Lira did not sleep. She drifted. Her body lay still, but her mind floated close to waking. The chime from the night before still lived in her bones. The whisper of her name tugged at her pulse like a thin thread.

When sleep finally took her, the dream did not feel like hers.

She stood in black water up to her chest. The surface was flat and cold. The sky above was a dark sheet with no stars. Somewhere under her feet, the old bell tolled. The sound was slow and heavy. Each note sent a round of ripples across the water.

Faces rose in the ripples. First Patricia Weaver. Pale. Eyes open. Then Ezra. Ryke. Callen. Their mouths moved, but no sound came out. It looked like they were speaking to her through glass.

The bell tolled again. The water climbed to her chin.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. It did not belong in this place, but the screen glowed like a knife.

She woke, gasping.

It was still dark. Her desk lamp made weak light against the window. Fog pressed at the glass in a soft wall. The phone buzzed again, this time real.

Ezra: We need to meet. Now.

Lira did not change clothes. She pulled on her coat and shoved her feet into her sneakers. She moved on quiet legs past the stairs. The house creaked once; she froze; then it went still again. She left a note on the kitchen counter for her mom: Went to meet Ezra. Back soon. She put the pen down like it might make noise.

Outside, the fog held low and silver. It curled above the grass and along the road like smoke that could not decide where to go. Her breath showed in small clouds. Streetlights hummed. Somewhere far off, a siren called and then faded.

The walk to the edge of campus felt longer than it was. Lira kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes forward. She listened. She did not want to hear the scrape. She half expected it anyway.

The gazebo sat near the trees behind the field, a half-rotted thing from a fundraiser no one remembered. Paint peeled off in strips. The floorboards warped. At night, it looked like a cage that forgot what it was for.

Ezra was already there. He sat on the bench with a folder thick with papers on his lap. His hair stood up like he had used his hands too much. His foot bounced without him noticing.

Callen leaned against one of the posts, hood up. His face was calm. It always was. Calm did not mean safe.

Lira stepped inside and pulled her coat tighter. “What’s going on?”

“Patterns,” Ezra said. He said it like the word should be enough. He spread black-and-white photos across the bench.

They were not crime scene photos. Not exactly. The images were small and wrong in quiet ways. A dead squirrel under a streetlamp. A window with frost forming only on the inside. A sidewalk pushed up from below, like something had tried to breathe under it.

“These are from every bell event I could find records of,” Ezra said. “Each time, four people were marked before the deaths started.”

“Marked how?” Lira asked. She already knew some of the answers. She wanted to hear him say them.

Ezra tapped the photos one by one. “The crow,” he said. “The flickering lights. The scrape. The… listening.” His eyes slid to Callen for a heartbeat and then back to the photos.

Ryke arrived last. He came in fast out of the fog, holding a gas-station coffee that steamed in the cold air. “What’s the emergency?” he asked.

“You’re in it,” Ezra said.