Orientation. Under The Kingdom, #1

Fourteen-year-old Jon Briggs has spent most of his life exploring the backstage corridors of the Disneyland Resort, where his mother works in facilities management. He knows which doors lead to ride systems, which passages connect the service roads, and where the carefully constructed illusion gives way to concrete, wiring, and machinery. Then he sees a door open in a wall where no door should exist.
Three unmarked adults escort a frightened teenage girl through the opening and into a warm-lit passage descending beneath the park. Days later, Jon receives an invitation from the Vanguard Academy-an underground residential school for young people with extraordinary abilities. Hidden across five levels beneath the world's most famous kingdom, the Academy trains students classified as Icons, Operators, Anomalies, Constructs, and Latents.
Jon has been designated a Latent: someone whose powers have not yet manifested. But while his classmates produce energy, manipulate physical spaces, construct advanced devices, and demonstrate abilities beyond ordinary explanation, Jon discovers that his own greatest talent may be something the Academy cannot measure. He notices what institutions try to hide. The deeper Jon moves into Academy life, the more troubling the patterns become.
Students whisper about reassignment. Entire levels remain inaccessible. Medical treatments are mandatory but poorly explained. Abilities fluctuate after clinic appointments, and students who question the system are relocated, counseled, or removed from ordinary school life. With the help of memory-reader Petra Okafor, technically gifted Torres, and powerful legacy student Callum Drake, Jon uncovers evidence of Protocol Diminish-a secret pharmacological program that has been systematically reducing students' abilities while presenting the loss as necessary stabilization.
The conspiracy reaches beyond the Academy's public leadership to an invisible administrative board, an unaccountable external foundation, and some of the most celebrated heroes in its history. Even Nadia Vance, the recruiter Jon believed had discovered him by accident, has been keeping secrets of her own. Jon was never recruited because he had hidden powers. He was recruited because he had none-and because a student outside the Academy's normal system of control might be the only person capable of seeing how that system truly worked.
To protect the students still undergoing treatment, Jon must gather evidence from restricted corridors, recover the testimony of those who disappeared before him, identify the people who authorized the program, and bring the truth beyond the Academy's walls before he becomes another problem the institution quietly reassigns. Orientation launches Under the Kingdom, an underground young-adult fantasy adventure series of secret schools, emerging heroes, hidden levels, institutional conspiracies, extraordinary friendships, and one observant teenager determined to discover what lies beneath every carefully maintained illusion.