Fifteen-year-old Everly Skye has kept the same five-step morning rite for 3,053 days. Adults call it obsessive. Everly calls it the one thing in her life that never lies.
Then a school she never applied to sends an acceptance letter that already knows her count.
At Limen Academy, doors lead where they should not, rules read like warnings, and six teenagers discover that the habits they have kept since childhood are not quirks at all.
They are rites.
Repeated human actions performed with intention sustain an ancient Roman world, while abandoned rites feed something newer and hungrier.
When an ancient flame begins to fail, Everly and five classmates are sent toward Rome with a deadline they cannot move.
Their enemy does not need to overpower them.
It only needs them to quit.