Welcome to Litsy!

Nobody can know that Leyna Alpern hallucinates. Knowing leads to helping, something her cynical, chronically depressed disposition truly cannot handle. Besides, that's the point of beating her wrist. To cope. In a bid to save her Princeton scholarship, she drives to Renwood -- a psychiatric hospital housing an uncle she hasn't seen since childhood. When asked a harmless question for a research paper, her uncle turns suddenly and brutally violent. It's not until she wakes up in a hospital that she finds the several gashes he's carved into her side. Except they're not just gashes. They're letters. And they spell a word so powerful, so inevitable, that merely reading it is enough to drag her into an impossible realm where houses breathe, the sky is underfoot, and no amount of injury can kill her. V E R I D I A It's not long before she meets the land's creator, a menacing, enigmatic being who calls himself Zee. His offer is simple: subject yourself to all manner of visceral and psychological torture, or relinquish your soul for his consumption. Pulled back and forth between Zee's world and her own, she's forced to take the help she once reviled: from Adam, the stubborn almost-boyfriend she has yet to chase away; from Allie, a doctor capable of more than she seems; from Hugh, the locked up uncle who knows exactly what she's facing; from Phineas and Bartleby, the Fragments who are living, breathing representations of her survival instinct. It will take all of them to defeat Zee, and more still to convince Leyna she deserves the soul she's been trapped into fighting for.