I wake up knowing things I shouldn’t know.

  The girl in the room next to mine had a nightmare at 3 AM. I didn’t hear her through the wall. I felt her aura spike in my sleep, a jagged red flare that pulled me half-conscious before settling back into the murky gray of troubled rest. The boy two doors down is sick. Something in his stomach, a knot of wrong color in his health layer that wasn’t there yesterday. He’ll spend the morning pretending he’s fine because showing weakness in a place like this is a luxury no one can afford.

  I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and let the building come to me.

  It’s early, just past six. The kitchen staff are already moving, their auras businesslike and uncomplicated. A maintenance worker is in the basement doing something with pipes. Two floors up, someone is awake and pacing. A student, from the size and position, walking tight circles in their room the way people do when their thoughts are louder than their body can contain.

  And on the first floor, in the room I’ve been tracking since last night, the locked book is awake.

  He’s still. Not pacing, not restless. Just… there. A quiet pulse in the map of the building, his aura low and steady like embers banked for the night. The darkness beneath his surface layers is the same, impenetrable, present, waiting. I catch myself reaching toward it with my perception, trying to push deeper, and pull back. I don’t know why I’m drawn to the one thing in this building I can’t read. Maybe that’s exactly why.

  I get up. I shower in a bathroom shared with three other girls I haven’t met yet. I dress in clothes that are clean but not new and look at myself in a mirror that has a crack running through the upper left corner.

  Fifteen years old. Brown skin, dark eyes, hair I pulled into a braid because I didn’t have the energy for anything else. I look like a girl who’s been passed around the system for eight months, which is exactly what I am. The mirror doesn’t show the other thing, the thing behind my eyes that sees too much. From the outside I’m just another troubled kid at a school for troubled kids.

  Good. That’s the safest thing to be.

  Breakfast is a smaller version of last night’s assault. Fewer students, not everyone eats this early, but the ones who do are broadcasting at full volume. I’ve learned that mornings are the worst for auras. People haven’t put their armor on yet. The performances haven’t started. What you see at 7 AM is closer to the truth than what you’ll see by noon, and the truth at Millhaven is a lot of hurt walking around in teenage bodies.

  I take my tray to the same corner I found last night. Routine matters when everything else is chaos. Same seat. Same angle. Back to the wall so I can see the room without anyone behind me. These are habits I’ve developed over eight months of never being in the same place long enough to feel safe, and I’m not ready to let them go.

  He’s not here. The corner where he sat last night is empty, the shadow from the column falling across a vacant table. I’m not disappointed. I’m not. I’m scanning the room the way I always scan a room, and his absence is just data.

  I eat powdered eggs and toast that tastes like the idea of bread and I watch the morning unfold.

  There’s a hierarchy here, the way there is in every school, but the currency is different. It’s not money or looks or athletic ability. It’s damage. Who has the most, who wears it the hardest, who’s been here the longest. The veterans sit in the center of the room with the confidence of people who’ve stopped being afraid of this place. The newer kids orbit the edges. I’m somewhere beyond the edge, not even in orbit yet, just floating in the cold space past the last ring.

  A group of boys at a center table is generating the most noise, aura-wise. Their leader, a tall kid with a shaved head and arms that suggest he spends a lot of time in whatever passes for a gym here, radiates a muddy orange dominance that makes my teeth ache. He’s not evil. His intentions don’t read as cruel, exactly. But he needs to be seen and felt and acknowledged, and that need fills the room like a gas leak.

  I file him under “avoid.”

  My first class is English with Grace Whitfield.

  Her classroom is the warmest room in the building, and I don’t mean the temperature. She’s taped student artwork to every available surface. Not the polished kind you see in real schools, but raw, strange, sometimes unsettling pieces that look like they were made by people working something out of their systems. The desks are arranged in a rough circle instead of rows, which means you can’t hide in the back. Grace stands in the center with a paperback and a dry-erase marker and teaches like she’s running out of time, which, based on what I read in her aura, she might be.

