All Chapters of To the Bone: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

Chapter 1: AtlasAtlas wakes up to the sound of his own teeth chattering. It’s not cold. Not really. The air in his room is stale, too warm if anything, the early spring humidity sticking to his sheets. Still, the chattering keeps going, mechanical and involuntary, until he clamps his mouth shut with the palm of his hand.Another dream.Another vision of his skin sloughing off in the mirror, leaving nothing but grinning bone and gristle. Every time, it feels more real. Every time, he wakes up half-expecting to find the sheets soaked in blood and rot. But it’s just sweat.He sits up, legs over the side of the bed, staring at his feet. They’re pale. Too pale. He presses his thumb against his shin until the skin goes white, then flushes back. Still alive. Still human.Downstairs, he hears the creak of floorboards. His father’s awake. Always the first up, the first out the door to work at the factory that’s still somehow operating despite half the town falling to pieces. Atlas listens to

Chapter 3: The Home That Calls You BackThe next time Atlas sees Nova, she’s not at the graveyard. She’s sitting on the church steps, notebook closed for once, her eyes watching nothing in particular. He almost walks past her, but something in her posture—the way her shoulders are set like she’s waiting for a storm—makes him stop."You avoiding the graves today?" he asks.Nova looks up, her mouth curving into half a smile. "Even ghosts need new scenery."He sits a step below her, knees pulled up, chin resting on them. For a moment, neither says anything. The air is heavy, the way it always feels before a rain."I asked my dad," Atlas says quietly. "About why it’s just here. Black Salt. He didn’t have answers. Just warnings.""He’s not wrong to warn you," Nova replies. "People don’t want to know why. They just want to survive.""But you know something," Atlas presses. "Don’t you?"Nova’s eyes flick to his, then back to the horizon. "I know a story. I don’t know if it’s true.""Tell me.

Chapter 5: The People Who StayAtlas kept his promise. The next day, and the day after that, he returned to the graveyard. Sometimes Nova was there first, sometimes he was. The sky changed, the air grew wetter, but the rhythm of it became something they both expected.One afternoon, Atlas found Nova sitting with two other people. He stopped short when he saw them—not because he was jealous, but because Nova had always been alone until now."Atlas," Nova called, waving lazily. "Come meet the dead.""Charming," one of the strangers said, grinning crookedly.Nova gestured to them. "This is Wren and Milo. Wren's the one who looks like she could kill a man with her pinky. Milo's the one who'd help bury the body."Wren waved with two fingers, her nails black and sharp-looking. "Don’t believe everything she says. I’d use my whole hand."Milo, a boy with a mess of dark curls and a permanent half-smile, nodded. "I only help with bodies if snacks are involved."Atlas raised an eyebrow. "We doin

Chapter 7: Flickers of LightThe arcade wasn’t much, not anymore. Once, it had been part of a strip mall that housed a diner, a video rental, and a hair salon. Now the diner was boarded up, the video rental long gone, and the salon windows caked with grime, a ghost town within a ghost town. The arcade, though—Rust Pixel—still clung on, its flickering neon sign barely legible, a stubborn relic of a time when Black Salt still pretended to have a future.It sat crookedly between the husks of old storefronts, its door painted red once but now faded to something closer to rust. A bell above the door rang when Atlas pushed it open, Nova close behind, her eyes wide with quiet curiosity. She hadn’t been back to Black Salt since she was three years old, and everything felt like a shadow of something half-remembered, a half-formed dream she couldn't fully grasp. Memories flashed like faded Polaroids—a bright carousel, her mother’s hand in hers, the distant melody of a calliope—but here, now, ev

The Spaces We KeepThe next morning, no one mentioned Sophie.At school, the halls buzzed with low conversation, but her name wasn’t in it. Teachers called roll as if her absence was normal. The seat she used to fill in homeroom stayed empty, a vacancy no one acknowledged. In Black Salt, people learned to forget the moment forgetting became easier than remembering.But Atlas couldn’t.He sat through his classes with Sophie’s hollow eye socket burned into his mind, the way her skin peeled like wet paper, the way her lips trembled when she tried to speak but couldn’t. He thought about her mother, too—the way she hadn’t screamed, hadn’t asked questions. She had just taken what was left of her daughter and folded her into the house like she was something broken but familiar.At lunch, they all sat together—Wren, Milo, Luce, Nova, and Atlas—but the table was quieter than usual.Nova picked at her sandwich. Wren stared at her nails like she could scrub Sophie’s image from beneath them. Milo