Eli Lawrence has always known things about people he shouldn't. Shake someone's hand and feel the grief they buried twenty years ago. Make eye contact with a stranger and understand why they can't sleep at night.

He thought he was broken. Turns out he's rare.

A mysterious professor brings Eli to Mudwick, a hidden school deep in the Appalachian mountains where students learn to draw power from places soaked with memory and emotion. Old battlefields. Sacred ground. Soil that remembers what happened on it.

There's just one problem. Every practitioner reads places. Eli reads people. And nobody can explain why.

Mudwick was supposed to be the place where Eli finally belonged. But the deeper he settles in, the more he realizes that belonging somewhere and being safe there are two very different things.