She’d snuck out of the house, journeyed to campus with Chichi, located and terrorized one of the most powerful confraternities in the area, and now here she was. This was the longest night of her life. Her eyes grew heavy. But there was no rest for the weary. The basement had no windows. She was deep beneath the ground; the place was like a tomb. And the one light bulb, which just had to be near the spiders, was greasy and dim, shining down on the older, used up, and discarded books. There were corners and crevices between fallen shelves, and the room was full of shadows and hiding places. All this made the scraping sound that much more terrifying.

The sound seemed to bear down on the marble floor. Then it dragged. Slow and steady. Then it stopped. Then it dragged and then stopped. It came from right behind one of the bookcases to Sunny’s left. And she could see a bit of a shadow through two fallen shelves. But nothing more. Sunny had nothing with her. Nothing to throw. Nothing to clutch with fear.

“Oh,” she whispered, trying to stay still. Willing herself to be invisible. She could become invisible. But not for very long. And to do so, she had to travel, to move. Would whatever it was come at her? What was it?

Scraaaaape. Pause. Scraaaape. Pause. It stopped just before it came into view. Sunny waited for what felt like fifteen minutes, but the thing didn’t show itself. Instead, quiet as smoke, a flame burst from behind the books. A smokeless one. No smell. No burning. Just the light and shadow of a flame. Sunny, helpless and exhausted, leaned against the neck of the bronze toad, staring at that which she could not see. Soon her eyes went out of focus, and then slowly they shut.

Scraaaaape.

Sunny’s eyes shot open and she jumped up. Her legs wobbled and buckled, and she fell against the toad, banging her hip. A rotten-egg smell of sulfur stung her nose. She winced, turning toward the sound and the stench. What she spotted beside the bookcase made every hair in her body stand up. Even from feet away, she could tell that they were human bones, and not only because the one piled at the top was a clearly human skull. One near the bottom was heavy and long. A femur. And there was a hand sticking out of the center. The pile looked about the size of one human being, the bones a dirty, rusty gray red.

Sunny didn’t move. She couldn’t move. Her eyes stared and stared. Then they started to water.

Tap, tap, tap. She gasped and looked toward the staircase. Someone was coming down. She looked back at the bones. They were gone.

It was Samya, one of Sugar Cream’s closest assistants. She was one of the few third levelers under the age of thirty that Leopard Knocks had. To pass Ndibu, one had to attend a meeting of masquerades and get a masquerade’s consent to be a third leveler. To attend such a meeting, one had to slip into the wilderness, which meant the person had to die and come back. Only third levelers and up knew how this was done when one was not born with the natural ability. To reach the third level of Ndibu was like earning a PhD, and it was rare for one to be under the age of thirty-five. Samya was twenty-four.