The Athenaeum: The First Matter by Matthew Campbell

Everything the pebble could become was always inside the pebble. Fourteen-year-old Eli Wren has spent his life hiding what his hands can do. Pennies corrode at his touch. Steel rusts in seconds. A kitchen table crumbles to powder while his mother pretends not to see. When a stranger arrives and tells him the truth — that he is an Adept, one of thousands who can perceive and reshape matter at the molecular level — Eli is recruited into the Athenaeum, a centuries-old institution carved inside a Swiss mountain. There, transmutation isn't magic. It's the deepest science the world has ever known. And Eli, a Solver who can feel the atomic structure of anything he touches, may be the most sensitive practitioner in a generation. But the Athenaeum is fracturing. Its molecular archive has been secretly edited for twenty years. Its sealed chambers have been repurposed as vaults for stolen human abilities. Adepts are vanishing — their perception stripped by a process called Extraction — and the person responsible has been operating from inside the mountain all along. As the conspiracy unravels, Eli discovers something no one expected: the mountain itself is remembering. The stolen signatures of the Extracted are waking in the stone, organizing into echoes of the people they were taken from. And one of those echoes belongs to the father Eli lost ten years ago. Read more