LOGINRydan’s POVVivian stood in the parlour doorway breathing like she had run a distance significantly longer than one flight of stairs, her face carrying the specific expression of someone who has encountered something and is still inside their first reaction to it.I was on my feet before the question had fully formed.“What happened?”She didn’t answer immediately. She was holding something behind her back with both hands in the way of someone who has picked up an object and then immediately regretted picking it up but hasn’t yet decided to put it down.“Vivian.” Franklin was up beside me. “What is that?”She hesitated. Then she brought it around from behind her.It was a toy.A stuffed animal of some kind, the sort that had been designed to be alarming in the way that a particular generation of horror-adjacent children’s toys had been designed… exaggerated features, button eyes that caught the light in a specific way, a mouth stitched into an expression that sat ambiguously between f
Chapter 75Franklin’s POVI walked through the door and found two people looking at me like I had come back from somewhere significantly further than the ground floor of a building.Vivian’s face had the specific quality of someone who has been through something and is still inside the aftermath of it… her cheek was marked, her posture was the posture of a person held together by will rather than ease. Rydan was beside her and the look on his face when he saw me was the look he reserved for moments when something had genuinely frightened him and he was converting the fright into something more actionable.“Where were you?” Vivian said.“Outside,” I said. “I saw movement through the window while you two were gone and went to check. There was nothing there.” I looked between them. “Why are you both looking at me like that?”Rydan crossed the corridor in four steps and had me against the wall before the sentence had finished.Not hurting me. Just the specific hold of someone who needs to
Vivian’s POVThe grip on my hair was the kind that communicated very clearly that the person applying it had no concern about whether it hurt, which it did, considerably.I grabbed at his wrist and got nowhere. His hands were the size of things that shouldn’t have belonged to a person, wide and certain, and pulling against them produced nothing except more pain from the angle the pulling created.He said something I didn’t catch and then the grip released and I went sideways and the floor came up and I hit it with my shoulder and the side of my face in the same moment that the impact from the slap arrived, which meant my system was receiving too much information at once and defaulted to the floor and staying there for a second while it sorted itself out.Rydan was there before I had decided to get up.He hit the man from the side and the force of it moved both of them across the narrow ground floor corridor and into the wall, and the wall registered the impact in the plaster. They cam
Vivian’s POVThe laughing was the worst part.Not the rope around my wrists, not the chair, not the state of my flat which I had watched them turn inside out while I sat tied to the chair and told myself that staying calm was the useful thing and mostly failed at staying calm. The laughing was the worst part because it communicated something that the rest of it only implied… that whoever this was had no concern about being interrupted, no anxiety about time, no sense that what they were doing required any particular hurry.They were comfortable.I was not comfortable.I had been tied to the chair for what felt like an hour and had probably been less than that, and the rope was the kind that responded to pulling by getting more certain of itself, and the man who had done the tying was currently standing at the far side of the room looking at the things he had pulled from my shelves with the browsing attention of someone at a market.I screamed again.He laughed again.I screamed louder
Rydan’s POVI called her immediately.The line rang twice and then produced nothing… not voicemail, not a busy signal, not the standard recorded message of a number that couldn’t be reached. Just the absence of connection, the particular dead quality of a call that hadn’t been declined but hadn’t been answered either.I tried again. The same nothing.Franklin was sitting up when I came back to where he was on the floor. He was still moving with the careful quality of someone whose body had been through something and was filing a full report, but his eyes were clear and he was present in the way that mattered.I showed him the screen. He read the message and then looked at me.“We have to go,” he said.“You need to rest.”“Rydan.” He put his hand on the floor and pushed himself up slowly, accepting the assistance of the wall without acknowledging it. “We have to go.”I looked at him standing there, pale and not fully steady, with the specific determination on his face of someone who ha
Rydan’s POVI got my hands on him.Not forcefully… not yet. I reached for his wrists first, which was the point of contact that gave me the most control without requiring me to hurt him, and I held them and pulled him back from me and the blood from my cheek was warm and running and I ignored it because it was the least important thing happening in the room.Franklin’s face was the face of something that was using his face. The black of his eyes, the absence of recognition, the specific blankness of a person whose interior has been displaced by something else… I had spent enough time looking at him to know every register of his expression, and this was none of them.He came at me again.I stepped aside and got behind him and wrapped my arms around him, both arms, crossing at his chest and holding with everything I had, which was enough to contain him against the wall with his back to me and his face toward the room. He fought it. The strength in him was not his usual strength… it was
Calen’s POV“Your condition for staying enrolled here,” Principal Morrison said, folding his hands on his desk, “is that you stay away from Karl.”The words hit me like a physical blow.“Stay away from him?” I repeated stupidly.“Yes. Whatever… involvement you have with him ends now. No more privat
Franklin’s POVMy legs made the decision before my brain did.One second I was standing in the doorway of the changing room, and the next I was turning, moving fast, trying to put as much distance between myself and what I had just seen as my legs would allow. The image was already burned behind my
Calen’s POVThe professor was talking about coastal erosion patterns, drawing diagrams on the board with a yellow chalk he always used, and I hadn’t heard a single word he’d said in the last twenty minutes.My notebook sat open in front of me, blank except for the date I’d written at the top out of
Calen’s POVThe principal stood in the doorway.For a long, frozen moment, nobody moved. My brain screamed at me to do something… pull away from Karl, fix my clothes, say something… but my body refused to cooperate. I was trapped between Karl and the wall, his hand still pressed against me, mine st







