The police station smelled like burnt coffee and bleach.
Leah sat in an interview room, grey walls, metal table, two chairs bolted to the floor, and waited.
She'd been waiting for forty-three minutes.
Not in handcuffs. Not under arrest. But the door was locked from the outside, and there was a camera in the corner with a blinking red light that hadn't stopped watching her since they'd brought her in.
Her hands were still covered in ash.
She'd tried washing them in the bathroom they'd let her use. Soap, hot water, scrubbing until her skin turned red. The ash had swirled under the stream, reformed, and settled back into place like it had never moved.
Officer Park had watched through the cracked door, face unreadable.
Now Leah sat alone, staring at her palms.
The ash was darker than before. Thicker. Almost like a stain now, spreading slowly up her wrists in thin tendrils.
She pressed her thumb against her opposite palm.
The ash pulsed.
Just once. A faint vibration that traveled up her arm and settled behind her eyes.
And in that pulse, she felt something:
Three more. Soon.
Leah closed her hands into fists.
Detective Harrison entered at the forty-seven-minute mark, carrying a folder and a styrofoam cup of coffee that looked like it had been sitting for hours.
He set both on the table, pulled out the chair across from Leah, and sat heavily.
For a long moment, he just looked at her.
She looked back.
"You're seventeen," he said finally.
"Yes."
"And your name is Leah Stone."
"Yes."
"And you live at 447 Maple Drive with your mother, Catherine Stone."
"Yes."
Harrison opened the folder. Inside were printouts, her school records, medical history, a copy of the list from her phone that someone had already screenshotted and printed.
"You withdrew from Riverside High two years ago," he said, reading. "Homeschooled since. No disciplinary record. No criminal history. Straight A's before you left." He looked up.
"Why'd you leave school?"
"People kept dying."
Harrison's jaw tightened. "Explain that."
"My lab partner in chemistry collapsed during class. Aneurysm. He'd sat next to me for three weeks." Leah's voice was flat, clinical. "A girl on the bus died in a car accident two days after we shared a seat. The janitor who worked the night shift had a heart attack after I stayed late one evening."
"Coincidence."
"That's what everyone said."
"What do you say?"
Leah held up her hands, showed him the ash.
Harrison stared at it. Swallowed.
"That wasn't there when we brought you in."
"Yes it was. You just couldn't see it yet."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're not ready to see what I am."
Harrison set down his pen. Leaned back. "Okay. Let's say, hypothetically, I believe you. That you have some kind of... connection to these deaths. How does it work?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I feel it before it happens. Pressure in my head. Metallic taste. My hands start shaking. Then, within seventy-two hours, someone who was near me dies."
"And you've documented forty-three deaths."
"Forty-six now."
Harrison's eyes narrowed. "The three in the square."
"And Officer Park."
Silence.
Harrison's expression went very still. "What about Officer Park?"
"She touched the tape line. She got close to me. She's marked."
"That's–" Harrison stood abruptly, chair scraping. "That's not possible."
"Check on her," Leah said quietly. "See if she's feeling okay."
Harrison stared at her for three long seconds.
Then he left the room without another word.
Leah was alone for six minutes.
She counted them.
Used the time to study the ash on her hands more carefully.
It wasn't random. There was a pattern, thin lines that branched and converged, almost like circuitry or neural pathways. When she tilted her hands, the lines seemed to shift, rearranging themselves into new configurations.
Like they were writing something.
Like they were calculating.
She thought about the bodies in the square. About how they'd fallen in a triangle. About the ash radiating outward in perfect geometric patterns.
This wasn't chaos.
This was design.
The door opened.
Harrison came back in, followed by a woman Leah didn't recognize. Fifty-something, sharp suit, federal agent written all over her.
"Miss Stone," the woman said, not sitting. "I'm Special Agent Rebecca Marsh, FBI. We need to talk about what's happening in your town."
Leah looked at Harrison. "Where's Officer Park?"
His face was grey. "She... collapsed. Twenty minutes ago. They're taking her to the hospital now."
"She'll be dead in three days," Leah said. "Unless–"
"Unless what?" Marsh interrupted.
Leah looked at the agent. "Unless you figure out how to remove the mark. And you won't. No one has."
Marsh pulled out the chair Harrison had vacated, sat down with deliberate calm. "Let's start from the beginning. You claim you can predict deaths."
"I don't predict them. I mark them."
"Explain the difference."
"Prediction implies possibility. Multiple futures. The mark is..." Leah searched for the right word. "...inevitable. Once someone is marked, they die. No exceptions."
"How many people have you marked?"
"I don't mark them. Something marks them through me."
"What something?"
Leah looked down at her hands. At the ash spreading slowly up her wrists.
"I don't know what it is," she said quietly. "But it's old. Older than words. And it's been watching us for a very long time."
Marsh and Harrison exchanged a glance.
"Miss Stone," Marsh said carefully. "Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness? Schizophrenia, perhaps? Dissociative disorder?"
Leah almost smiled. "You think I'm crazy."
