L I R A

The hallway doesn’t settle. It just… trembles. Like the whole school is holding its breath and nobody warned me I was supposed to do the same.

The emergency Heritage Ceremony.
Dusk.
Mandatory.
Consequences.

The words keep flashing behind my eyes, strobing like the cracked lights overhead. Everyone rushes in every direction at once, some pretending to be calm, most failing miserably. I try to swallow but my throat’s dry, scraped hollow. My stomach is still somewhere back at the alcove, where Ezra’s name glitched out like he was already half-gone.

I can’t stop watching it. The empty space where he should’ve been. The way Ms. Voss’s face pinched like she’d seen a ghost but wasn’t allowed to admit it. Kids keep whispering as they hurry past me:

“Do you think the ceremony’s about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“The one who..”
“No, seriously, what girl?”

And that’s the worst part. They’ve already lost her. Not just the body, her name but Her existence. Like she never laughed in Chem or borrowed a pencil or sat at the stupid blue table near the windows.

My hands won’t stop shaking. I jam them into my sleeves, try to look normal, whatever that means now. Callen keeps glancing at me from a few steps behind, like he expects me to fall over. And I swear I can hear something buzzing under the floorboards. A hum that isn’t quite sound. A warning I don’t know how to read.

By the time we reach the end of the language wing, the teachers have switched strategies. Now they’re lining us up. Organizing. Sorting. Like the panic is inconvenient and they’d prefer if we’d all just shut up and follow their neat little arrows on the floor.

“Students involved in the disruption earlier,” one of them calls out, reading from a tablet like she’s reading a grocery list, “you will report to Temporary Detention in the West Tower classroom while administration prepares the hall.” Temporary. Like grief. Like a glitch. Like names that can vanish.

Theo raises his hand, a crow feather sticking out of his jacket pocket like an accusation. “I literally just fed one bird. One. Why am I in trouble?”

“Because you were on restricted grounds,” the teacher snaps back, too fast, too loud. She’s sweating. They all are. Not one of them mentions the frost on the broken hallway glass or the low rumble from the bell.

Callen ends up in our group too, of course he does and Ezra’s assigned to “support staff check-in” like that’s a real thing and not another lie the adults made up five seconds ago.

“Go on,” the teacher says, ushering us toward the stairwell. “Everything is perfectly safe.” She doesn’t even believe in herself.

West Tower detention looks like every sad, underfunded classroom I’ve ever seen with peeling paint, and humming lights but it’s colder than it should be. The kind of cold that sinks into bone instead of skin. I hug myself without thinking. Theo slips past me to the window, where three crows are perched on the ledge like they’re waiting for him. They tilt their heads in unison. He grins.

“Hey, guys. You made it.” The teacher supervising us pretends not to hear that. She pretends not to see anything, actually, especially the frost blooming in delicate spirals along the edges of the cracked windowpane. And especially the way those spirals pulse, faintly, like a heartbeat.

“Take a seat,” she says, voice too bright, like she’s performing for an invisible camera. I move toward the sign-in sheet on her desk. It’s supposed to be a simple roster with name, reason, time. Except half the lines look rubbed out —wiped clean, as if someone deleted the people attached to them.

My chest tightens. Ezra. His name blinking. His record disappearing for half a second. And now this. I look closer. One of the half-erased names flickers, like ghost-ink catching light. A faint outline, then nothing. I blink. It vanishes completely.

“Did you see that?” I ask. The teacher stiffens but doesn’t look up. “Everyone finds a seat. Now.” Her knuckles are white. She knows.  She definitely knows. When I sit, the desk is ice-cold. Under my palm, the wood gives a tiny tremor. Like something underneath is trying to wake up.

Theo whistles low. “They’re restless today,” he says to the crows.  I pretend he isn’t talking about all of us. Callen chooses the desk beside mine even though there are at least six other empty ones. He sits like a shadow, quiet, controlled, way too aware of the room. Or aware of me. I’m not sure which is worse.

“You’re freezing,” he murmurs.

“I’m fine.”  It’s a lie. I’m shaking. He notices anyway. His knee brushes mine under the desk. Just barely. Probably an accident. Probably. But my breath snags and he must feel it because he goes still. Not pulling away. Just… hovering. Waiting.

“Lira,” he says softly. My name in his voice does something to me I’m not prepared for. “The ceremony, they shouldn’t be doing it now. Not with the bell like this.” I don’t know what he means but the way he says it, the way his eyes dip to my hands like he expects them to start bleeding frost and it terrifies me more than the announcement itself.

“Why do you know all this?” I whisper. He looks at the front of the room instead of me. Jaw tight. Like he’s holding something back. “Because patterns repeat.”

“What patterns?” A long pause.
“The kind you don’t want to see twice.” My pulse trips. He’s closer than he should be, closer than anyone has a right to be during mandatory detention in a creepy freezing tower. His arm shifts like he’s resisting the urge to reach for me. My fingers twitch like I might let him. A crow taps the window, sharp and quick, one, two, three.  Almost like a countdown. Callen flinches first. Like he heard something deeper inside the sound. And maybe… maybe I did too.

