The defiant little Blanche didn't dance in the end. Instead, she offered Ethan Gray a series of sharp, narrow-eyed glares—the kind of look a tiny, cornered predator gives a trespasser—and successfully "scared" him away. Ethan retreated to his third-floor sanctuary, chuckling to himself at the sheer audacity of the six-year-old.
As the clock struck 10:00 PM, the rhythmic cycle of The Midnight Academy shifted. The heavy iron gates creaked open more frequently. The evening was no longer about play; it was about the tired, weary reunion of the city's night-shift workers and their children.
Parents, their faces etched with the grime of the production lines or the pale exhaustion of office overtime, began to arrive. Some children were already dead to the world, buried deep in their Cotton thro
