Clara is the biological daughter of Boston's Abele biotech family, and Doris is the adopted one everyone calls a prodigy. When Doris needs a scapegoat, Clara gets a schizophrenia diagnosis and a year inside a mental hospital, where brain-machine experiments tear her apart and rebuild her head into something faster.
Out of the hospital, Clara finds her family still choosing Doris, right up to a hit on her engineered cat. With Miles Cabot, her rival and the head of a competing house, she gets a chip into an Ivy League banquet where Doris plans to fake her way through a legacy problem. Clara's plan is simple: expose the cheating chip, the hospital, and the family that signed her away. But walking into that room means her own mind, and the persona called Cleo, becomes the weapon she can't fully control.
