I set the letter on my desk next to my chipped mug full of pens and the map with all the highways. Outside, a siren wailed and then faded, it had somewhere important to be. I touched the crest on the paper with one finger and felt the indent where it was crushed into shape.

  Sketch showed up faster than made sense unless he’d been halfway out the door already. Mom let him in with a nod and a “Hi, Mikey,” and he said, “Hey, Mrs. Sinclair,” in that polite voice he saved for adults. A second later he was in my doorway, sunglasses perched on his head like always, backpack slung over one shoulder.

  “Door open,” Mom called from the kitchen.

  “It is,” I said, even though I was sitting cross-legged on my bed and Sketch was on the floor, exactly as unthreatening as two humans could be.

  He dropped his bag and pulled out the sketchbook—the new one, the one he’d started for all of this. “All right,” he said, flipping to a clean page. “Monster of the week. Hit me.”

  I took a breath, reaching back to the park. “Okay. Picture a pit bull crossed with an armadillo and a battering ram. Body low and thick, dark grey, like wet asphalt. But the head—” I frowned, trying to get it right. “It had this…shield. Like a plate bolted over its face. With two ridged horns curving forward off it.”

  He sketched a rough box shape, then drew the shield over the front, leaving room for the horns. “Eyes visible?”

  “Not really. The plate covered most of where eyes should be. If it had them, they were tucked under there. The back had a raised ridge. Overlapping plates, like a stegosaurus, but flatter. And this little…hump between the shoulders that flexed when it moved. Like a coiled spring.”

  “Movement?” he asked, already darkening the line of the ridge.

  “Fast. Short bursts. It would lower the shield and just—go. Straight line, no subtlety. It went for this jogger like he’d offended its ancestors, but the guy just spooked like he’d been bumped by nothing.”

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “The same kids with the swords showed up.” I told him how they’d come out of nowhere, how the girl cut its angle, how the boy used his blade more like a traffic sign than a weapon, how they’d herded it into the alley by the pizza place.

  He added two small figures at the edge of the page, just as silhouettes for now, one with a straight sword shape, one with a slightly different grip. “Any smell?” he asked, glancing up.

  “Not like the strawberry one,” I said. “More like…cold metal? Wet dog, but worse. And the birds all left the trees at once right before it came out.”

  He wrote that in small letters in the margin: birds scatter first. Wet dog / metal smell. “And nobody reacted,” he said, more statement than question.

  “People reacted to them,” I said. “The boy was yelling ‘Back!’ and a guy in a Ravens hat yelled at him to put the sword away. That mom with the stroller steered around them like they were weird kids playing LARP. No one looked at the thing. At all.”

  He shaded in the plates on the back, giving them a little overlap. “So, data point three. One at the station. Two in homeroom. Now…whatever this is. All in public places. All completely ignored by everyone except you.”

  “Comforting,” I muttered.

  He snorted softly. “Did you go back to the alley after?”

  “After we finished.” I picked at a loose thread on my knee. “Community service guy wouldn’t let me peel off. Later, I walked past. It looked…normal. Dumpster a little off. Some scuffs on the brick. Could’ve been anything.”

  “No bleach smell?” He glanced up, then added, “Sorry, I know you said don’t harp on it, but it’s a pattern.”

  “Yeah, but fainter,” I said.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He finished the sketch with a few quick strokes, then turned the book so I could see. It was…right. The hulking body, the shield head, the spring-knot of muscle above the shoulders. Even on paper it made my stomach clench.

  “That’s it,” I said quietly. “That’s exactly it.”

  He looked at it a moment longer, chewing his lip. “They’re organized,” he said. “Those kids. Same pair, same blades, same weird…training. This isn’t random.”

  “This isn’t anything,” I said. “We’re two freshmen with a notebook full of monsters. And apparently, now, a prep school problem.”

  He blinked. “A what?”

  I gestured toward my desk. The letter and brochure sat where I’d left them, both perfectly aligned because apparently that was genetic. “That showed up today.”

  He stood, knees cracking, and picked up the letter. His eyes did a quick flicker across the page. Then he went back and read it slower.

