The Last Thing Still Burning

They only studied the gifts. Never the cost.
When the government announced a mandatory neurological advancement study for high-performing teenagers, they promised progress, protection, and the future of human evolution.
What they built instead was an institution.
A machine.
A place where gifted students were turned into weapons.
Vivienne Vale remembers the rivalry first: debate championships against Elias Mercer, combat rankings, academic warfare between elite school districts competing to survive long enough not to be chosen next. Then came the injections. The hallucinations. The impossible abilities. Teenagers predicting each other's movements before they happened. Sensing deaths before they occurred. Remembering people the institution insisted never existed.
Some students evolved.
Some went insane.
Some disappeared.
The survivors were relocated deep inside a classified observation facility where scientists stripped away guilt, remorse, fear, and memory itself through experimental neurological trauma. Names became numbers. Friendships became liabilities. Love became dangerous. And every time someone died, the academy erased them from the minds of the living.
But memory does not disappear cleanly.
It lingers in phantom touches.
In tattooed numbers carved into skin.
In empty chairs left waiting at dinner tables.
In boys who keep speaking long after they are dead.
As the facility descends into violence, psychosis, and temporal fracture, Vivienne and the remaining candidates uncover the horrifying truth behind the program: the government is not studying whether the human brain can evolve beyond its limits.
It is studying what survives after reality itself begins to break.
Now trapped inside a collapsing institution filled with ghosts, failed experiments, and the bodies of children dissected for their "gifts," the candidates make one final decision:
If they cannot escape the academy-they will burn it down.