Morning found the fog thin as gauze and rimed with frost, clinging to lawns and roofs in a glittering skin that looked pretty until you noticed how it made the whole street feel hollow. The sun tried to push through and failed; daylight here always looked like it had been washed too many times.

Lira lay awake and let the quiet measure itself against her breathing. The house made its usual old-bones sounds—pipes ticking, a settling creak in the hall—but they seemed… rearranged. Like the noises had been put back in the wrong order. She had dreamed of the bell again: not ringing so much as inhaling. The memory left her ribs tight.

On her desk, her phone sat face down on the corner of a half-finished worksheet. She turned it over. Nothing from Ryke.

She sent a text anyway.

Lira: you alive?

The typing dots didn’t appear. She tried again—two more messages, then a call. Straight to voicemail. His recorded voice tried to sound bored and ended up sounding young. She hung up before the beep.

The house smelled like toast and dish soap. Downstairs, her mother hummed along with the radio and asked something about gym shoes; Lira answered on autopilot and went to the front door under the excuse of getting air. The fog was melting off the shrubs in slow drips. Near the street, a patch of frost caught the weak light and flashed like a dozen little mirrors. She stepped toward it without meaning to. The cold bit through her socks.

A crow feather lay at the edge of the lawn, oily-black and bent. She didn’t touch it.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. She nearly dropped it.

Ezra: On my way. He never checked in.

Lira: Ryke?

Ezra: Yeah.

Lira: I’ll meet you out front.

She shoved her feet into sneakers without tying the laces, jacket over pajamas, hair shoved into a knot that immediately failed. She was halfway to the door when she remembered to grab a scarf. The bell’s two gentle notes from last night pressed at the back of her skull like something she hadn’t swallowed right.

A knock rattled the wood before she could reach the knob. She opened it to Ezra, who looked like he’d slept in the library stacks and lost the fight. His hair had entered a new era. The strap of his satchel dug a groove into his shoulder.

“He never went home,” he said.

“Maybe he crashed on a couch,” Lira said, because the words had to be spoken to be disproved. “You know Ryke. Somebody’s couch is always—”

“He always texts his mom,” Ezra said. “It’s their deal. He can go wherever, but he checks in. She called me.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “She never calls me.”

For a moment, the street seemed to tilt. Lira nodded, because that was what the air in her lungs would allow.

“We’ll find him,” she said, and wasn’t sure which one of them she was lying to.

They cut across yards, over the low metal fence that ringed the school’s side path, breath making little clouds. The quad lay pale and wet, every blade of grass crusted with frost so fine it turned their steps into quiet crunches. A few early students moved through like ghosts, hoods up, heads down. The bell tower shouldered the sky, black in the morning light. She couldn’t look at it for very long without feeling like it was looking back.

Callen waited on the far side of the quad, back against a leafless oak, hands in the pockets of his hoodie. He had that stillness people got when they’d already decided something. The wind nudged his hood string; he didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re looking for Ryke,” he said, not as a question.

Lira stopped, the frost hissing under her sneaker. “How did you—”

“I know where he isn’t,” Callen said. “Which is more useful than you think.”

Ezra’s jaw set. “You want to stop with the cryptic for one minute? We don’t have time for—”

Callen tilted his head a fraction, listening to some frequency only he got. That motion always made Lira’s spine feel too exposed. “He’s still in the window,” he said.

“What?” Lira asked.

“The window, the bell opens when it rings,” Callen said, patient, as if he were explaining weather to a child. “The mark isn’t the death. It’s the invitation.”

Ezra’s laugh was thin. “Fantastic. We’re RSVP’d to what, exactly?”

Callen didn’t answer. He didn’t shrug either. The lack of anything like normal teenage body language made Lira’s skin itch. For a second she thought she saw a whitish bloom in the grass where he’d been standing, a lace of frost that hadn’t been there before. When she blinked, it looked like all the other frost.

“Where do we start?” Lira asked.

“Everywhere,” Callen said.

Which, as it turned out, meant splitting up. Ezra would sweep Main Street and the blocks around Ryke’s house. Lira would take the long way toward the industrial edge of town, where the old railway crossed a strip of scrub and marsh and then curved back toward the academy. Callen fell into step beside her like the world had always arranged itself that way.

They passed the science wing; its windows reflected the sky like empty eyes. The wind came down the lane with a smell like pennies. Somewhere a truck backed up with an alarm that beeped at the wrong tempo, too slow and then too fast, like the sound had been stretched and snapped back.

“You knew before we did,” Lira said, when the silence got heavy in her throat. “About the bell. About… everything. You know more than you say, and you say creepy things like ‘It’s not ready for you yet’ as if that helps, and now Ryke is missing. If you’re not going to explain it, at least tell me one thing that’s true.”

“That I want you to live,” Callen said.

She hadn’t been ready for that one. “Why?”

He thought about it, which she appreciated and hated. “Because wanting someone to live is a good anchor.”

“A good anchor for what?” Her voice frayed on the edges.

“For staying.”

She looked at him, then away. The street they were on ran out into scrub where the town just… forgot to finish itself. The fog had retreated to the low places, pooled in the ditch beyond the fence. The railway line scraped a straight rusted path across the weeds.

“You have a name in a record from fifty-two years ago,” she said, picking her steps carefully along the crumbling shoulder. “A witness to the bell. Your name. You’re not fifty-two.”

“No,” Callen agreed.

“So either it’s a family thing, or it’s a typo, or—”

“Or the counting stopped,” Callen said.

“The counting what?”

“Of my years,” he said, and said nothing else.

“But that sounds like—”

“Not now,” Callen said. Not unkindly. He had that voice you used with skittish animals. “We have to find Ryke before the fourth night.”

“Fourth—?”

He shook his head. “Later.”

She would have pushed. She would have dug her fingers into the soft spot of his half-answers and pried. But the wind shifted, and the fog in the ditch breathed—a small, deliberate sigh—and something black fluttered on the chainlink.

“Wait,” Lira said.

They stopped at the fence that paralleled the tracks. A snag of fabric clung to the top wire, frayed and dirty and still somehow recognizable: the edge of Ryke’s hoodie, the red stitching on the seam like a thin slashed mouth.

Lira’s pulse went sideways. She reached up and tugged it free. It was damp and not entirely cold, the way laundry was after it had almost finished drying. She pressed it to her face because doing something stupid felt better than doing nothing, and it smelled like deodorant and the artificial citrus of school soap and a hint of smoke.

“He was here,” she said.

“Maybe,” Callen said. He watched the fog instead of the fabric. “Or something wanted you to think so.”

“Why would—” She cut herself off. She already knew the answer to that. Because we follow trails made of ourselves.

Author’s Note
Some bells call for help.
Others call you in.

Ryke’s trail just turned dangerous, and Callen’s secrets aren’t staying buried.
The question is—will the fourth night be too late?

Drop your theories below. 👀