  “Northbridge,” he said, and let out a low whistle. “Fancy.”

  “I didn’t apply,” I said. “I didn’t even Google them. Mom called—this Ms. Cho person is real. They want an interview. Full scholarship. Room and board if I want. Bus if I don’t.”

  He blinked twice, then looked from the letter to me. “You’re sure you didn’t, like, fill something out last year? A talent search, or—”

  “My talent is not getting run over by invisible bulldogs,” I said. “That’s not brochure material.”

  He huffed a laugh and then sobered. “Your grades are good. You’re not exactly a secret genius, but you’re solid. And you’re…you. Maybe someone recommended you.” He frowned. “Have you done anything…Northbridge-y? Robotics? Model UN? Did you save the principal’s cat and forget to mention it?”

  “Pretty sure I’d remember the cat thing.” I sank back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. “It says ‘algorithm and teacher recommendations.’ I didn’t ask anyone. Nobody said anything.”

  He picked up the brochure and flipped it open. There was the quad, the pool, the gleaming labs, the kids in blazers. He paused on a spread showing the pool and the fencing team. “Oh. Of course. Olympic pipeline,” he said. “They love that in the marketing.”

  I eyed the swimmers—strong arms, confident smiles. One of the relay photos had a girl with dark hair I couldn’t quite see the face of. “You think they want me to…sweep the pool deck?”

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that either somebody at your school put your name in for something without telling you, or—” He hesitated.

  “Or what?”

  “Or it’s connected.” He glanced at the monster sketch, then at the Northbridge crest. “Weird stuff starts. You see things no one else does. Kids with swords show up and fight things no one else reacts to. Then out of nowhere, the richest school in the area wants to hand you a golden ticket? I know correlation isn’t causation, but come on.”

  “I’m not in their league,” I said. “I don’t have straight As. I don’t fence. I’m not…anything.” My voice cracked more than I wanted it to. “And if they know about the…other stuff, how? Are there cameras? Secret monster SATs?”

  He set the brochure down carefully. “I don’t know,” he said, honest. “I have theories that sound like bad anime plots, but no answers.”

  “Welcome to my life,” I said.

  We sat there a minute, the room suddenly feeling smaller. In the kitchen, a cabinet door thumped. A car rolled by outside, bass line rattling the window just a little.

  “So,” he said finally, “we have: four confirmed monster types, two mystery sword kids, two scrubbed alleys, a letter from the fanciest school in town, and exactly zero sensible explanations.”

  “Don’t forget community service,” I said. “I also have trash bags.”

  “Right,” he said. “Add ‘you now officially cleaning up the city’ to the conspiracy board.”

  I laughed, then surprised myself by not stopping right away. It came out sharper than it should have, but it was either that or scream.

  He closed the sketchbook and rested his hands on it. “You’re going to the interview,” he said. Not a question.

  “I guess,” I said. “Mom’s calling tomorrow. We’ll schedule it. I’ll go. I’ll try not to sound like an idiot. Maybe it’s just…a fluke. Clerical error. Wrong Sinclair.”

  “Diana,” he said, and his voice went that steadier register he saved for when he needed me to hear him. “You don’t get a letter like that by mistake. Someone’s watching. Maybe in a good way. Maybe not. But it’s not random.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Love being watched. Super fun.”

  He gave me a look. “We’ll figure out as much as we can before you go. What they’re known for, who they recruit, what the interview’s like. I’ll help.”

  “You’re not coming,” I said, even though a part of me wanted that. “This isn’t…your thing.”

  “Your thing is my thing,” he said simply. “Even if I’m not in the room, I can still prep you.”

  I looked at the monster sketch, then at the letter, then at him. The questions stacked up in my head like library books, tall and teetering. “I hate this,” I said quietly. “Not—” I waved at the letter. “That. That’s…insane. I hate not knowing. I hate that every answer just makes three more questions.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  We sat there a while longer, trading half-built theories and stupid possibilities—secret gifted program, weird psycho-social experiment, underground sports recruitment—none of which felt right. We didn’t solve anything. The sketchbook stayed closed on the floor, the letter stayed on my desk, and when he finally left, all we really had were sharper questions.