Summary

Chapter 1 introduces a teenage girl named Zoel who lives in the Community, an underground city created after human emotions – anger, hate, greed, indifference – almost destroyed the Earth, now called the Old World. Like other children, Zoel and her 13-year-old brother Markan were created through genetic engineering and like everyone else, they have a chip implanted in the back of their neck that controls their emotions. Everyone in the Community is robot-like, unable to see colors or experience anything other than pain, which they still need for safety reasons. But Zoel has a secret. For a while now, she has been glitching, or experiencing a malfunction in her chip that enables her to see and experience everything a normal human would. It frightens her but she also likes it and is training herself to hide her glitches from everyone else, including the Regulators, who...