"I think you're a traumatized teenager who's constructed an elaborate narrative to explain a series of coincidences–"
The lights flickered.
Once. Twice.
Then went out completely.
Emergency lighting kicked in, bathing the room in dim red.
And through the walls, muffled but unmistakable, came the sound of screaming.
Marsh was on her feet instantly, hand going to her sidearm. Harrison moved to the door, yanked it open.
The hallway beyond was chaos.
Officers running. Radios crackling. Someone shouting about the holding cells.
"What's happening?" Marsh demanded.
A young officer ran past, face white. "They're all dead, everyone we brought in tonight, they just–"
He didn't finish.
Just kept running.
Harrison turned back to look at Leah.
She was still sitting at the table, hands folded, expression calm.
"How many people did you arrest tonight?" she asked quietly.
Harrison's voice came out hoarse. "Seven. Bar fight, drunk and disorderly, one domestic."
"Were any of them in the square earlier? Or near the tape line?"
Harrison didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
Marsh stepped toward Leah, face hard. "If you had anything to do with this–"
"I didn't kill them," Leah said. "I just told you they were going to die. You didn't believe me."
"This is terrorism. Mass murder. Whatever you're doing–"
"I'm not doing anything!" Leah's voice cracked, the first real emotion breaking through. "I'm just the marker. The warning. I show up, and death follows. I don't choose it. I don't control it. I'm just–"
She stopped.
Looked down at her hands.
The ash was moving now. Actively crawling across her skin, forming words, dissolving, reforming.
And in her head, clear as a voice but not quite a voice, she heard:
Three more. Now.
Leah stood.
Both agents moved back instinctively.
"You need to evacuate the building," Leah said.
"What?" Harrison demanded.
"Everyone. Right now. Get them out."
"We're not–"
"THREE MORE!" Leah shouted. "It's not done. It's never done. It marks in groups, in patterns, and this pattern isn't complete yet. So either you evacuate, or you watch three more people die in the next–"
The building shook.
Not violently. Just a tremor, like something enormous had shifted its weight.
The emergency lights flickered.
And somewhere above them, on the second floor, maybe, or the third, something heavy hit the ground with a wet, bone-cracking thud.
Then another.
Then a third.
Silence.
Harrison ran for the stairs.
Marsh stayed, gun half-drawn, staring at Leah like she was something that had crawled out of a nightmare.
"What are you?" she whispered.
Leah looked at her hands. At the ash now covering both arms up to her elbows, dark and spreading like infection, like roots, like veins carrying something that wasn't quite blood.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "But I'm starting to think I've always been this."
The bodies on the second floor were three administrative staff.
No trauma. No wounds.
Just dead, with ash thumbprints on their foreheads.
The station was evacuated within ten minutes.
Ambulances arrived. Coroner vans. More federal agents.
And through it all, Leah sat on the curb outside, still in the red emergency light spilling from the building's entrance, watching the chaos unfold with the detached calm of someone watching a documentary.
Harrison approached her slowly, like she might detonate.
"We're taking you into federal custody," he said. "They're sending a specialist team.
People who deal with... unusual situations."
Leah didn't look at him. "It won't help."
"Maybe. But we have to try."
"You should go home, Detective. Kiss your wife. Hug your kids. While you still can."
Harrison's breath caught. "What does that mean?"
Leah finally looked at him. "You interviewed me for twenty-three minutes. You touched the folder that touched my phone. You breathed the same air."
His face went pale. "I'm marked."
"Probably."
"How long?"
"I don't know. Hours. Days. It's moving faster now."
Harrison stood there, swaying slightly, looking like a man who'd just been diagnosed with a terminal illness and given no time to process it.
"Is there any way to stop it?" he asked quietly.
Leah wanted to lie. Wanted to give him hope.
But she'd tried lying to herself for three years, and it hadn't changed anything.
"No," she said. "Once you're marked, you're already dead. You just don't know it yet."
They came for her at dawn.
Not police. Not FBI.
Something else.
Black SUVs with no plates. Men in tactical gear with no insignias. A woman in a lab coat who introduced herself as Dr. Ogun and spoke to Leah like she was a person, not a threat.
"We're taking you somewhere safe," Dr. Ogun said.
"Safe for who?" Leah asked.
"Everyone."
They loaded her into the middle vehicle, hands zip-tied in front of her, not because she'd resisted, but because protocol demanded it.
As they pulled away from the station, Leah looked back through the tinted window.
Officer Park was being loaded into an ambulance, unconscious.
Detective Harrison stood on the curb, watching the convoy leave, one hand pressed to his chest like he was checking if his heart was still beating.
And above the station, the sky had started to bruise again, that same sick purple color from the night the first bodies fell.
Leah closed her eyes.
Counted her breaths.
Waited for whatever came next.
Because she knew, with absolute certainty, that this was only the beginning.
The marks were spreading.
The pattern was expanding.
And somewhere in the distance, somewhere beyond words or understanding, something vast and patient had finally turned its full attention toward her.
Not as a threat.
As recognition.
Like it had been waiting for her to notice it back.
[To be continued in chapter 4]