My phone buzzes against my thigh. I jump like it’s a gunshot. Callen’s head snaps toward me, eyes narrowing. I slide the phone out under the desk.
Ezra: Are you okay? Where did they send you?
Another buzz, three seconds later, too fast, like he’s typing before he thinks.
Ezra: Don’t sit near the windows. Don’t touch anything cold.

A chill goes up my spine. How does he know about the cold? About the windows? About any of this? I text back with stiff fingers: How did you know where I am?
He replies immediately: I just guessed. Protocol stuff. Doesn’t matter. Just stay away from the frost.

I stare at those words like they’re radioactive. Ezra wasn’t even near the broken glass earlier. He shouldn’t know that frost is still blooming on the window inches from me. He shouldn’t know anything.

Callen leans closer, voice low. “Bad news?”

I shove the phone deeper under the desk. “It’s just Ezra checking in.”

“That’s not what I asked.” His tone is too soft. Too careful. It makes something in my chest twist. I don’t answer. I can’t. Because there’s something wrong in Ezra’s messages, something rotten under the worry. And Callen senses it, of course he does. A crow taps the glass again, harder this time.  Like it’s agreeing with him.

Theo startles upright so fast his chair screeches across the floor. “Uh—Lira?” I turn just as one of the crows on the ledge hops closer to the cracked pane. Its feathers puff in a slow ripple, like it’s breathing in my direction. Then it drops something, it clinks softly against the sill before sliding through a gap in the broken glass and landing on my desk.

A thin strip of metal. Cold, even from a distance. Stamped with one word:  

RUN.  

Stamped. Like a tag. A label. My heart lurches into my throat. The strip vibrates, barely,  just a soft, high hum I feel more in my teeth than my ears. My fingertips tingle before I even touch it. Callen’s hand comes down on my wrist before I can reach forward. “Don’t.”

His voice is rougher than before, something close to panic buried under it. I look up at him, but he’s staring at the strip like it’s a live wire.

The teacher clears her throat loudly. “Eyes front, please. Animals outside are not part of the instructional environment.”

That would almost be funny if her voice didn’t crack halfway through. She definitely saw it. She’s just choosing not to.

Theo crouches next to my desk, whispering, “They only drop things when it’s bad.”

“Bad like what?” My voice shakes. He doesn’t answer.  Then the bell tolls.

Not loud, just one low, sickening note that vibrates through the walls and straight down my spine. Everyone in the room freezes. Even the teacher’s face goes blank with fear. A split-second later, the tower wall gives a long, miserable groan.

I barely have time to inhale before a crack snakes across the ceiling. Dust showers down. Plaster splinters. Something deep in the stone shudders like it’s coming apart.

“Lira—!” Callen’s already moving. He grabs me, waist, wrist, I don’t even know and yanks me into him as a chunk of the ceiling breaks free and slams onto the desk I was sitting at a heartbeat ago. Wood splinters, shards flying across the floor.

My back hits his chest. His arm cages around me, his other hand braced against the wall. I can feel his breath at my neck, hot, ragged, real. My heart’s not beating right. Too fast. Too loud.

“We need to get out,” I whisper, but it comes out like a gasp.

“No,” he says, voice tight. “Not yet. Not until it settles.”

“Settles? The ceiling is falling..”

“It’s the bell,” he murmurs in my ear. “It’s shifting the whole damn tower.” His hand tightens on my waist, anchoring me like he thinks I might disappear if he lets go. And I… I don’t pull away. I should. I don’t.

The teacher’s screaming something. Theo’s coughing through the dust. But all I can feel is Callen’s heartbeat pounding through his ribs into my back like he’s the only solid thing in the room.

When the rumbling finally dies, the room is a wreck, dust hanging in the air like smoke, desks pushed sideways, crow feathers scattered across the sill. My ears ring, but underneath that… something else is ringing too. A colder sound.  Sharper.

Callen loosens his grip just enough for me to step forward. The strip on my desk has stopped humming. Everything feels paused, suspended. Waiting. Then the temperature drops so fast my breath fogs instantly. Frost blooms across the floor in delicate veins, then thicker, faster, racing toward the front of the room like it knows exactly where it’s going.

“No,” Callen mutters. “Not here. Not now.” I backed up until I hit his chest again. The frost stops at the blackboard. A thin layer spiders across the surface. Words begin to carve themselves inside it, the letters forming with that faint scraping sound I heard the night of the bus:

D U E / 2

The moment the last stroke finishes, the temperature plummets again. My fingers sting, my lungs ache. The frost pulses once, like a heartbeat, then goes still. Someone behind me whispers, “What does that mean?”

Callen’s voice is almost nonexistent. “It means we’re out of time.” My pulse spikes. My vision swims for a second. The bell hums again, low and hungry. And the 2 on the board…  it drips.