  She sees me come in and her aura does that gold flare again. She’s glad I showed up. Not professionally glad. Personally glad. Like my presence in her classroom is a small victory against something she’s been fighting.

  “Thea. Grab any seat.”

  I take the one closest to the door. Old habit.

  The class is small, twelve students, most of them checked out before Grace even opens her mouth. Their auras are a spectrum of indifference, ranging from mild gray boredom to the aggressive blankness of someone who decided years ago that school was something that happened to other people. But Grace doesn’t seem to notice, or if she does, she doesn’t let it stop her. She talks about a book I haven’t read with a passion that makes you want to read it, even if you came in planning not to care.

  I almost raise my hand once. Almost. Then I remember that speaking up is how you get noticed, and getting noticed is how you get labeled, and getting labeled is how you get sent somewhere worse. So I keep my mouth shut and let Grace’s warmth wash over me like standing near a fire on a cold day, close enough to feel it, not close enough to get burned.

  Second period is Math with Mr. Voss.

  Gerald Voss is the opposite of Grace in every way that matters. Where she radiates warmth, he radiates precision. Where her classroom is covered in student art, his walls are bare except for a periodic table and a clock that he glances at with the regularity of a man who believes time is the only resource that can’t be wasted.

  His aura is interesting. Controlled, more controlled than almost anyone I’ve read. Tight grays and steel blues held in rigid formation, like a military uniform made of light. There’s no malice in him. I check twice because my instinct says anyone this guarded must be hiding something dark, but no, what he’s hiding is exhaustion. Beneath the rigid control is a man who has been doing this job for too many years and has stopped believing it makes a difference. He teaches because it’s what he does, the way a machine runs because that’s what it was built for.

  He scans the room when I enter. His eyes land on me, catalog me, and move on. New student. Filed. He doesn’t introduce me to the class. He doesn’t make me stand up and share something about myself. He just nods at an empty desk and starts talking about quadratic equations.

  I’d be grateful for the anonymity if I didn’t notice the way his aura pulsed, just slightly, just once, when his gaze passed over me. Not suspicion exactly. Assessment. Mr. Voss is a man who watches, and he’s decided I’m worth watching.

  Great.

  I see him again at lunch.

  Not in the cafeteria. In a hallway.

  I’m walking back from the bathroom. A route that takes me through a corridor on the first floor that’s quieter than the main arteries. Less foot traffic. Fewer open books screaming their contents at me. I’ve already started mapping the building by noise level, finding the paths that cost the least.

  He’s coming from the other direction.

  The hallway isn’t dark, but it’s not bright either. One of those institutional corridors where half the overhead lights have burned out and nobody’s replaced them. He moves through the dim stretch between functioning fixtures with a ease that goes beyond comfort. Most people slow down in low light, adjust their steps, squint. He does the opposite. His stride actually loosens. His shoulders drop. He becomes more himself the darker it gets, like he’s taking off a coat he didn’t know he was wearing.

  We’re going to pass each other. The hallway is wide enough that we don’t have to get close, but narrow enough that we can’t pretend the other person isn’t there. I feel the moment approaching the way you feel a train coming through the floor before you hear it.

  I open my sight. I can’t help it.

  His aura unfolds in my vision and it’s just as overwhelming as it was last night. The surface layers. Gray withdrawal, blue loneliness, the muted palette of someone who’s been alone so long he’s forgotten what the alternative feels like. And beneath them, that depth. That impossible, lightless depth that my gift skids across without finding purchase.

  But this close, ten feet, then eight, then six, I catch something I missed from across the cafeteria. The darkness isn’t empty. It’s not a void or an absence. It’s full. It’s alive in some way I don’t have vocabulary for. It moves and breathes and responds to his emotional state the way surface auras do, but in a language I can’t translate. It’s like hearing music through a wall. You know it’s there, you can feel the bass in your bones, but you can’t make out the melody.

  Four feet.

  He glances at me as we pass.

