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When a prestigious fellowship at Saltmere University plucks Isla Marsh out of her struggling fishing village, it looks like the reward for six years of relentless work – six years of burying her grief for her drowned father in equations and weather charts.
But Isla wasn’t chosen for her grades.
Behind Saltmere’s gothic towers and prestigious reputation lies a programme that doesn’t appear in any prospectus. Funded by the corporate giant Blackwood Marine and run by the brilliant, calculating Dr Helena Voss, it has been selecting students for decades – students with specific neurological profiles, specific vulnerabilities, specific reasons not to ask too many questions.
Students who won’t be missed.
The injections begin within weeks. The nightmares follow.
As Isla’s senses sharpen in ways no science she knows can explain, she starts noticing what everyone else has been trained to ignore: gaps in the fellowship records, students who vanish mid-term, a hidden ward beneath Blackwater Hall where brilliant minds lie trapped behind slack faces.
Then she finds the journal of the last student who worked out the truth – and realises she isn’t being educated. She’s being modified. She’s being rewritten.
The enhancement makes her extraordinary. It also makes her property.
With the programme closing in and her own body becoming something she no longer recognises, Isla must choose: become what Dr Helena Voss designed her to be, or take on an institution with thirty years of practice at making people disappear.
The storm that took her father taught her the sea doesn’t care about human plans.
She’s about to teach Saltmere the same lesson.