L I R A

By morning, the whole academy knows.

The bell isn’t mentioned, not out loud, but whispers ripple faster than class schedules. “The bus glitch,” someone calls it. “The blackout.” Others swear it was lightning that cracked the windshield, or a gas leak that made us hallucinate.

None of them were there.

By lunch, it mutates into a full-on rumor. The cafeteria feels like a hive of voices, buzzing too loud. Forks scrape trays, sneakers squeak, gossip spills over itself in half-truths.

That’s when Pia Reyes decides to make her grand entrance.

She hops onto one of the benches like it’s her stage, her phone rig clipped to her shirt, cat-ear headphones glowing pink. “Attention, survivors!” she crows, loud enough to make three tables turn. “Who wants to see proof?”

My stomach drops.

She waves her phone, screen flashing, but when she tries to hit play, all we get is distortion. White noise. Frosted static crawling across pixels like veins.

“Ugh, it was crystal-clear last night!” Pia insists. “The strip literally fell through the bus roof, I had the whole thing, but..” She flips her phone around, frowning when it stutters again. “It’s like someone corrupted the file. I swear it was there.”

Whispers sharpen, turning into stares. Someone mutters, “She’s lying for clout.” Another: “Why would a bus drop metal? Dumb.”

Ezra’s already moving before I can. He cuts through the crowd, steady and calm, but his voice has that dangerous edge. “Delete it, Pia. Before you make this worse.”

She blinks at him. “Worse? I’m trying to help people know the truth!”

“That’s not true,” Ezra says, lowering his voice but not his intensity. “That’s noise. And noise feeds it.”

The way he says it makes goosebumps ripple down my arms. Some kids roll their eyes, but Pia actually falters, her phone trembling just slightly in her hand.

My gaze flicks to the side doors of the cafeteria. Callen’s there, leaning against the frame, hood shadowing his face. Watching. Not saying a word.

Ezra stands in front of me, a protective wall. Callen watches from across the room, unreadable. And I’m pinned between them, heat and gravity both pulling at me while everyone else keeps whispering about something they’ll never understand.

The cafeteria noise follows me into the archive, like whispers seeped under the door. By the time I step inside, the air feels different, it is stiller and colder.

Ezra’s already at the long wooden table, yearbooks stacked high, attendance rosters spread like a crime scene. His glasses catch the dim light, and he doesn’t look up right away.

“You’re late,” he mutters.

“I had Pia in my ear,” I say, sliding into the chair across from him. “Consider it combat training.”

Ryke’s slouched in the corner, half-asleep with a bag of chips, while Mara fusses with her dead camera, clicking the buttons like she can will it back to life.

Ezra pushes a book toward me. “Look.”

At first, it’s just a neat page of faces from freshman class, smiling too wide. But halfway through, the photos stop. The names underneath are crossed out, not scribbled, but erased so clean it looks like the page was never printed. Only faint indentations remain, ghost-shadows where people used to be.

I touch the paper. The ink ripples, faintly wet. “This isn’t normal.”

“Exactly.” Ezra’s voice tightens. “Whole years missing. Families scrubbed out. No transfer records, no obits. It’s like they were… unmade.”

Ryke snorts. “Or maybe they just moved. Witness protection, extreme edition.” He tries to laugh, but it dies in his throat when the window above us fogs over, frosting white at the edges.

We all look up. Words press faintly into the condensation, backwards from the outside. I can’t make them out, only warped lines bending like veins.

The fluorescent light above flickers, buzzing low, and my chest seizes with the same pressure as the bus.

Ezra leans closer to the page, jaw set. “It’s connected. The ledger, whatever it is. It’s eating names.”

Mara whispers, “Or hiding them.”

My pulse spikes, because behind us, a shadow moves. Callen, silent as always, leaning in the doorway like he’s been there longer than we realized. His hood’s still damp, rain clinging to the edges. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t need to. His gaze settles on me, steady, unreadable.

Ezra notices him and bristles, shoulders tightening. He moves subtly closer, like a barrier between me and Callen, even though Callen hasn’t moved.

The frost on the window deepens, spreading in veins across the glass. For a second, the warped letters almost take shape. 

Then the light above us pops, shattering into silence.

The silence after the bulb pops feels wrong, too thick. Dust drifts down, catching in the glow of the one light still working.

Then.. 

Tink.

A sound I’ll never stop recognizing.

Something taps the top shelf of the archive stacks, metal against wood. The hair on my arms lifts.

Tink. Tink.

We all look up at the same time. The air seems to hold its breath.

Then it drops.

A thin strip of steel slips between the books, clattering to the floor and spinning in a sharp circle before landing flat.

No one moves at first. The room’s too quiet, except for the faint hiss of frost creeping across the window.

Mara whispers, “No.” Her camera blinks red for half a second, then dies again.

Ryke swears under his breath, backing toward the wall.

Ezra bends, slow, controlled, and flips the strip with his shoe. The name catches the light, deep grooves etched with frost.

Not mine.

A different name. Someone else.

My throat closes. If it isn’t only me, then this is bigger, sharper, hungrier than I thought.

Ezra straightens, his face pale but steady. “It’s started again.”

Across the room, Callen shifts out of the shadows. His eyes lock on the strip like it’s already a gravestone. He doesn’t say a word, but the way his jaw tightens tells me what he isn’t willing to voice.

We aren’t safe. None of us.

And the bell isn’t finished.

The strip still gleams on the floor, Ezra’s shoe hovering over it like it might sprout teeth. No one talks for too long. Silence feels like bait.

Ryke finally blurts, “Well… at least it’s not Lira again.” His laugh is thin and wrong, and no one joins him. He wilts, muttering, “Too soon. Got it.”

Mara hugs her dead camera to her chest. “It blinked red before it cut out. I swear it recorded something. I just… I can’t get it to stay.” Her voice cracks, and it makes me want to believe her, because evidence would mean this isn’t just in our heads.

Ezra shakes his head, steadier than the rest of us. “We need a system. Tomorrow, same time, back here. We’ll build a timeline, map it out.”

“Tomorrow won’t wait for you,” Callen says from the doorway, low and certain. His eyes flick from the strip to me, like I’m the part of the puzzle that matters.

The window hisses again. Frost creeps over the glass, veins tangling faster, harder, until they snap into a single word, clean and sharp as a blade:

LISTEN.

The word hangs in silence, daring us to break it.

And I don’t know what’s worse, that the bell is speaking, or that part of me already wants to answer.