Chapter 1 Lights Out

Margo's POV

The speakers died first.

One second the gym was shaking with bass, three hundred kids screaming the last chorus of the night, and the next second, nothing. Just silence dropping on the room like a lid closing over a jar.

I was already moving before I understood why. My hands went straight for the mixing board, flipping switches, checking cables, doing the thing I always do when something breaks: fix it before anyone notices it broke.

Nothing lit up. No red light. No hum under my fingers.

"Power's out," someone yelled from the floor, and then the emergency lights kicked on, dim and orange, and three hundred kids in prom dresses and rented tuxes turned into three hundred shadows all screaming at once, laughing, some of them already pulling out phones to record it like it was part of the show.

I stayed in the booth.

That's the thing about me. When the room panics, I get very still. It's not bravery. It's the opposite, actually; it's easier to disappear into a corner than to be one more person making noise. I've been disappearing into corners since sixth grade. I'm good at it.

Through the little window in the booth I watched teachers herding everyone toward the exits, flashlights bobbing, Mr. Reyes yelling that the backup generator would kick on "any minute now," which is the kind of thing adults say when they have no idea what's actually happening.

I should have gone with the crowd. That would have been the smart thing.

Instead I turned back to my board, because somewhere under all those dead switches was four thousand dollars of school equipment, and if it fried because of a power surge, I was the one who signed it out tonight. My name. My scholarship. My one job was to run the sound and not break anything, and if I walked away and something got ruined, that would land on me, not on the electric company.

So I stayed. Alone. In a booth the size of a closet, at the back of a gym that was emptying behind me like water going down a drain.

The last voices faded into the hallway. A door banged shut somewhere far off. Then it was just me, the dark, and the small red glow of the exit sign over the gym doors, way across the room, too far to help me see anything close up.

I felt for my phone in my bag. My fingers found the strap instead. Then the outside pocket, the zipper, and nothing. No phone.

I must have left it on the shelf under the board when I was checking cables. I turned around to find it, hands out in front of me like I was underwater, and that's when I heard it.

Footsteps.

Not from the hallway. From inside the gym. Slow, even, like someone who wasn't in a hurry at all, which was somehow worse than if they'd been running.

"Hello?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Is someone,"

The footsteps stopped.

I told myself it was a teacher. Had to be a teacher, checking the room was empty, doing a final sweep before locking up. That's what teachers do. That's what made sense.

But nobody answered me. And teachers answer when you say hello. Teachers say your name, tell you to head to the buses, ask if you need a ride. They don't just stand there in the dark saying nothing.

I reached for the edge of the soundboard to steady myself, and my fingers were shaking, actually shaking, which made me furious at myself because it was probably nothing; it was probably Mr. Halloway coming to check the equipment, and here I was acting like the girl in every dumb slasher movie who wanders toward the noise instead of the exit.

Except I wasn't wandering toward it. I was frozen in place, back against the board, and it was wandering toward me.

"This isn't funny," I said, louder this time, the way you talk when you're trying to convince yourself you're not scared. "If this is some prom prank thing, I swear,"

A hand closed around my wrist.

Not a bump. Not an accident in the dark. A grip, firm and fast, fingers wrapping all the way around my arm before I could even pull back, and I sucked in a breath to scream, and nothing came out; my whole body just locked up the way it does in nightmares, the ones where you open your mouth and there's no sound at all.

Whoever it was didn't say anything either. Not at first. They just held on, tight enough that I could feel my pulse thudding right against their fingers, and for one long, awful second I thought: this is it, this is the part where something happens to me and nobody even knows I'm still in this building.

Then, right up close to my ear, quiet enough that I felt the breath of it more than I heard it, a voice said my name.

Not "hey." Not "who's there." My actual name, said slow, said like they'd been waiting a long time to say it, and something about the way they said it made my stomach drop straight through the floor, because I didn't recognize the voice at all.

"Margo."

I yanked back so hard I knocked my hip into the board, and every dead switch under my hand lit up at once, the power surging back on, the gym lights flooding white, the speakers shrieking a half-second of feedback so loud I flinched and slapped my hands over my ears.

By the time my eyes adjusted, blinking against the sudden brightness, the hand was gone.

So was whoever it belonged to.

I was standing alone in the booth, wrist still stinging where fingers had dug into it, staring at an empty gym full of nothing but crepe paper streamers and one abandoned high heel by the punch table, and no sign, none at all, that anyone had ever been standing close enough to touch me.