Chapter 4

Calla's POV

A thick fog hangs around the old arts building like it never left.

The chain-link fence has a rusted NO ENTRY sign hanging off it, smeared with dark handprints.

I slice through the fence with the machete and squeeze through.

The temperature drops the second I step inside. Cold crawls up from the ground and doesn't stop.

My flashlight can barely cut through more than a few feet of fog.

I take the stairs up. Third floor. The old music room. According to the guard's journal, that's where Emerson Shade used to spend most of his time.

I'm rounding the second-floor landing when I hear it. Wet, rhythmic chewing. And underneath it, a voice, small and desperate.

"Please... just let me go... I'll do anything..."

Lacey.

She actually made it out of that massacre. And she ended up here.

I move without a sound and duck behind a crumbling plaster bust near the wall, just far enough to see.

At the end of the hallway, Lacey is on her knees in front of a guy in a clean school uniform, his back to her. He looks tall, lean, completely normal from behind. Like any other student.

Lacey's clearly decided he's some kind of NPC she can charm her way through. Same moves she's been running her whole life. She even tugs her already-torn collar lower, skin pale in the dim light.

"I'm so cold," she says, voice soft and practiced. "Can you hold me?"

The guy turns around.

The top half of his face has been stripped clean. No skin, just raw red muscle and two eyes sitting exposed in their sockets, catching the light wrong.

"Hold you?" His voice sounds like a nail dragged across glass. "Sure." He tilts his head. "Your skin looks so smooth."

Lacey screams and spins to run.

His arm shoots out and catches her by the throat, lifting her completely off the ground.

"No, no, please—" Her legs kick at nothing.

The tearing sound that follows makes my teeth ache.

He peels her. One hand, starting at the back of her neck, pulling down. The blood comes fast. Lacey doesn't die right away. Her throat makes a wet, whistling sound, eyes fixed on her own skin peeling away in his fist.

I watch and feel nothing.

Back in the real world, Lacey and a few of her friends cornered me in the locker room, locked the door, stripped me down, and filmed it.

Now someone's doing the same to her.

Karma's a funny thing.

【System Announcement: Player Lacey Voss has died.】

【Players currently alive: 25. Prize pool updated to: $21,000,000.】

He walks away humming something tuneless, her skin folded over one arm like he's carrying laundry.

I wait until he's gone, then step out from behind the bust, step over what's left of Lacey, and keep climbing.

The third-floor hallway is strange. Clean. No blood, no dust. The air even carries a faint smell, cold and almost sweet, like the first day of winter.

The music room is at the end.

The door is slightly open.

I tighten my grip on the machete and push it open.

No lights. Moonlight pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows and falls across a black grand piano sitting in the center of the room.

Then the midnight bell starts ringing somewhere outside. Twelve slow strikes spreading across the campus.

With each one, the room gets colder. My breath starts showing.

Blood seeps up through the gaps between the piano keys, dripping onto the floor in a slow, steady rhythm.

Someone is sitting at the piano. I don't know when he got there.

Dark uniform, perfectly fitted. Still posture. Long pale fingers moving across the blood-wet keys, pulling out something slow and strange and deeply wrong.

Every muscle in my body locks up at once.

Whatever he is, nothing I've run into tonight comes close.

The song ends.

He stops playing and turns his head.

The face is striking in a way that doesn't sit right. Skin too pale, almost translucent. Eyes dark and bottomless. The corners rimmed with a thin line of red that looks less like an injury and more like something that just grew there.

He looks at me and smiles. Unhurried. Like he already knows exactly how this ends.

"A little mouse that wandered into the wrong room."

His voice is low and smooth and makes something in my chest go very still.

"How do you want to die?"