Wren Darlington, a Modified telepath hiding an incitement ability, lived quietly in Ward Z with her guardian Julian “Jim” Ash until a white coyote attack during Liberty Day exposed her marksmanship to Command. The next dawn, soldiers arrived at her ranch, held Jim at gunpoint, and arrested him as the deserter Julian Ash. Wren fled via a hidden network route, demanded help from Uprising contacts to reach Sanctum Point, and learned Jim had already been found guilty and set for execution. Defying orders to hide, she infiltrated the public plaza and, in a desperate attempt to save him, incited the firing squad; her control broke and the rifles swung back, killing Jim. Seized afterward, she endured questioning by Silver officers Tyler Struck and Xavier Ford and the silent commander she had met in a Hamlett inn—Captain Cross Redden—before resisting a mental probe by Tribunal telepath Jayde Valence and being forced into the Program.

Inside Silver Block, Wren plotted escape while masking her abilities, clashing with instructors and recruits like Kess Farren and Anson Booth, protecting timid Pera, and building bonds with Lyddie De Velde and Kaine Sutler. Captain Cross blocked attempts to cut her, pursued her when she tried to flee, and kept her under scrutiny. As training escalated—from weapons and shielding with the enslaved telepath Amira, to brutal barracks tests and pit-night politics featuring Cross, his half brother Roe Redden, and Xavier—Wren balanced sabotage with survival. She fought Kess in the mess hall, was denied leave, scouted the base at night to the execution plaza, and faced Cross’s warnings that failure would only land her in the stockade. Pressured by Uprising handler Adrienne to become useful, Wren met clandestinely in a camera-dead tunnel and agreed to stop underperforming and aim for Silver Elite.

Wren excelled in desert sniper drills and other modules but found her scores suppressed by Cross until she stole a jammer, infiltrated his quarters, and forced a confrontation that won her a conditional promise of fair evaluation. She began UCOs at Haven under Cross’s field oversight, then crossed personal lines with him in a fraught affair. As selection tightened, the cohort endured city jumps, where Glin Cotter died impaled, and Roe later executed recruit Betima as an alleged empath; Wren, horrified, engineered a medical removal by breaking her wrist, which Cross negated by flying in healer Ellis. Pushed into Elite testing, she survived RTI with Roe and Ivy, then advanced to the knife-duel finals where she unintentionally severed Bryce Granger’s femoral artery and watched her die, earning a Silver Elite slot amid grief and shock.

As an Elite, Wren confronted operations against smuggler Jasper Reed and a suspected Uprising cell in Hamlett. While assigned elsewhere, she discovered a ward of fragmented Modified patients in a hospital basement. Diverted to Hamlett, she negotiated to spare Griff and Tana Archer by trading the tunnel’s location, then answered Tana’s urgent link to find Anson dead after an attempted assault; Wren staged self-defense to protect Tana. Cross remained skeptical but proceeded with sentences sending Griff to labor and Tana to X. Two months on, Wren covertly fed black cache coordinates to Adrienne, enabling a failed but alarming “sugar bomb” strike, even as Cross ordered wellness checks where Ellis offered to remove Wren’s scars; she refused to protect the hidden bloodmark. Cross took Wren to his family estate, where she suspected his mother Vinessa’s condition was Modified-related and recognized a seaside painting that matched scenes her unseen telepathic confidant “Wolf” had described, leading Wren to test Cross with Wolf’s drowning nightmare and confirm he was Wolf. They exposed truths—his telepathy, her Uprising ties—just as an alert reported a crashed Uprising fighter.

Responding in two B-8s, Cross’s team fell into a depot ambush; a massive blast killed Tyler Struck, Kaine Sutler, and Noah Jones, and a B-8 was stolen. Grief and suspicion tore at the unit; Cross doubted Wren’s innocence until she returned to confess her full history, bloodmark, and uncontrolled incitement at Jim’s execution, and they reconciled, professing love. On the eve of the Silver Jubilee, Adrienne tasked Wren with planting small charges as decoys; Lieutenant Colonel Jayde Valence intercepted her and, after a psychic standoff, Wren used spoken incitement to compel Jayde’s suicide while Cross arranged a cleanup. At the Jubilee, Wren’s improvised cover as a loyalist Aberrant barely contained Lyddie and Ivy’s shock. Onstage, General Merrick Redden’s speech collapsed into incoherence; Wren spotted Adrienne focused on him and later cornered her, learning Adrienne had “rewired” the General’s mind. A second blast destroyed the northern quadrant and a hangar, panic spread, and Roe detained Wren after Lyddie directed soldiers to expose her bloodmark; she was jailed for execution as Travis Redden became General and declared war on all Modified.

Cross jammed the stockade and extracted Wren with Xavier’s help, guiding her through the wards toward the Blacklands while she argued that the General had been corrupted, not born Modified. At the Blacklands’ edge, Cross refused to flee farther—bound to resist Travis and protect his mother—so he sent Xavier on with Wren, and they parted in a painful farewell, promising to hold their mental link. Wren led Xavier through predators and poisons to her childhood hut, where she found and burned a devastating letter from Jim, then pushed on until they reached a mountain valley. A helicopter arrived piloted by “Kaine,” revealed as Uprising ace Grayson Blake, alive; he and his team restrained Xavier for the Authority. Warned that joining meant war, Wren told Cross she was safe and chose to board the helicopter to the Uprising’s base to keep Xavier alive and pursue answers.