E Z R A

By morning, Hollowbrook pretends nothing happened.
The choir loft is locked, the frost scraped off the windows, and the school announcements insist on normal.
“Welcome back to Heritage Week! Frost trays in the homeroom, participation required.”
As if singing to cursed glass can make us forget that last night, the bell sang back.

I haven’t slept. The hum still sits behind my eyes, a thin vibration in my skull that won’t fade. I keep replaying what I saw about Callen’s hand on her wrist, the sheet music twisting into her name, the look on Lira’s face when she realized the bell answered her.
It didn’t answer me. It never does.

Mr. Voss claps once to get everyone’s attention. “Morning, class. Heritage Week meets physics today. We’re testing resonance frequencies, that’s how sound waves alter surface temperature.”
He gestures to the chilled metal trays lined along the benches. “You’ll each speak your name once, clearly. The microphones will read amplitude; the frost pattern shows wave symmetry. Think of it as science meeting folklore.”

He says it like a lab assignment, not a ritual. That’s how the adults do it here, they dress the curse in data until it sounds harmless.

“Breathe onto the tray,” he continues. “Say your name. Watch how the pattern forms. Every voice leaves its own harmonic signature.”

Simple. Controlled. Meant to prove logic over superstition.

Each student leans in, exhales, and speaks. Frost spiders outward in loops and branches, the microphones chirping as their wavelengths stabilize.
I catalogue automatically: Mara’s amplitude spirals tight; Ryke’s breaks mid-line like static; Alma and Vio’s pulse in perfect mirrored symmetry. Predictable. Measurable.

Then it’s my turn.

I angle the tray toward the sensor, breath misting the glass. “Ezra Quinn.”

Nothing.

The monitor stays flatlined. No shimmer, no frost, not even a humidity trace. Just smooth metal reflecting my own frown back at me. A few kids shift in their seats. Someone whispers, “Maybe he said it too soft?”

I try again, louder. “Ezra Quinn.”

Still nothing.

Mr. Voss frowns, tapping the microphone port. “Could be interference. Try one more”

“I did.” The calm in my voice feels forced. I touch the tray; it’s warm where others’ prints cooled instantly. No frost forming. No resonance curve. Impossible. I’ve spent months graphing these reactions. I know the math.

Ines mutters, “That’s freaky.”
Someone else laughs under their breath, too nervous to mean it.

Voss clears his throat, eager for control. “Probably a calibration error. Step aside. We’ll reset.”

He slides the tray away, but before he can replace it, a draft slips through the cracked window. The surface fogs again unprompted. Condensation twists into thin white filaments, curving together in deliberate strokes.

L I R A.

Her name blooms in perfect silver script where mine refused to form.

The class gasps. The sensor lights stutter, microphones spitting static. A faint hum, low and harmonic, ripples through the speakers, almost too pure to be feedback.

Voss freezes mid-motion. “That… shouldn’t happen.”

“I know.” My tone is flat, but inside something splinters. The tray trembles on the desk, frost veins spreading outward in pulse with that single, impossible tone, the same one that followed me home from the bell tower.

“Quinn, step back,” Voss warns.

I do, slowly and carefully, folding my shaking hands behind me. The frost spelling her name glows once, then fades, leaving only a ghost-outline.

All the physics in the world can’t explain why her frequency answers when mine refuses.

By the time the bell rings for next period, my tray’s been confiscated “for analysis.”
No one says anything to me in the hallway, but they don’t have to.
The silence follows like frost-smoke that people step aside, pretending not to stare.
A few whisper, “Did you see it spell her name?”
I keep walking.

Dr. Bloom’s door is open when I reach the infirmary wing.
He’s bent over a microscope, sleeves rolled, the overhead lamp throwing lines across the silver in his hair. The room smells like antiseptic and melted ice.
“Mr. Quinn,” he says without looking up. “I heard you had a… result.”

I stop at the edge of the desk. “If you mean failure, yes.”

He glances at me then, eyes sharp, too alive for someone who deals mostly with the dead.
“Failure isn’t the word I’d choose. Absence, perhaps.”
He slides a frosted slide under the lens and gestures to me closer.
Tiny filaments glimmer on the glass, branching patterns like snowflakes, except the center is hollow, a clean circle of nothing.
“Do you know what you’re looking at?”

“Frost resonance,” I answer automatically. “The visual echo of a spoken name.”

“Correct.” He adjusts the focus. “This sample is from you.”

The hollow in the middle expands as the slide cools, eating the lines outward until the frost collapses entirely.
Bloom straightens. “Your name refuses the inscription. I’ve seen it once before.”

My pulse stutters. “In who?”

He studies me for a long moment, then says, “In your mother.”
The words hit like ice water.
“She came here once,” he continued, voice quiet. “Before you were born. Same pattern with blank frost, hollow resonance. The Quinn Accord runs deep.”

I shake my head. “There’s no record of that..”

