Eleanore, who was affectionately called Erin since coming to Japan, could only stare at Carmen. Her friend, her mind blank as she processed the reality of her best friend being here, alive.

  Alive!

  Behind Carmen, two male figures stepped into the room, their expressions grim but focused. One blonde and the other dark-haired. The blonde boy was a tall, wiry figure.

  Julian Ward. Her mind supplied. One of the second year remedial students.

  A second-generation rich kid. And he was the obvious choice as the source of the fire that had saved them all. His sleeveless arm, now singed at the edges, hung limply by his side, but there was no sign of actual burns on his skin. Despite the exhaustion that clung to him, there was grim satisfaction in his eyes as he surveyed the room. The blast had torn through the Teethers, but it showed how the effort had taken its toll.

  He was leaning against the other boy, who looked familiar.

  The student body vice president, Minoru Takahashi.

  Of course, he'd survive this, too. He was shorter than Julian, but he was able to keep the other boy steady. He was radiating with calm strength. He had a sharp jawline and a composed, almost detached expression, as if he'd seen this kind of chaos before. His dark hair, that was always styled in elegant waves, was now lying limply—a mocking mop of harried hair. His eyes scanned the room with clinical detachment, his gaze flicking over the survivors before returning to Carmen.

  "You should keep your strength, Carmen." Vice President Takahashi said flatly, "We don't know yet if we should rest or run."

  "But, Erin is my friend!" Carmen tried to reason out. Erin looked at Carmen, she could see the shadows under her eyes. Clearly, she was tired. They all were.

  "I'm fine," Erin managed, though her voice didn't sound convincing even to her own ears. She swallowed hard. "Vice-Pres is right. You shouldn't exhaust yourself. Still, thank you, Car."

  "Takahashi, Minoru. Either is fine. It seems like we are stuck together in this sort of school regardless." He said quietly as he helped Julian sit on the floor and lean against the wall. He looks around and his eyes stop at the boy, the student who'd been attacked. He wasn't unconscious. But he wasn't okay either. His gaze was distant, unfocused, and his skin had gone a waxy, unnatural shade. "What's happened to him?"

  She felt it in her chest. That wrongness is humming again. A low, slow throb behind her ribs. Like the air around him was being pulled inside out. Erin glanced back, her brow furrowing with a mix of concern and confusion. "I don't know. He was... okay just a minute ago."

  Her Spidey-sense or radar, or whatever it was called, buzzed softly, a low, pulsing hum in her mind. The room shifted, and her attention snapped back to the student. He was trying to stand up again, his weight leaning heavily against the podium; his eyes still too blank, too distant. As if the boy was there and not at the same time. The confusion was causing her head to throb in concentration. She wanted to figure out what exactly was happening. She doesn't remember having concussion, but the sensation feels like it.

  Her senses could pick up the vague impression of wanting to run away, like a fading echo behind solid walls. There was also that feeling of something breaking out, not like the hatching of an egg. It was more like something trying to wiggle out from a cocoon. And those eyes! Why does nobody else notice? Can't they see those eyes?!

  Then it hit her. They couldn't see, not like she does. It was that feeling. That strange, wrong sensation that had started in her gut earlier. The pulse in the air that had set her radar on edge.

  This wasn't over.

  Not by a long shot.

  The smell of scorched death still lingered. And somehow, it was only she who saw the abyss in those eyes. She hesitated to tell someone. If they knew what would happen then? She was just sick and tired of seeing people's deaths. Just for a while. She just needed to think about it some more. Her senses were not yet screeching of danger. There was still time. She needed to use her remaining strength wisely.

  She had to try and see if she could stretch her senses to look for her family. Maybe map out a route in advance, a way to escape.

  Carmen was talking softly with the Vice President, Takahashi, her hands just above Julian's limp arm. She was healing him. And yet, he still looked composed, even now, in this nightmare that forced them to only think of running and surviving. As if they've done this before. Since when could Carmen heal? And Julian, did he always have that fire? Just like her, with her odd sense of knowing since her childhood years. That made her nervous. They were all just children, and yet look at them. One can heal, another shoots life-ending fire, and that other boy can push away things.

  Was it really that loyal friend? Or did it come from the boys with abyssal eyes? Who else had these abilities? Can she identify them with her radar? Maybe those darkened eyes were a clue?

  So many questions.

  Should she try to figure them out? They were safe right now. No blaring senses of danger.

  No, she will think about that later. For now, she had something more important to do. She had never tried to truly extend her senses, to stretch them out as far as she could. But she had to try. She must.

  Erin stood, her knees aching. Her radar flickered.

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  Far off, across the quad, movement.

  Not a Teether. But not human either.

  The ripple was wrong-too slow, like a thought moving through thick oil.

  Whatever was happening to Kyotaki Hills, to Shinjuu Academy, it wasn't just monsters. Something older had stirred beneath the surface.

  Something that knew her.

  Her skin prickled.

  Was it her family's blood? Her eyes? The strange sharpness she felt every time she took off her glasses? Maybe. Maybe this apocalypse wasn't random. Maybe it had called to her.

  And maybe the monsters weren't the only ones hunting.

  Then her senses snapped back carrying back a wave of exhaustion. Like an overstretched rubber band, the force of it snapping back caused her to step back, slumping against the wall. Grimacing at the wince of pain at the tender skin on her back, she flinched at the pressure. Gingerly, she slid down as softly as she could. She had to catch her weight against the cold tile, her knees shaking in their feeble attempt to keep her body steady.

  Taking a deep breath, she needed to reat. Just for a short while. She would try again, once she got her second wind. She must. Her eyes closed, a frown caught between her eyebrows.

