Thornwood High

The first thing Ren Okafor learned about Thornwood High was that nobody looked you in the eye in the hallway between classes — not because they were rude, but because they were listening. She didn't understand that yet. All she knew, on her first Monday, was that the school smelled like pine floor cleaner and something underneath it, something wilder, like the woods had crept in through the vents overnight and nobody had bothered to air it out. "You're the new girl." A boy fell into step beside her without asking. Tall, dark-haired, moving like he was bored by his own body. "Locker 214?" "How did you know that?" "Lucky guess." He smiled, and there was something too sharp about his canines for it to be entirely comfortable. "I'm Silas. Word of advice — don't walk through the east courtyard after last bell. Not till you know people." "Is that a threat?" "It's a kindness." He was already walking away, backwards, hands in his pockets. "You'll figure out why." Ren figured out why three days later, when she stayed late for yearbook committee and cut through the east courtyard because the front doors were propped shut for cleaning. The moon was just a sliver, barely a fingernail clipping in the sky, and that was the only reason she survived what she saw. A shape at the tree line. Too big for a dog. Too deliberate for an animal, the way it turned its head when a car alarm went off three streets away, like it was cataloguing the sound and deciding whether to care. She didn't scream. She would think about that later — why her body chose silence over noise, chose stillness over running. Some instinct older than her sat up very straight inside her chest and said: do not be prey right now. The shape looked at her. Amber eyes, catching the security light like coins. Then Silas stepped out of the tree line in human shape, shirt inside out, hair full of leaves, and said, "You really don't listen to advice, do you."