The standard academic chatter—the shuffling of heavy boots, the squeak of sneakers on terrazzo, the distant drone of the professors—had completely vanished. The clock on the wall above the stairwell read 11:45 in the morning obviously. The lecture had ended fifteen minutes ago.
A cold spike of adrenaline hit her stomach as she threw open the rear doors of the main auditorium.
The massive room was empty. The digital projector had been turned off, leaving the white screen at the front of the hall dark and blank like an unblinking eye. Rows of wooden desks rose up to the ceiling, completely clear of backpacks or notebooks.
But there, in the third row, sitting exactly where she had left it, was her canvas tote bag.
She ran down the steps, her boots making a loud, hollow against the wood. She snatched the bag by its strap, her fingers instantly checking the zipper.
It was half-open, her notebooks shifted slightly to the left, but everything seemed intact. Then she saw it.
A bright yellow legal slip was taped directly across the main handle. The handwriting was thick, hurried, and unmistakably the professor's black felt-tip marker:
> "Miss Fiona—"
> "Your sudden exit was quite concerning, and your performance during the lecture suggests a severe lack of rest. Given the recent administrative adjustments and the county curfew, I highly recommend you take a few days off from class to resolve this baseline exhaustion. Do not return to the seminar until you have cleared your medical clearance with the department head."
>
Fiona's hand dropped. A few days off was no different from they were pushing her out of the room. She didn't know if Ryan had stayed behind to suggest it or if her own panic had simply been too loud to ignore, but the result was the same: she was being isolated from the grid.
She didn't wait and shoved the slip into her cardigan pocket, threw the strap over her shoulder, and walked out of the complex, her head down as she crossed the empty concrete plaza toward the North Quad dormitories.
The dormitory room was small, smelling of old pine floorboards and the stale tea she'd left on the window sill three days ago. Fiona locked the heavy deadbolt behind her, her back sliding down the wood until she was sitting flat on the linoleum floor.
The grey afternoon light filtered through the small, high window, casting a long, rectangular shadow across her unmade bed.
She didn't take off her coat.
She reached deep into the false bottom of her canvas bag, past the medical articles, past the student id cards, until her fingers brushed the cold, unyielding plastic of an old-model telephone—a heavy, matte-black cellular unit with a thick rubber antenna and a mechanical keypad that hadn't been supported by commercial networks since the late nineties.
It was an unlinked device, its internal components modified with three separate copper wire coils wrapped around the battery housing to pick up low-frequency ground waves rather than satellite relays.
She punched in a eleven-digit sequence, her thumb pressing each softly.
It hummed—a low, rhythmic static that sounded like the tide pulling back over wet stones. Then, with a pop, the connection cleared.
"¿Fiona?"
The voice that answered was smooth, mixed with rolled r's of the northern castilian dialect. It was a feminine voice, young with tiredness that didn't belong to someone in her early twenties.
"Yeah. It's me," Fiona said, her voice dropping into a ragged whisper as she pulled her knees tightly against her chest.
"Ah, mi hermana," the girl on the other side said, a faint, small chuckle vibrating through the low-frequency static.
"Look at you, calling through the ground line. How is the university? How is life among the vivos?
You're what... twenty-two now? We are nearly the same age group, Fiona, but sometimes I think you went to Ohio just to see how normal people spend their winters."
Fiona closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the locked door. "Don't start, Kaith. Please. Just... tell me how much home is right now, the salt marshes are still grey."
"They are grey," Kaith replied, her Spanish shifting smoothly into English as she always did when she sensed Fiona's rhythm slowing down.
"The tide is high in San Sebastián. The old bones beneath the chapel haven't moved an inch since the winter solstice. We are still cleaning the oil lamps, Fiona. We are doing the usual work. But you... tú no estás bien. Why does your voice sound like you've been breathing smoke? You sound like you've been smoking pot."
Fiona squeezed her eyes shut, the rough canvas of her bag digging into her hip.
"Something is wrong with everything here, Kaith. Ever since the incident in the North Quad woods two weeks ago, the whole campus feels like an open grave. Especially the ...I suspect there are vampires here."
"The students?" Kaith's tone raised instantly, the casual warmth dropping away into seriousness.
"Fiona, Ohio have a strict monitor on vampires than the have on werewolves. ¿Qué está pasando?"
" Okay okay okay, but ...there's a guy in my history seminar," Fiona said, her breath hitching as she spoke his name aloud for the first time.
"Ryan. He sat exactly one seat to my left today obviously looks like a standard varsity athlete. Broad shoulders, dark hair tucked under a commercial baseball cap, always wearing that stupid green university jacket with the leather sleeves."
"And?" Kaith asked, her voice flat on the other end of the line.
"And whenever I got within three feet of him, the air turns to iron," Fiona hissed, her fingers twisting the wool of her cardigan until her knuckles went white.
"I don't hear his breathing or his pulse. Inside my ears, every time he moves his hand, every time his pencil touches the paper, I hear the sound of metal clanking against each other, the sound feels very agonizing."