Ansel Varrow can read the scars left behind by broken magic. When a student dies in an accident that shouldn’t have happened, one impossible flaw leads him toward a discipline the Academy buried generations ago.

But the deeper Ansel digs, the less his evidence points to a murderer, a conspiracy, or even a lie. Instead, he finds something far more dangerous: good people following reasonable rules, records that are technically correct, and a system capable of destroying lives without anyone deciding to be cruel.

To uncover what happened, Ansel must learn that seeing the truth is not the same as proving it—and that understanding what is broken does not give him the right to decide how it should be fixed.