Onset

Arthur Watts’s foster home is for children who have already been noticed too much.

It has warm rooms, a stocked kitchen, rides to school when it rains, and a rule no one has to say out loud: look ordinary.

Sixteen-year-old Natti Herrera knows how. She knows which questions to answer, which adults to avoid, and how still a person has to be before the world stops looking closely. The other children in Arthur’s house know it too. They do not ask for confessions. They know better than to make each other lie.

For a while, that is enough.

Then the woman from the Bureau arrives with questions no one in Arthur’s house can answer safely.

The Bureau has been patient. Arthur has been careful. Natti and her friends have been lucky.

None of that will be enough for much longer.

Onset is the first book in Manifest, a dark YA/crossover speculative thriller about found family, surveillance, control, and the dangerous cost of being seen.