Maya - The Miraculous Child

Maya has always been able to feel what the animals around her feel. She 
has never once thought to ask why.

Then, on an ordinary morning by the sea in Southern Thailand, she 
watches a stranger step through a circle of light—and vanish. Days 
later, the same door opens for her.

It takes her to a hidden magic market tucked into Nepal, where a woman 
she's never met presses a ring into her hand—a ring that once belonged 
to a father Maya didn't know she had, set with a gem said to be formed 
from a whale's tears. To reach Mantra School of Magic, hidden high in 
the Himalayas, she has to survive a mountain that has already broken 
children stronger than her, and pass through a gate that only opens for 
those who don't stop moving.

She isn't the only new arrival with something to hide. Tanic hears 
thoughts he was never meant to hear. Minho watches more than he speaks. 
Together, the three of them are the closest thing to family any of them 
has had in a long time.

But something at Mantra School was waiting for Maya before she ever 
arrived. A professor with a secret coiled beneath her robes. A 
headmaster who goes pale at the sight of her ring. A shape in the dark 
that watches from gardens, from balconies, from the edges of her 
vision—patient, unhurried, and never quite gone.

Ten years ago, this school lost someone. Maya is starting to wonder if 
it was someone she should have known.

Whatever is waiting for her here has been waiting a long time. And it 
isn't finished.