E Z R A

I shouldn’t be shaking. I tell myself that three times before my hands even move. It doesn’t help. The frost word is still burned behind my eyes—LISTEN and underneath it, that second pulse of ghost-ink like a vein lighting up. DUE.

It’s ridiculous. Frost can’t spell. Ice doesn’t pulse. I know this. My brain knows this. But my pulse hasn’t got the memo.

What gets me worse is the way Callen looked at her. Not even at her—into her. Like he knew exactly what the frost was saying before it said it. Like this whole thing was some conversation I’m not fluent enough to follow.

And Lira… God, the way her breath caught. The hum under her ribs that I could almost feel from where I stood. Her eyes locked on his like her body recognized something before she did. I hate how much that bothers me. I hate the sour jolt of it sitting in my chest like a bad chemical reaction. I hate that I noticed her leaning toward him without moving.

But what I hate most is this thought I can’t shut off: Callen wasn’t surprised by any of it. And that means he knows something I don’t. Fog doesn’t part for people. Frost doesn’t write warnings. Callen shouldn’t be able to appear out of nowhere like that. My breath goes shallow. Okay. Fine. There has to be an explanation. There always is.

I take the watch shift early. Didn’t even ask. Just showed up with the logbook and told the sophomore on duty to go get dinner. He didn’t argue. Maybe I looked like I’d bite him if he did.

The shelter is colder than usual, the kind of cold that clings to the floor and works upward. I flick on the desk lamp. It buzzes like it’s irritated to be awake.

A crow sits on the outside ledge, staring straight at me through the narrow window slit. Its eyes don’t blink. I tell myself this is normal behavior for a bird. They’re curious. Territorial. Whatever. But it doesn’t move, not when I wave my hand, not even when I tap the glass. Just keeps looking at me like it knows something I haven’t figured out yet.

“Fantastic,” I mutter. “Birds now.”

I drop into the chair and open the shelter log. My handwriting from last week looks steadier than I feel right now. I flip to a fresh page, anchor my pen, start listing observations:

Temperature variance.  Visibility patterns. Possible mechanical faults in stairwell hydraulics.  Faulty window seal → frost behavior.

The more I write, the more human everything becomes again. Manageable. Quantifiable. Nothing supernatural. Just data.

I pull up the stairwell camera feed. Part of me knows I shouldn’t. Part of me needs to. The footage from half an hour ago loads in jerky little squares. It’s just a hallway. Just light. Just air. But my shoulders knot anyway because I remember exactly what it felt like standing there, like the building inhaled around us.

I rewind to the moment right before the frost crawled across the window. There I am. There Lira is. And then the frame ripples. It’s subtle, like heat distortion, but wrong. The distortion doesn’t come from the edges. It starts around her, haloing her outline like someone dragged a finger through the pixels. I lean closer to the monitor. My throat goes dry.

Compression error, I tell myself. Loose wiring. Low-light interference. This building is older than half the teachers; nothing here works the way it should. But the distortion sharpens, clusters like the camera doesn’t want to show her clearly. Like it’s protecting her. Or hiding her. Or—No. Stop. I scrub back. Forward. The warp stays.

Someone in the hallway yesterday said the footage blurred around her on purpose. I thought it was idiotic gossip. Now my scalp prickles. I drag a hand through my hair and shut the monitor off hard enough to make the plastic click.
“It’s nothing,” I say out loud, because the room is too quiet and I need to hear something real. “It’s a glitch.” It has to be.

A shadow moves across the frosted window slit, and before I even think, I’m on my feet. It’s her. And him. They’re standing just outside the shelter, too far to hear but close enough that I can see the line of her shoulders tilt toward him. Not leaning—just… open. Like her body forgot to be tense for once.

And she laughs. Soft. Quick. The kind of laugh she never gives me unless she’s exhausted or I’ve finally said something right after ten tries. My stomach drops straight through me.

Callen says something low. She lifts her chin in that stubborn way she does when she’s pretending she’s not scared. He steps closer, but not touching. He doesn’t have to. The space between them seems to shift on its own, contracting around them like the fog did earlier.

I hate the way it looks. Like they’re speaking some language I can’t hear. Like I’m the outsider in my own damn school. I tell myself to walk away. I don’t move. Not until she smiles at him, small, unsure, but real. Something inside me cracks. Just a thin line.But I feel it.