  She must have dozed off. When she opened her eyes again, she caught sight of other students clearing debris from the shattered barricade, taking command from Takahashi. There were now eighteen of them. The fire-blasted corpses of the Teethers had been dragged to a far corner, covered with whatever cloth they could find. No one wanted to look at them. No one wanted to admit they'd come so close to dying.

  But Eleanore could feel it. Those Teethers were definitely dead, but there was something else on their bodies. Like a mark, the grim stench of death.

  And, the world outside hadn't gone quiet. Somehow, she could hear odd things that shouldn’t even be possible in Kiyotaki Hills. Their campus was located in Kyoto, not Tokyo. It shouldn’t be possible to hear the sounds of an industrial city. Still, that odd distant city groaned with strange echoes-faint screeches like glass grinding against metal, echoes of sirens that wailed and cut off too quickly, and that awful silence between them that pressed down like an invisible weight.

  Her fingers clenched around the cracked lens of her glasses, her pulse still erratic. A tiny shard of glass had cut her palm when she landed. She hadn't noticed until now.

  "Erin," Carmen murmured, crouching beside her again. "You with me?"

  She nodded slowly, wiping at her cheek with the edge of her sleeve. Her senses now were oddly tired, but still a faint hymn beneath her veins. She rubbed at the scar on her palm, staring through the remains of a lecture hall window. She needed to try again.

  The view of the campus, once serene, was now warped and broken. Craters split through the pavement. Buildings had cracked open like eggs. The skyline beyond was tinted red, as if painting fire over the eastern quad.

  The school had become a graveyard. And they were the ones left behind to dig through whatever remained. How will they survive? It has only been two days. Or was it? Time seemed to seize meaning in this place.

  Even after the Teethers were dead, after the heat faded and the smoke cleared, something else lingered in the air-murmurings of expectation. As if the students and the building itself were waiting for something.

  Erin pressed her back on the wall near the damaged windows. It didn't hurt anymore, she thought absently. Carmen must have healed her again when she was resting.

  Now slumped more comfortably and somewhat alone at the back of the room, she closed her eyes and tried again to expand her senses, her thoughts unraveling.

  Kael.

  Mom.

  She hadn't seen them since it began.

  That first day, they'd all been on the campus. An arrangement was made to complete pending tasks before they would meet up at the campus clinic where her mother worked as a nurse. She was just doing one last errand to the Faculty building before meeting up with her mother and her brother, Kael. Just two hours left before her mother's working hours finally ended for the summer break. Just two hours away from their summer vacation on the beach in Okinawa.

  But that errand and two hours was all it took to be trapped here. Just one more stupid errand to finish, and the nightmare began. The sky fractured, and a few trickles of crimson-stained raindrops brought forth hell. That was all it took for the world around them to collapse.

  She'd tried calling them-of course she had. Dozens of times. No signal. No internet. No answer.

  A hundred theories played out in her head on a loop. Maybe they were safe in a shelter. Maybe her mom got them out before the school was swallowed in this dimension. Everyone of them thought the same. They were all still inside the school, but not, at the same time. Maybe Kael used that too-smart-for-his-own-good brain to hide them somewhere clever.

  Or maybe-

  No.

  She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood.

  That thought didn't help. That fear didn't help.

  What she needed now was clarity. Focus. She had something. That spider-sense-or whatever it was-it worked. It had kept her alive. Guided her when everything else had fallen apart.

  She closed her eyes, breathing shallowly through her nose. Letting the muffled sounds of the survivors blur into background noise.

  And reached.

  At first, there was nothing. Just darkness and the static-snow of her panicked mind.

  Then-

  A flicker.

  Like sonar bouncing off the world. Not sight. Not sound. Just feeling.

  Outward. Down the hallway. Past the crumbling lockers and stairwells. Beyond the scorched lawn. Like echoes of bones and blood.

  She cast her thoughts wider, pushing past the boundaries of what her mind insisted was normal.

  There were pulses. Some bright. Some hollow.

  The survivors were easy-burning fragments of will. Afraid. Fragile.

  The Teether remnants were still there, even in death, like rotting signal towers giving off the wrong kind of pressure. Disgust. Hatred. Hunger. Death.

  But there! Just a little farther off.

  Two presences.

  Small. Warm. Familiar.

  Kael.

  And her mother.

  Alive?

  The flicker was faint. Unstable. But it was them-or something trying to be them.

  She gasped and struggled to stand, and reached towards the window, heart slamming against her ribs. Somehow, her senses could clearly sense Kael. But the other presence, it was familiar like her mother but something was shrouding her. It was unnatural to this realm—as if she was not supposed to be here but something was tethering her like a suit to camouflage her to this realm.

  "Erin?" Carmen called from the corner.

  Erin blurted out. "They're here. They're alive!"

  Carmen blinked. "Who—?"

  "My brother and my mom. They're still out there."

  "How do you-?"

  "I just do."

  There was no time to explain. No time to wait.

  She knew it. The same way she'd known which hallway to run through to avoid the monsters. The same way she'd led those people here without knowing how.

  Like there was a second skin beneath her own, listening to the world's silent language.

  And now it whispered back.

  She had to find them. They came to this place hopeful for new beginnings together. Whatever happens, they will live through this all together. Her determination and will caused a flash in her amethyst eyes.

  Her mind was already drifting back-before the screams, before the blood, before the sky split. Back to the time when she just completed her primary education in England at age ten, despite the unpleasantness of being the youngest in her year.

  Two years ago, back when she received an odd letter.

  Oh, it wasn't a magical letter like a certain little boy to a school of magic. There were no post owls or grand waving. It was just a letter. An expensive-looking letter with a wax seal, thick vellum, and elegant script.

  In a moment of hysterical realization, she thought that it must have been truly magic after all. She would have preferred to go to a magic school rather than be trapped in this forsaken nightmare, with unknown monsters and eerily broken red skies.