Chapter 100

Aria's POV

On the evening of the day Kira started school, I sat at my desk and did something I hadn't done in years.

I read the original document.

Not the alliance framework. Not the hub governance structure or the knowledge compact or the cumulative displacement framework. The original — the thirty-seven pages I'd written in the first year of rebuilding Shadow Peak's school, before the alliance existed, before I'd understood what I was trying to build well enough to describe it to anyone else.

The document that had no audience but me.

I'd written it in the winter of that first year, working through what I believed...