I force myself back to the desk. Back to the lamp. Back to the damn logbook. If I pretend hard enough, maybe I can believe my own handwriting. But something shifts in the room. A soft scrape. Metal against metal.  The bell in the back alcove.

I swallow. “No,” I mutter. “Not you too.”

The bell hasn’t been used in decades. It shouldn’t even be able to move. But the air changes like a breath pulled through cold teeth. I step toward it anyway because that’s what I do: I look the thing in the face. I measured it. I name the problem.

Frost is gathering along its rim. Slow at first, then threading upward like veins pushing toward the crown. My pulse spikes. I tell myself it’s just condensation reacting to temperature drop. Perfectly normal under certain atmospheric conditions. Then the frost bends. I stop breathing. Lines form. Curved. Sharp. Intentional. Letters. My last name.

QUIN

Every hair on my arms rises. I blink hard, waiting for the illusion to break. It doesn’t. The letters glisten, knife-thin and exact. Whoever or whatever is doing this knows me. Not just my face. My name. I lift a hand toward the frost, stupid, reckless. When my fingertips brush the metal, the letters shiver. Re-forming. Tightening their edges like they’re reacting to me.

“Impossible,” I whisper. The frost doesn’t care what’s possible. For the first time, a thought hits me that I don’t want:  What if Callen wasn’t warning her about some abstract curse? What if he knows exactly how this thing chooses its targets?

The metallic click snaps behind my ear—sharp enough to jolt my spine. I whirl, heart slamming, but the shelter is empty. Still. Too still. Then the monitor on the desk flickers. Static crawls over the screen, white-blue and violent. I step closer, my own reflection breaking into pieces across the glass.

The stairwell camera flashes back on. For a second—one breath, one heartbeat—the bell on the feed is coated in frost again. But this frost isn’t spelling my name. It’s spelling hers. A single word, scraped rough and uneven like it didn’t want to appear:

DUE.

I stumble backward. My shoulder hits the shelf hard enough to rattle a can of emergency batteries. The screen clears. Normal image. Normal stairwell. Nothing is normal and I’m lying to myself more than anyone else. I grab the desk edge until my fingers ache. I want to call her. I want to drag her somewhere warm and fluorescent where frost can’t write prophecies on old metal. But that would mean admitting I believe any of this. And I can’t. Not yet.

The door creaks before I’m ready. Lira steps inside, arms wrapped around herself like she’s still cold from the stairwell. She offers me this tiny smile, thin, apologetic, like she knows I’m unraveling but doesn’t know how to say it.

“I brought you something,” she says, holding up a thermos. “Tea. I just thought.. ”

“Thanks.” My voice is too tight. I try again. “You didn’t have to.” She comes closer. I take the thermos but my hand grazes her wrist, warm and small and real. God, it grounds me. For half a second I can breathe.

“You okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine.” Lie number whatever-the-hell. “Just…recording anomalies. Nothing to worry about.” She nods, but her eyes slide past me, toward the window, toward the darkness where Callen had stood with her earlier. It’s a tiny movement, barely there.

But I see it. I always see everything. Something twists under my ribs. Something ugly. I want to tell her not to look for him. I want to ask why she laughs with him like that, why her body reacts when he’s near, why she looks at him like he has answers I don’t.

Instead, I say, “Stay away from the stairwell tonight. Just in case.”

She frowns. “That’s exactly what he said.” My stomach drops. I hate that she remembers his words before mine.

Lira leaves after a few minutes, promising she’ll go straight back to her dorm. I watch her footsteps fade into the hall, listen until I can’t hear anything but my own pulse. I turn back to the alcove. The frost on the bell is gone. Wiped clean like a slate waiting for its next command. I exhale shakily, too loud in the small room. Then the temperature drops.

Fast.

A thin lace of frost spreads across the bell’s surface, forming quicker this time. Not hesitant. Not shy. Like it was waiting for me to be alone. The letters carve themselves in a single motion:

LISTEN.

My breath fogs in front of me. The frost pulses, once like a heartbeat. Then it melts. It evaporates in one sharp exhale of warmth that doesn’t belong here. The metallic click rings again. But it comes from inside the shelter, not the bell.

Behind me. My throat closes. I don’t want to turn around. I do anyway. Nothing’s there. Only cold air and the sense that something just brushed past me. My voice cracks around her name.

“Lira.”