‘There’s someone else who knows, but. And she hasn’t been through fire for her mate; she hasn’t got that kind of nerve. She holds in the secret as long as she can, but it finally gets to be too much. She cracks, makes the postcard. Probably she genuinely doesn’t think it’ll go further than that board, corridor gossip. The bubble again: you’re inside it, the outside doesn’t feel real. But your Holly’s been to the outside before. She knows it’s there.’

Sound from the fourth-year common room, sharp and sudden. Something heavy thudding to the floor. A squeal.

I was half off the windowsill when Conway’s hand clamped round my bicep. She shook her head.

‘But—’

‘Wait.’

Murmur like bees, swelling and bristling.

‘They’re going to—’

‘Let them.’

A wail, rising above that murmur, high and trembling. Conway’s hand tightened.

Words, a terrified cry too garbled to catch through the thick door. Then the screaming started.

Conway was down and hitting the combination lock before I realised her hand was gone off my arm. The door opened on a different world.

The noise punched me in the face, sent my vision skidding. Girls up and on their feet, hands and hair flying – I’d been seeing them through texts for so long, just narrow snippets of minds shooting through dark, it felt like a double-take seeing them real and solid. And nothing like I’d seen them before, nothing. Those glossy gems, watching us cool-eyed and assessing with their knees perfectly crossed: gone. These were white and scarlet, wide-mouthed, clawed and clutching at each other, these were wild things.

McKenna was shouting something, but none of them heard her. Shrieks launched off them like birds, battering against the walls. I caught words, here and there, I see him oh my God oh God I see him it’s Chris Chris Chris—

It was the high sash window they were fixed on, the one where Holly and her mates had been sitting an hour or two earlier. Empty now, blank evening sky. Heads back, arms open to that rectangle, they were screaming like it was a joy, a physical one. Like it was the one thing they’d been dying to do, for years and years, and the time had come.

It’s him it’s him look oh God look— Conway’s ghost story had paid off.

Conway dived in. Aiming for Holly and her lot, pressed together in a far corner. They weren’t screaming, weren’t gone, but they were huge-eyed, Holly’s teeth sunk into her forearm, Rebecca crouched in an armchair gasping, hands pressed over her ears. Get them now, we might get them talking.