The full moon rose, a perfect, bloated pearl of cold light that seemed to suck the color from the world. Its ascent was not a gentle transition, but the throwing of a switch. Los Angeles, holding its breath for hours, erupted into chaos.
In the Academy library, the moment the moon cleared the horizon, Luna's head snapped back. A silent, silver scream tore from her lips. The intricate diagram on the floor blazed with the light of a captured star. The other seventeen children gasped in unison, their small bodies jolting as if taking a physical blow. The Great Healing had begun. It was not a gentle flow; it was a psychic tsunami crashing into their carefully woven net. Luna's mind, the central conduit, was instantly flooded with a billion fragments of agony—the searing loneliness of the void, the bitter taste of consumed hopes, the raw, screaming rage of eternal hunger. The net held, but the strings groaned under a strain no child should ever know.
