It’s basically patrol with training wheels for knights-in-training like me, and it’s not preparing us for much we haven’t already dealt with. Even though the school used to be an asylum, it’s also long been a stronghold of Valryn, and most of the dead tend to avoid it. The curfew is only enforced to allow us to patrol unbothered. Sure, sometimes a stray spirit or two will wander campus and scare some kids who’ve snuck into the woods to party, or Vera, our resident dead girl, will get a little testy and break a window (she thinks she’s scarier than she really is), but that’s about as intense as it gets. The real action’s outside the boundaries of Nacoma Knight where ranked shadow knights like my father get to patrol and fight darklings.

But today, things got interesting.

Case in point: Vera is missing.

Missing might be the wrong word. She isn’t in her usual place.

The thing about the dead is they’re as predictable as rain after a car wash. Vera is a mobile spirit and roams about campus, but she takes the same routes she did when she was alive. She’ll wander into buildings, to the rooms where she had class, but at 3:05 p.m.—the exact time she hung herself about fifty years ago—she’ll return to her noose over the doors at Emerson Hall. But today, she wasn’t there.

I ran out of time scouting campus for her. I still need to search the woods on patrol tonight before I report her missing. Still, I know she’s out there somewhere, because her noose remains. It’s like a relic, tethering her soul to earth. When that disappears, it’s really time to worry.

“Did the new girl keep you?” Jacobi tries again, and my blades collide with his, jarring me from my thoughts. We pause for a moment; our breathing is heavy, and the muscles in my arms start to throb. The observation is a little startling as I realize Jacobi’s fighting with more force than usual. We step away from each other; our knives untangle with a crisp zing.

“No.” I shift my blades in my hands to get a better grip.

I came into training thinking I could take my mind off things, which is usually the case, but today, each strike reminds me something is wrong.

Just as wrong as Anora’s reaction to the dead…the second thing to challenge my complaint that nothing ever happens at Nacoma Knight Academy.

It was sort of funny, watching her interact with Vera…until it wasn’t. After her first sighting, I expected her to go about her day like all the other death-speakers at our school who can see the dead—like it is normal. As sure as the sky is blue, dead people roam the earth.

But she didn’t. She freaked.