When a 13-year-old girl discovers the healing gift inherited from her dying father has no limits, she must choose between hiding from the world and embracing the responsibility to help those she can save.

SYNOPSIS:

ACT ONE

Thirteen-year-old Lourdes lives with an extraordinary secret: her bare touch can heal and improve living things, but using the gift causes her body to rise from the ground. Her mother, Lupe, has spent years teaching her to conceal the ability behind thin gloves and strict rules. The exception is Lourdes's best friend, Martha, a gifted competitive swimmer chasing qualifying times and dreaming of Olympic gold.

When the mysterious elderly Mawagbay visits, she awakens something dormant in Lourdes. Her healing becomes stronger, her levitation more powerful, and the limits she understood disappear. After accidentally throwing a neighborhood boy across the street, Lourdes fears what she is becoming. But curiosity wins. With Martha, she secretly practices until levitation becomes movement, and movement becomes flight.

Lourdes finally tells Lupe she cannot understand her ability by pretending it does not exist. On a remote hillside, she and Martha test her limits. Lourdes flies faster, farther, then rockets thirty feet into the air.

She cannot feel a ceiling.

ACT TWO

When an elderly man collapses on a neighborhood street, Lourdes hesitates because witnesses surround them. But when he stops breathing, she touches him and he revives. Lourdes saved him, yet she is haunted by the seconds she spent protecting her secret while he was dying.

On the hillside, Lourdes flies so high Martha can barely see her. She confesses that the dying man awakened an old memory: as a small child, Lourdes held her father's hand as he died and watched it slip from hers. She could do nothing then. She can now. If someone is dying and she can stop it, Lourdes needs to know whether she can reach them. She launches across the sky to discover how fast she can travel.

Soon Lourdes deliberately heals an injured child, experiencing for the first time the satisfaction of using her gift for a stranger.

Mawagbay reveals that Lourdes has misunderstood the defining memory of her childhood. Her father's hand did not slip because Lourdes failed him. On his deathbed, against Lupe's wishes, he deliberately transferred his gifts to Lourdes. His hand separated when the transfer was complete. The power is an inheritance, and with it comes responsibility.

At a sidewalk café, a small child is struck by a car. Lourdes tells Lupe she can help. After years of fear and prohibition, Lupe tearfully nods.

In front of a growing crowd, Lourdes removes her glove and heals the child as phones record everything.

The secret is over.

With Martha beside her, Lourdes replaces her thin gloves with a full black second skin: high collar, sealed gloves, black boots. She is no longer hiding what she is. She is preparing to carry it.

ACT THREE

At Martha's swim trials, Lourdes enters openly in black as phones rise around her. Before the race, she offers Martha her hand and the advantage her gift could provide.

Martha refuses. She has this.

Lourdes watches Martha swim the race entirely on her own.

Then Lourdes sees Lupe with the mysterious man who watched Lourdes at the opening swim meet. Remembering Mawagbay's warning of the Evil One, Lourdes recognizes the threat. In full view of the crowd, she approaches him and points.

Get away from my mother.

She doesn't heal, fly, or unleash her power. Faced with Lourdes and a room full of witnesses, the man retreats and leaves.

Behind them, Martha's result is confirmed.

Later, Martha relaxes outside Lourdes's home wearing her gold medal while Lupe tends the grill. Lourdes has an errand.

On a downtown rooftop, Lourdes surveys the city with the same concentration she once devoted to Martha's swimming times. Sirens sound in the distance.

Lourdes listens.

Then launches toward the city.

The child who once feared touching the world has chosen to serve it.