E Z R A

I can’t unsee it, the drawer full of frozen name strips, stacked like trophies. Every blink brings back the top one, glinting with a name the ledger should’ve already erased. Proof that the town lies deeper than even I imagined.

Fury doesn’t fade on the walk across campus. It hardens. My phone buzzes with texts from Mara, Ryke, even Lira, but I don’t answer. Not until I know how many names were stolen, and who helped hide them.

That’s how I end up outside Dr. Bloom’s office, hand sweating on the doorknob. I tell myself this is a strategy. Evidence. But the truth is simpler: if the sheriff covered up what I think he did, I need to hear him admit it before the frost erases him too.

The office smells like bleach and stale winter. Light hums overhead, the sterile buzz of a place built to hold silence.

“You came alone,” Bloom says without looking up. Latex gloves snap sharp against her wrists.

“I told Lira I’d text if it was important.”

A lie. Everything here is important.

She wheels a cart forward. Old manila folders slump against each other like drunks. “This is what’s left of the coroner’s files. What wasn’t shredded.”

I reach for the top one and freeze. The page is wrong. The name at the top blurs while I’m looking at it, letters thinning into pale scratches. By the time I blink, it’s just a ditch in the paper, like someone erased the person clean out of existence.

My breath fogs. “That shouldn’t happen.”

“Nothing about this town should.” Bloom slides another folder out. Its edges are blackened, crisp as burned bread. “Ghost-ink. Comes and goes when it wants.”

I can’t stop staring at the empty name line. “Who erased them?”

“I can tell you who signed off.” She taps the corner. Sheriff Pike. His signature wobbles, a tremor I’ve never seen on his council paperwork.

The door clicks. Heavy boots on tile.

I don’t have to turn. Pike’s weight fills the room before he speaks.

“I signed what I was told to sign.”

Bloom folds her arms. “Say the rest.”

He scrubs a hand down his jaw. Looks smaller without the badge aura. “There’s a second book. I never saw it, but I knew. The calls always came before the accidents. ‘File it clean,’ they’d say. Weather. Pipes. Gas leaks. If you asked questions, the phones stopped ringing.”

My throat knots. “The Bellwardens.”

He flinches. “They don’t use that word with me. Heritage committee. Donors. Choir moms.” A bitter bark of a laugh. “Pick your poison.”

“How many reports?” My fingers dig into the folder until the frost creaks.

“More than I can carry.” His voice roughens. “And last night, it came for my niece. Opened her yearbook—her photo was a gray smear. Said her name, and the ink twitched like it heard me.” He swallows. Doesn’t hide the shake in his hand. “I can’t lie to them anymore.”

The hum of the lights fills the silence. The files glow faintly under it, like they know they’re the last scraps of truth.

Pike’s eyes lift to mine. “If you want proof, like real proof, you should go back to school. Choir loft. Third pew rail. Look under the varnish. Then tell me this is a rumor.”

I can’t breathe for a second. The frost in the room tastes sharp, like blood.

Proof. Not whispers. Not forums. Something carved into the wood where no eraser can reach.

I should leave right then. Head to the chapel. Get the proof Pike all but begged me to drag into daylight.

Instead, I hear myself ask the one question I swore I’d never say out loud.

“Why him, not me?”

Bloom blinks. “What?”

I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste iron, but the words keep spilling. “Why does she look for him when she’s scared? Why does she always pick Callen?”

Pike shifts like he’d rather be anywhere else. The sheriff who just admitted to burying half the town’s dead suddenly looks like he wants the ground to swallow him whole.

Bloom studies me with that clinical stare she saves for cadavers. “This isn’t about him,” she says carefully. “It’s about what she thinks he hears.”

“That’s the excuse?” My laugh comes out jagged. “He listens? That’s it? Meanwhile I’ve been tearing holes in every lie this town feeds us, mapping the bus crash, finding names they can’t erase, and she still—” I snap my mouth shut.

Neither of them answers.

The silence makes me want to smash something. My pulse hammers loud enough that the frost edging the files seems to throb with it.

I drag a hand down my face. “Forget it.”

But I don’t forget. I can’t. The image of Lira’s hand brushing Callen’s sleeve in the chapel weighs heavier than Bloom’s whole file cart.

Pike finally clears his throat. “Kid. Sometimes people go where they think the bell won’t follow.”

His words hit like a bruise. Because I’ve been moving, planning, fighting since the bus crash and she still doesn’t see me as safe.

Bloom peels off her gloves, snaps them into the trash. “You’ll burn yourself out faster if you make this a triangle instead of a war.”

I want to argue, but my phone buzzes again. One vibration. Two. Three.

Lira: Where are you?

I pocket it before they can see my face.

“I’ll get the proof,” I say, voice steady even if the rest of me isn’t.

Bloom nods once, sharp. Pike looks like he aged ten years in ten minutes.

I push through the door before either of them can say more, jealousy coiled tight under my ribs. The town’s lies I can fight. The cult I can expose. But Lira choosing him instead of me? That’s the one battle I don’t know how to win.

The chapel is colder than Bloom’s office.

Light slants across the pews, painting the wood in stained-glass halos that don’t warm a thing. Every step echoes too sharp, like the room’s holding its breath.

I head straight for the choir loft. Third pew, just like Pike said.

Up close, the rail looks like normal oak varnish, a hundred carved initials, nail moons scratched deep by bored students. My thumbnail picks at a seam. The varnish flakes away like brittle candy.

And underneath.. 

Not initials. Not doodles.

A mark.

Branded black into the wood, burned so deep it looks like it grew there: a circle with a line through the center, two smaller cuts flanking it. A bell from above, its clapper pinned.

The cult’s sigil.

My breath stutters. Proof. Not rumors, not threads with blurry screenshots. Proof branded into the school itself.

The wood hums under my hand. Low. Alive.

I snatch my palm back, but the echo stays in my bones.

The choir room is too still, like it’s waiting for me to decide what this means. My phone’s out before I think, camera shaking. The first shot blurs into static. The second half-captures it. The third glitches white, nothing but noise.

“Come on,” I mutter. “Just let me keep one.. ”

The wood groans. A crack whispers through the rail, heat licking at the edges.

The sigil isn’t just burned. It’s waking.

The sigil flares ember-red, smoke curling like a throat clearing. Ash lifts, swirls, and etches a single word across the pew backs in thin frost letters:

LISTEN.

My stomach flips. My hand burns where I touched the mark, skin reddened with the same circle seared into the wood.

This isn’t a rumor. It isn’t history. It’s alive and it wants us.

For the first time since the bus crash, I don’t feel like the one pulling the strings.

I feel hunted.

And worse when I think of Lira, I realize I can’t protect her. Not from this. Not even from myself.