Ayla Summers was sixteen, born November 14, 2009, living in a town that treated popularity like a civic duty. Ayla preferred the exit rows. She had spent most of her time at Ann University Highschool being so thoroughly overlooked that teachers occasionally forgot to mark her present. She wasn't the athlete, the class president, the theater lead, or the overachiever. She was just Ayla, another face moving through the locker-lined halls in a worn hoodie and faded sneakers. Her home life had shifted years earlier when her father, Julian, passed away. That left her mother, Mandy, to hold everything together on a single income and a punishing schedule as a private security officer at the local airport. Mandy spent her days dealing with checkpoints, delayed flights, and endless streams of travelers. She was fiercely protective of Ayla. People who didn't know Ayla mistook her quietness for weakness. She did have social anxiety—crowded hallways made her shoulders tense up, and being forced into group presentations felt like standing on a ledge. But anxiety didn't make her timid. Ayla was sharply observant and entirely unimpressed by loud opinions. If someone tried to push her around or said something genuinely idiotic, she had a dry, direct way of shutting it down without raising her voice, with a bit of hesitant maturity when things became serious. Her classmates missed all of that. They saw the sleek, black hair tied back in a messy ponytail, the white earbuds constantly planted in her ears to her phone, and the sharp dark eyes that made her look like she wanted to be left alone. Since she rarely went out of her way to correct their assumptions, they left her alone, which suited her fine, she wore graphic tees to school with a simple black-wrist band. They certainly had no idea what she did after the school bell rang. For the past year, Ayla had been building a second life under the name Starry Masks. It wasn't some massive internet phenomenon or a label-backed pop career. It was just her, an old microphone plugged into a laptop, and a violin. She recorded instrumental tracks late at night, layering melodies that slowly started finding an audience on small music boards and local independent playlists. She kept the two worlds entirely separate. At school, she was the quiet girl sitting in the back row. Online, she was a voice people actually listened to. Propped up in the corner of her room on her mattress was an electric guitar she was teaching herself to play, chord by clumsy chord, spending hours trying to get the distortion right without waking the neighbours.