Julia Karnes was diagnosed with schizophrenia at six years old. She was plagued with nightmares of the world ending. Voices no one else could hear. Shadows no one else could see.

She learned to smile through it. To fake normal. At sixteen, she's doing a great job blending in?until the shadows rise.

One moment, she's at school, trying to blend in. The next, black tendrils pour from the ground, smothering the sun, swallowing people whole. When the monsters emerge, they sing?and when they sing, people walk into the dark and never come back.

Julia doesn't. She's immune to their songs.

Fleeing to an isolated patch of land in North Carolina, she thinks she's found safety. But safety is a lie. Her parents fall. She is about to give up when she finds Westin, a deaf boy she once ignored, and his younger brother. Westin becomes a safe place and she starts to have feelings for him but trust is dangerous in a world where nothing is what it seems.

The truth is worse than the madness she thought she was plagued with. Julia was never sick. She was made?from DNA not of this world. She was built for the shadows. As Julia uncovers the truth about her origins?crafted in a lab, born from another realm?she meets Shaw, a mysterious boy who commands the very shadows that destroyed her world. Together, they may hold the key to ending the terror. But between monstrous science, fanatical cults, and her own fractured mind, survival might cost Julia more than she's willing to pay.

What if your greatest fear wasn't a lie? What if it was something you were engineered to fight?