A confrontation with a teacher and a family crisis force high school senior Cerulean Gene to drop out of twelfth grade and derails their dreams of moving cross-country and living off the grid.

Magic is forbidden throughout the Morning Realms. Magicians are called abomination, and blamed for the plague of monsters that razed the land twenty years before. Jin Zhara already had enough to worry about--appease her stepmother's cruel whims, looking after her blind younger sister, and keeping her own magical gifts under control-without having to deal with rumors of monsters re-emerging in the marsh. But when a chance encounter with an easily flustered...