“How do you know all this, anyway?” I ask, starting to feel sweaty and uncomfortable.

Taeyo sits on the Swiss ball that Sora offered me earlier. “Sora was the Horangi elder on the council at the time. She knows because it happened on her watch.”

Wait, Sora used to be on the council? I shake my head. So this woman standing in front of me is the infamous Ms. Kwon—the one the council accused of masterminding the Horangi attack against the gifted community all those years ago.

Hiccups start erupting from my throat, and I sound like a gurgling drain. The council couldn’t be corrupt—no way. But what Sora and Taeyo are saying doesn’t seem illogical.

Taeyo bounces gently on the ball. “We’ve been searching for the eighth artifact for years. None of the Horangi clans around the world have it, and we think the only way to keep the Mortalrealm safe is to destroy it. Like we did with the seventh one.”

It’s all too much. I pinch my thigh for even entertaining the idea of believing them. “You guys just want to find the last artifact for yourselves! This is all a big story to cover up what you really want—to take the power of the last fallen star for your own gain. Admit it!”

Taeyo looks super offended and starts talking really fast. “It’s not a story. It’s the truth! You’re too blinded by what the council has told you to see it. You’ve been brainwashed!”

Sora goes to borrow one of the scholars’ laptops. She brings it over and opens it in front of me. “I know it’s hard to question everything you’ve ever been taught, but let me show you something.”

She opens an app that looks a lot like Google Drive but is called Campus Drive, and selects a folder called Project Prophecy. She scrolls down the files and clicks on a JPEG.

The photo that opens shows me the man I’d seen in the Haetae’s vision—the man who’d had the onyx stone. Here he’s gazing at the woman next to him with utter admiration. She’s smiling broadly at the camera, her hand draped lovingly over her pregnant belly. When I see her face, my heart stops. We have the same eyes, the same angled cheekbones, the same sprinkling of sesame-seed freckles across the nose. I know without a semblance of doubt who she is.

“It’s them,” I whisper, reaching out to touch the screen. “My birth parents.”

“Yes,” Sora says softly. “It is.”