She was seven years old the first time she killed a garden.
It wasn't intentional. Nora Ashfield had only wanted the roses in their backyard to bloom faster — she remembered pressing her small palms into the soil, whispering to it the way she whispered to everything: the clouds, the rain, the old oak in the corner of the yard. But when she looked up, every flower had opened at once, violently, as if screaming. Then they shriveled and died within minutes, leaving nothing but black stems and the thick smell of something ancient.
Her mother stood at the kitchen window. She didn't come outside.
That was the first sign. There would be many more.
Nora grew up in Millhaven, a suburb so ordinary it hurt — identical beige houses, identical families, identical silences at dinner. She was born in the back seat of her parents' car during a thunderstorm, and her mother often said, half-joking, half-afraid: "The lightning came down and touched you, Nora. It never quite left."
She felt it every day. A current beneath her skin. A hum in her bones when the moon was full. A knowing — dark and wordless — that settled behind her eyes when someone near her was lying or hurting or about to break.
By ten, she had learned to keep her hands in her pockets.
By twelve, she had learned to keep her mouth shut.
By fourteen, she understood: the world she had been born into was not built for what she was.
The question that would follow her the rest of her life pressed its first cold finger against her chest on a Tuesday in October, when her sixth-grade teacher slapped a science test on her desk — a test Nora had aced without studying — and whispered, "How did you know all of this? You never pay attention in class."
Nora looked up at her. She saw the tiredness around the woman's eyes. She saw the bruise the woman had hidden under her sleeve. She saw things that weren't hers to see.
"I just knew," Nora said quietly.
The teacher took a step back. Just one small step. But Nora felt it like a door slamming.
She was different. And the world already knew it before she did.