Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all. London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife.

According to Mother, he'll be married by the end of the year. It doesn't matter that he's needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.

After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness-and shipped away to Braxton's Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear.

So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton's innards and expose its rotten guts to the world-as long as the school doesn't break him first.