It’s . . . a phone vibrating, from a storage cabinet in the corner of the room. Tiles appear as I approach the doors—squares of pink and green, arriving for one footstep, departing for the next.

Is he behind this door? Waiting to shoot me?

Maybe I’m an idiot who took the bait, and this nightmare-scape, this long, anguished death loop, is where he ultimately meant to lead me . . .

My fingers curl around the cold silver handle, and I pull the door open.

There’s someone in there, in the right side of the closet, who flinches when I open the door. A girl with olive skin and a pie-shaped face, bunched up with her knees to her chest and a phone sitting next to her.

I kneel to meet her. “Hi.”

“Hi?”

Heavy eyeliner. A cartilage piercing and a moon necklace that sinks into her chest like an arc reactor. Straightened hair falls over one eye and her shoulders, lilting lightly like thin curtains. Some of the light from behind me reflects off her glasses and skin. Even though she died, she stayed closer to the Here than the After. She seems trapped in some state of being, both alive and dead.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“I’m Jake. You?”

“River.”

“Hi. It’s nice to find another . . . um . . . aware person in this nightmare school.”

“I’ve never seen you before,” River says. “Did you go to Heritage?”

“I’m actually a medium. I’m not even from here—I’m from DeKalb. Clark City.”

“A medium?” She lowers her knees. There’s a big spot of dark blood seeping through the front of her shirt. “So you’re contacting me from the world of the living?”

“It’s weird. I kind of just go where the mist takes me. Well, I came here on my own because I wanted to see it.”

“Ah. The grand spectacle of the school where it happened.”

River raises her arm, it seems, to push hair out of her face, but her hand is missing. Her forearm ends in a stub of exposed membrane, cauterized in a crust of twinkling light.

She scoots out of the closet, and I move back some to make room, checking behind me to make sure there’s still floor. “How’s it done, anyway? How do mediums cross worlds?”

“It’s all still new to me. Shouldn’t be, because I’m sixteen, but I spent my whole life until, like, two weeks ago trying to ignore it. Trying to run away. And then Sawyer showed up.”

River flinches and then lets in a breath she doesn’t let out.