  It’s brief. Barely a flicker of eye contact, dark eyes under dark hair, a face that’s all angles and guarded stillness. He doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t speak. But in the half-second our eyes meet, something shifts in his aura. The surface grays ripple like water disturbed by a stone dropped from somewhere deep. He felt something. I don’t know what, and from his expression neither does he, but something in him responded to something in me.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Then he’s past me, and the shadows in the corridor behind him seem, I must be imagining this, seem to lean toward him as he walks away. Like they’re reaching. Like they want to follow.

  I stand in the hallway and watch him disappear around a corner, and the lock in my chest turns another degree.

  Third period is History with Mr. Dunn.

  Robert Dunn, “Call me Rob, everyone does”, is the most popular teacher at Millhaven. I know this within thirty seconds of entering his classroom because every student aura in the room angles toward him like flowers toward sun. He’s got the gift: easy smile, relaxed posture, the ability to make a room full of damaged teenagers feel like they’re hanging out with a friend rather than sitting in a class.

  His aura is the first one today that makes me stop and look twice.

  It’s pleasant on the surface. Warm tones. Approachable energy. Colors that make people trust you instinctively, which is probably why the students respond to him the way they do. But there’s something beneath the warmth that doesn’t match. A thread of something, not dark exactly, but not honest. It’s slick. That’s the word that comes to mind. His surface aura is a polished floor and underneath it there’s something that slides when you step on it.

  His intentions read as... complicated. Not threatening. Not predatory. Nothing that sets off the alarm bells I’ve learned to trust. But there’s an ambition in him that doesn’t fit the room. A man this charming, this capable of working a crowd, teaching History at a school for troubled kids? He wants more than this. He’s aimed at something, and the friendly teacher act is a means, not an end.

  I don’t know what to do with that information. It’s not a crime to be ambitious. It’s not a crime to wear a pleasant mask. Half the adults I’ve met do it, and most of them are just tired, not dangerous. But I file Rob Dunn in a different category than Grace and Voss. They are what they present. He’s adjacent to what he presents, which is a different thing entirely.

  “New face!” He spots me before I can find a seat. “Welcome aboard. I’d ask you to introduce yourself but nobody wants to do that, so just find a spot and jump in. We’re talking about the fall of Rome, which is more fun than it sounds.”

  A few students laugh. I don’t. I find a seat. And I watch Rob Dunn perform his warmth for fifty minutes with the precise, polished skill of someone who’s practiced it until it looks effortless.

  By evening I’m exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with physical effort.

  A full day of open books. Dozens of people read and cataloged and filed, their secrets and sorrows absorbed into a mind that can’t refuse them. My mother used to say I needed to learn to close the door, that there had to be a way to shut the gift off or at least turn it down. She spent years trying to help me find the switch. We never found it.

  I skip dinner. I can’t face the cafeteria again, the concentrated noise of seventy auras in a confined space. Instead I lie on my bed with the lights off and let the map do what it does.

  The campus goes quiet around me. Students in their rooms, in common areas, in the spaces between where teenagers congregate when they think adults aren’t watching. Staff offices glow with the tired auras of people finishing paperwork. Grace is in her classroom again, alone, that blue going dimmer. She needs to go home.

  I find Leo. In his office, same as yesterday. That underground current is running strong tonight, the obsidian focus I noticed during our meeting. He’s working on something. Not school business. School business doesn’t generate this kind of intensity. Whatever it is, it’s got its hooks in him deep.

  I find Rob Dunn. He’s still in the building, which surprises me, most teachers leave by five. He’s in his classroom and his aura has shifted from the warm performance of the school day to something more private. The slick thread I noticed earlier is more pronounced now that he thinks no one is watching. He’s on his phone. The ambition pulses.

  And I find him. Cole. I learned his name today. Not by asking. I’m not ready for that. I heard it in the hallway between classes, a teacher calling out to him as he passed: “Mercer. Hands out of your pockets in the building.” A student nearby muttered “Cole” to someone, and the name attached itself to the locked book in my mind like a label on a spine.

  Cole Mercer.

