I finger my real ID in my pocket. Manon Foix Hammick, it reads. Five foot five—maybe not the aesthetic opposite of Tai’s lithe five foot seven, but it feels that way. Brown eyes that could’ve been pulled from Dad’s skull, nothing like my mother’s and Tai’s blue ones.

Age eighteen.

I deserve to feel uncomfortable for trying so hard to sneak into this stupid bar.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I rummage for it, sweaty-palmed. The bouncer snaps his fingers. “Hey,” he says, shooing me down the garbage-filled street with a gesture. “Move along, superstar. No ID, no entry.”

Are you still coming, M? We just ordered a pitcher of elderflower sangria, reads the message from Kelly.

Kell, not Kelly, she said to me, green eyes narrowing when we were making these plans the last day of fall semester. Seriously, Manon? We’ve gone to school together for ten years. You know it’s Kell.

My cheeks burn again thinking about it. It’s impossible to forget how she and her friends treated me when I had just arrived at their fancy prep school. The brightness in their eyes dimmed when they realized I wasn’t exceptional in the flesh, like my parents, like Tai. That I had no more juicy stories about Mama and Dad than the tabloids did. Okay, but what about Viloxin? What’s it like? they would ask. And even though Viloxin—this Eden so closely tied to my parents’ legacy, this foggy island that radiated mystery—was the closest thing I had to an identity … I didn’t remember it. Not well. My Viloki childhood was just a collection of genuine yet elusive feelings, tied to bursts of colors and smells, borrowed from photographs and stories later seen and heard.

So I avoided everyone by hiding in the library during schooldays, and I spent weekends thrift-shopping and visiting botanical gardens with Aunt Marion, my father’s spinster sister and the closest thing to a parent. I trawled the internet and made friends there, anonymously, while Tai thrived in the richly colored limelight of the real world. I hid from the city’s overwhelming stimulation in the church garden twenty steps from this bar, reading book after book (high fantasy, gothic romance, you name it), while everyone else … lived, in this sprawling city that contains millions of lives.

I was afraid of that reality. I’ll admit it now.

But this is the second-to-last semester of senior year. It feels like my last chance to really live, to make up for lost time, to figure out what the cool kids know about the glitzy underbelly of this city loved the world over.

Almost there, I type back, all chapped knuckles and numb fingers.

My phone buzzes immediately. But it’s not a reply from Kell; it’s my sister, calling me for the first time in months.