PROLOGUE
The clock read 6:00 a.m., though it hardly mattered anymore.
Zari had spent the night reading, pages blurring into one another as the hours dissolved into something soft and untraceable. When she finally closed the book, her eyes burned, her body heavy with exhaustion. Yet at 8:00 a.m., she still forced herself to prepare for class, moving through her routine like a shadow trying to remember how to be human.
She told herself she wouldn’t sleep in class.
But she did.
Her head fell against the desk, and the world went quiet.
When she woke, the classroom was gone.
The school had changed.
Not in any way she could explain — it was still familiar, yet hollowed out. The hallways stretched too long, the lights dimmed into a sickly glow, and an unsettling silence pressed against her ears like a held breath. It felt… wrong. Like the building was remembering itself incorrectly.
“Vanessa? Zay?” she called out.
No answer.
Her voice swallowed itself.
Zari walked through the corridors, each step echoing too loudly in the emptiness. She searched for anyone — a flicker of movement, a whisper, anything. But there was no one. Only the sensation that she was being watched by something just out of sight.
Then, behind her, a presence.
She turned sharply.
A girl stood there.
Zari didn’t recognize her at first, though something about her felt strangely familiar — like a memory she couldn’t place. The girl’s expression was calm. Too calm. Unbothered by the strangeness of the place, by Zari’s confusion, by anything at all.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Zari asked quickly. “Where is everyone?”
The girl studied her for a moment before speaking.
“This is what happens,” she said softly, “when you stop being fully awake… or fully alive.”
A pause.
“Make yourself comfortable.”
Zari froze. “What does that mean? Wait—please, just tell me—”
But the girl had already turned away, disappearing down the hall as if she belonged to it more than she belonged to the world itself.
“Wait!” Zari called, stepping forward—
A hand touched her shoulder.
She jolted.
And then everything snapped back.
She was in her classroom.
Her head lifted from the desk as her friends shook her awake, laughing lightly, telling her she had been sleeping for a long time and nearly missed the start of class. The room was normal again. Bright. Loud. Real.
Zari blinked slowly, breath uneven.
Was it a dream?
A hallucination?
A fragment of something she wasn’t supposed to remember?
She didn’t say anything.
Not to Vanessa. Not to Zay.
But as they left the classroom together, walking down the hallway, her steps slowed.
Because there — standing near the corridor wall — was the girl again.
Watching.
“Hi, Zari,” the girl said gently.
Zari stopped cold.
Her friends kept walking, unaware.
“Do you… see her?” Zari whispered.
“No one’s there,” Vanessa replied, confused.
But Zari saw her clearly.
And as students passed through the space where the girl stood without even noticing, Zari realized something that made her stomach tighten:
They couldn’t see her at all.
And when she blinked again—
The girl was gone.
