Heritage is a school like any other school, with red bricks, a flagpole, car lanes, and bus lanes. I pedal down a crosswalk to reach the carpool lane and then breeze past a marquee sign—got a date for homecoming? it asks. I dream of a world where I can answer yes to that question, but now is not the time.

One thing sets this school apart. I pull the brakes and jerk to a stop, catching myself with one foot against the ground when I see it.

Sawyer, charging the doors with a machine gun in his hand. He passes me with no acknowledgment.

It’s not the real him. Just a phantom of him—a residual image from the death loop of a victim. He’s a projection of the real thing, a smoky red outline, with lifeless eyes and no mind of its own. Like the falling javelin and the knife that kills Matteo.

I circle to the back of the building. There, facing a sports field and a line of classroom trailers, I put down the kickstand of my bike, pop two sleeping pills, and sit against the bricks of the building.

Best-case scenario: some friendly security guard finds me, wakes me up, asks a few questions, and lets me off the hook. Worst-case: Racist Karen peeks out her window and calls the cops on the Black boy passed out in front of her local school.

I can hear their screaming even from out here.

Breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe . . .

I’m terrified, but I can’t afford to listen to that voice inside me telling me to go home. And besides, home isn’t safe anymore, and if I don’t stop Sawyer Doon, it never will be.

Questions float through my mind as I drift into sleep.

Why did you do it?

What did you want?

What do you want?

I wake up lying down on a cold floor. A hard, shiny tile shrouded in a creeping fog of ecto-mist . . . the hallway of the dead school.

The mist is so thick only the top lockers are visible. It brought me inside Heritage’s walls, like I thought it would. It’s everywhere in here, like pollination season, bathing everything in an electromagnetic glow. The walls stretch up and fade right into the open air, a black abyss, thick with clouds of ecto-mist. At the end of the hallway, the floor ends in a lethal drop off the third floor. Past that drop, a wall of murky clouds crackle with sparks of light connecting between telephone poles. It’s all a giant storm cloud.

There’s a phantom Sawyer dragging the barrel of his machine gun along the floor, banging the buttstock against the lockers. Bullet shells and dust penetrate the air. Books explode from the arms of a girl and flop open across the floor, their pages disintegrating like ashfall.