch

Aru has lived her life avoiding touch. Ever since she was a child, the slightest brush of skin-to-skin contact floods her with another person's deepest emotions , their grief, their guilt, their secrets. It's a power that isolates her, and one she barely understands.

When a mysterious organisation captures her, promising to "help" her control it, Aru quickly learns the truth: she's a subject in a government experiment designed to weaponise empathy.

Inside the sterile facility, she meets Cloud - a boy engineered to be her opposite. Cold, detached, and incapable of feeling anything, Cloud has been molded into a perfect assassin. Where Aru's gift makes her fragile, his emptiness makes him unstoppable. Yet, against every rule and expectation, the two are drawn to each other. Aru's emotions begin to anchor Cloud's hollow existence, while Cloud's calm becomes her refuge.

But the fragile balance between them shatters when an experiment goes wrong and their powers swap. Now, Aru feels nothing for the first time in her life, while Cloud is overwhelmed by every emotion he never knew he had. Their bond deepens as Cloud begins to experience love, fear, and tenderness for Aru; feelings that both heal and destroy him.

Just as they start to believe they might escape together, Cloud vanishes without a trace, leaving only the echo of his newfound humanity behind. Aru is left in a world of numbness, clutching the memory of the boy who taught her what it meant to feel, will she find what she has lost or will she find answers she doesn't want looking for him.

[Cover Art: Miwah_Kat and Canva]