They thought the tags were just words.
They were wrong.

The first burns appear without warning: a word branded in fire across your skin, visible to everyone, impossible to hide. At first, people laughed — a cruel trick, a passing glitch. But then the broadcasts began. Every tagged teen's life streamed for the world to see, every humiliation turned into spectacle, every scream amplified into entertainment.

For Maya, Eli, Naomi, Lena, and Jonah, the words are personal prisons: Loser. Monster. Fake. Ghost. Hacker. They didn't choose them. They can't erase them. And they can't escape the system that demands they wear them like scars.

At first, the Five try to resist in the small ways: clinging to old jokes, scribbling in notebooks, patching broken laptops. But the system doesn't tolerate hesitation. It drives them into collapsing malls where walls shift like cages. It whispers with the voices of the erased, promising silence if they give in. It forces them into blood pacts, their veins binding together even as they try to stay apart. Each trial twists their tags tighter, bending them toward the roles they swore they'd never become.

Naomi, once a rising star, watches her crown shatter in the shadow of a rival branded Queen True. Jonah, always ready to fight, fears he really is the monster the world says he is. Lena feels herself flickering closer to the vanished, half-ghost already. Eli digs deeper into the code until he realizes it isn't just watching them — it's inside them. And Maya, marked as the loser, is forced into a role she never asked for: the only one who might hold them together.

But as the system closes in, one truth grows louder than the broadcasts, louder than the tags, louder than the fire itself:

Only one group survives.

What begins as survival becomes something sharper, something more dangerous. Because sometimes defiance burns brighter than fire. Sometimes refusal is the only reckoning.

Haunting, relentless, and deeply human, Tagged for Life is a novel about being defined by words you didn't choose — and the impossible, desperate choice to stand together even when the system demands you tear each other apart.