  He’s in his room on the first floor. The lights are off. I can tell because the thin strip of space beneath his door, visible to my spatial sense, shows no light bleeding through. He’s in total darkness by choice, and his aura is different than it was during the day. More open. Not to me, I still can’t penetrate the depth, but to itself. The surface layers have relaxed, like armor unbuckled at the end of a battle. The grays are softer. The loneliness is less rigid, more like sadness, which is at least honest.

  The darkness around him, not his aura but the actual, physical darkness of his unlit room, registers strangely in my perception. I’ve mapped hundreds of dark rooms. Darkness is just the absence of light. It’s nothing. It’s negative space.

  The dark in Cole’s room isn’t nothing.

  It has a quality I’ve never encountered. A density. Like the difference between empty air and air filled with fog, technically the same space, but heavier, more present. The shadows in his room seem thicker than the shadows in the room next to his, which makes no logical sense and yet my gift reports it with the same matter-of-fact certainty it reports everything else.

  I pull back. My heart is doing the thing again, the paying-attention thing that started in the cafeteria last night. It’s faster than it should be. My palms are damp.

  This is ridiculous. He’s a boy in a dark room. There are dozens of boys in dozens of rooms in this building and none of them make my pulse change. But none of them are locked books. None of them sit in shadows that aren’t just shadows. None of them looked at me across a crowded room and made something inside me shift on its axis.

  I reach for my duffel and pull out the wooden box.

  It’s small, palm-sized, carved from dark wood that’s been smoothed by years of handling. My mother kept it on her nightstand. I don’t know where it came from originally. She never said and I never asked, the way children don’t ask about the things that have always been there.

  Inside is a photograph. My mother and me, taken when I was maybe four. She’s holding me on her hip and we’re both laughing at something off-camera. Her aura in the photo, because yes, I can read auras in photographs, which is either the most useful or most painful version of my gift, her aura is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Gold and deep blue and a violet I’ve never found in anyone else, shot through with the bright clean white of unconditional love.

  She saw me. The real me, the whole me, gift and all. She never flinched. She never looked at me the way the foster families did, like I was a puzzle with half the pieces missing. She looked at me and saw something complete.

  Amara Cross. My mother. Who had the best instincts of anyone I’ve ever known and who died because the world crushed them out of her.

  I close the box. I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since the funeral, and the funeral was six months ago. The tears are somewhere in me, I can feel them the way I feel other people’s auras, a pressure behind a wall, but the wall holds. It’s held for six months. I don’t know what happens when it breaks.

  I put the box on the nightstand, the same place my mother kept it, and turn on my side.

  Sleep comes slowly at Millhaven. The building is too full of noise. But gradually the auras dim as students drift off, their broadcasts fading to the low murmur of unconscious minds. It’s the quietest the building will be until morning, and in that relative silence, things become clearer. Edges sharpen. The map resolves into finer detail.

  I’m almost asleep when I feel it.

  It’s subtle. A resonance, like a tuning fork struck at a frequency that only I can hear. It’s coming from Cole’s room, but that’s not what stops my breath. The frequency is familiar. Not because I’ve heard it before. Because it matches something.

  It matches me.

  Somewhere beneath the layers of his aura that I can read and the depths that I can’t, there’s a thread that vibrates at the same frequency as something inside me. Not my gift. Something deeper. Something in my soul, my bones, the architecture of whatever I am. His thread and my thread are humming the same note.

  I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why a boy I’ve never spoken to carries something inside him that resonates with something inside me. I don’t know why the shadows in his room are heavier than the shadows in any other room, or why his aura has a floor I can’t reach, or why looking at him across a cafeteria made a dead part of me sit up and open its eyes.

  But I’m going to find out. I said that last night and I mean it more today, because today I walked past him in a hallway and felt the air between us vibrate, and tonight I’m lying in the dark, and his frequency is singing to mine across three hundred feet of old hospital turned school for broken children.

  My mother said the gift would make sense someday.

  I’m starting to think someday might be here.