“There wouldn’t be,” he cuts in gently. “Your family bargained for it. Erasure, in exchange for freedom from the toll. But debts don’t vanish, Ezra. They accrue.”

He opens a drawer and pulls out an old patient ledger, edges burned. My surname gleams faintly under soot, half-crossed out.
Bloom traces the line with a gloved finger. “Erased names don’t get rewritten. Not unless the debt returns.”

The air feels thinner. “So the bell can’t see me?”

“It sees the space you leave behind,” he says. “And lately that space has begun to hum again. Whatever you are to the ledger, an omission, a scar..it’s waking.”

He shuts the book, soft but final. “Stay clear of resonance experiments. Especially with her.”

He doesn’t need to say the name.
The warning is obvious, and useless.

I nod once, because that’s all I can manage, and turn toward the door.
As I reach for the handle, he adds quietly, “Patterns fail when the missing piece moves. You’re moving, Ezra. That’s why it’s starting to notice you again.”

The archive feels colder at night, like the frost never really left the walls.
Council access means I can unlock it after hours, no one questions the vice president doing “inventory.”
The lie slides easily off my tongue.
So does every other lie lately.

The bell hums faintly through the floorboards, so low it might just be my heartbeat.
Stacks of student files lean like gravestones. The ledger sits in its case at the center table, iron clasps dull with age.
I should walk away.
Instead, I pull off my gloves and touch the cover.

Nothing.

No sting, no reaction, not even a chill. The metal is just metal, the page just paper.
It feels like a touching absence.

I open to a blank spread. Frost should crawl across the fibers at the sound of a name, that’s the rule, every experiment we’ve run.
So I will try.

“Ezra Quinn.”

Silence.
The page stays gray and dry.
The ink veins near the spine twitch, faint as a dying pulse, then fade back into stillness.

My throat tightens. I try again, louder. “Ezra Quinn!”

Nothing. Not even the echo of my voice.

It’s the same hollow I saw under Bloom’s microscope that was erased disguised as safety.
And I’m so tired of being unseen.

The words slip out before I can stop them. “Lira Vesper.”

The ledger inhales.

Frost detonates across the paper in silver veins, racing to the edges in a heartbeat. The air hums with a pitch that matches the bell tone from the loft.
I stagger back, hand burning with cold. The book glows faintly where her name curls across the center page alive and pulsing.
It heard me, but not as me.
It heard her.

Of course it did.

The hum fades. The frost veins blacken and crack, leaving her name faint as ghost-ink again.
I close the ledger gently, almost reverent, even as my chest feels hollowed out.

Dr. Bloom was wrong about one thing.
Erased names don’t stay erased. They just wait for someone louder to speak over them.

I slide the book back into its case, fingers trembling.
The lock clicks shut, but the hum keeps echoing behind my ribs, steady as a pulse that isn’t mine.

The hallway outside the archive hums with the low aftertone of the bell.
Not a ring. Not quite a sound. More like pressure on something unseen leaning on the walls.

I pocket the key and keep walking. The hum follows.

Light flickers in the stairwell, one fluorescent tube stuttering in rhythm with my pulse. I glance up.
A crow sits on the railing outside the narrow window, tapping its beak tink, tink, tink.
A countdown. Always a countdown.

I should go home. I should sleep. Instead, I end up in the council office, half-lit and half-haunted by my own reflection in the trophy glass.
Binders line the shelf, neatly labeled by year. Attendance logs, student IDs, the bureaucratic order I used to believe meant safety.

I drop my council badge on the desk. The lamination catches the dim light, my face staring back: Ezra Quinn, Vice President.
Still neat, still sharp at the edged. Still real.

Then something slides loose behind the desk, a file folder, old and water-stained. I kneel, tug it free. Inside: another ID card, yellowed plastic, edges warped from heat.
Same face.
Same age.
Different name.
Elias Quinn — Council President.
Dated eight years before I was born.

The hum spikes.

I blink hard, trying to logic it away. A misprint. A relative. Anything. But the eyes in the picture are mine down to the scar on the brow line.
I press my thumb to the photo; the plastic is cold, rimed faintly with frost. The same kind that refuses to form for me.

My breath fogs.
The crow outside screeches once and flies.
The hum in the air condenses into a single faint tone of pure bell-metal.

It’s the same pitch that Lira answered.

I dropped both IDs. They land face-up on the desk, side by side. Two versions of me, one current, one erased.
The frost from the old card creeps across the newer plastic, silvering my printed name until the letters dissolve.

E Z R A smears, vanishes.
The space beneath glows faintly, almost rewriting itself.

For a heartbeat, Elias flickers through.

I stumble back, pulse hammering. The light above the desk explodes with a soft pop, showering glass across the floor.
Darkness folds in around me, humming low.

I don’t move. I just watch the cards, side by side, frost connecting them like veins.

Maybe Bloom was right, erased names don’t get rewritten.
Maybe they get recycled.

The hum quiets, and in that stillness, a thought lands heavy and certain:
If the bell can’t see me, it’s because it already has.