Circles of Influence: In Washington, D.C., your pain is a metric, your hope is a strategy, and the system is holding the pen. (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798278949251)

College student Kassie Winters runs a small anonymous account, @melorism, posting late-night thoughts about surviving in a world that feels quietly rigged. When a fellow student-brilliant, restless Elliot Voss-dies after a river crash that should have killed Kassie instead, grief and survivor's guilt start to pull her under.

Then an unsent draft appears in her app in someone else's voice.

Then an unknown number texts:

I worked on the system that watched you.

At PHU, a "data-driven mental health tool" called Universe is quietly scoring student posts, mapping friendships, and flagging who counts as "risk." On paper, it's about care. In the internal briefings Kassie isn't supposed to see, it looks a lot more like control-especially when she finds a scenario memo that reads like it predicted the night of the crash months before it happened.

Pulled into a campus Oversight Committee and a growing circle of students who call themselves Unstable Nodes United, Kassie teams up with ethics professor Ren Marik, whistleblower Gray, and staffer Beck Campbell, who reports to Elliot's mother, Senator Harper Voss. As Kassie digs into her own file-with help from her best friend Sadie Leon and therapist Dr. Elise Chen-she uncovers falsified alerts, recoded events, and a label that treats her grief as "narrative risk."

The deeper she goes, the more dangerous it becomes to be the girl whose story can sway the system.

To survive, Kassie will have to decide how much of herself to put on the record-and what it really means to take the pen back.