Episode 1 — "The Transfer"
Cold Open
The library should have been safe.
It was the kind of safe that smelled like old paper and floor polish, humming under fluorescent lights that buzzed like tame bugs. Rows of books lifted into a cathedral of knowledge. There were signs about silence, and the security desk near the front door with its dim monitor, and the emergency exit with the bar that said ALARM WILL SOUND IF OPENED.
Amanda Price didn't believe in alarms. She believed in deadlines.
At 2:11 a.m., she closed her laptop and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her contacts were sandpaper. Her coffee had gone metallic-cold. The anthology of True Crime Case Studies lay open to a chapter about staged suicides. She didn't mean to notice the photographs more than the text, but the photographs were clean and violent the way winter is clean and violent. A woman's feet were too close together in a bathtub. A chair was kicked too neatly away from a beam.
She shut the book. Enough.
The stacks had a particular loneliness at this hour. They had always had it. You could stand between them and feel the weight of everybody who had whispered here and never raised their voice. She slung the strap of her backpack onto her shoulder and paused when her phone vibrated on the table. A number she didn't recognize:
DON'T TURN AROUND.
Amanda's mouth dried. She wasn't the type to spook—she worked nights at a bar that had its own legend about a shotgun under the counter. But the sentence crept up her back like a cold wet finger.
She swallowed, trying to snort at herself. "Cute," she said to no one.
She turned around.
A face looked back—if you could call a mask a face. White porcelain, hairline cracks radiating from the right eyehole. Painted lips like a funeral smile. The figure wore a dark coat that fell wrong, too long in the sleeves, a gloved hand holding something that gleamed: a broken triangular shard of glass, long enough to be a promise.
"Hey," Amanda said, tone pitched somewhere between bartending bravado and dream. "Is this—do you need—"
The mask tilted, slow as a cat.
Amanda ran. She sprinted down the main corridor, shoes hammering carpeted squares, backpack thudding against her spine. The exit doors yawned at the far end, black glass on black. She slammed the bar.
Nothing moved.
The red letters on the push bar didn't lie: ALARM WILL SOUND. But no sound came. The door didn't give an inch. She hit it again. Again.
Behind her, the whiteness of the mask floated between shelves like a moon at the end of a canyon.
Amanda looked left. The security desk was empty.
Her phone chimed.
BREATHE.
The masked figure didn't run. They simply changed where they were. One breath they were twenty feet away; the next they had bled a dozen feet closer, shoulders barely stirring the air. Amanda grabbed the heaviest book on the display case—Criminal Investigations: A Visual Guide—and hurled it. The mask flinched; the book smacked off a shelf, burst into pages that whirled like frightened birds.
She bolted between periodicals, muscles turning electric. At the far end, an emergency door. She hit it. The alarm screamed.
Yes. Yes.
The masked figure's hand hooked her backpack and yanked her backward so hard her teeth clicked. She turned, clawed, kicked, felt the shard kiss the strap and shred fabric. Her bag fell; her life spilled—laptop, keys, lipstick, a student ID with a photo that looked like a girl who still believed in morning.
"Help!" she shouted, and her voice broke on the syllable like a bone.
The shard rose. Amanda grabbed the wrist with both hands; the glove was damp and smelled faintly of bleach and something like pennies. The shard dropped—fell point-down beside her head, thunking into the carpet with a whisper of fibers splitting.
Her hand found the mask and pushed. It was warm. Flesh pressed under ceramic.
The porcelain rotated, showing her a human eye through the crack: not crazy, not frothing, not cinematic. Just patient.
"Why," Amanda asked, which was really please.
The eye blinked once, like a shutter taking a photo, and the masked figure put their mouth close enough that Amanda could feel breath whisper through the slit.
"So he learns."
The shard lifted. Amanda tried to move, but the night had teeth and all of them were in her. The last thing she saw—because this is how the brain is cruel—was her phone faceup under the table, screen bright, recording.
THE STALKER
———
Arrival
Jason Hale watched the town of Ravenwood seep up around the bus like a bruise. The windows were greasy. In the reflection, his own face looked a little ghosted: late-night eyes, not enough sleep, a mouth that didn't remember smiling without being told.
He had made a vow, not out loud, not to anyone who could hold him to it: observe, don't attach. He'd learned the hard way that being the guy who saw too much didn't make friends. It made suspects. It made late-night questions. It made guilt.
But then the bus exhaled at the station, and he stepped into air that smelled like rain on brick, and Ravenwood College rose ahead with its old stone buildings and ridiculous clock tower, and the vow felt like something you put on paper because it looks good there.
Jason shouldered his duffel and catalogued without meaning to: the driver's nicotine-stained fingertips; a poster for a missing cat with a tear down the middle; a pair of undergrads making out against a vending machine, laughter small and mean. A cop car turned the corner, too fast, the driver's jaw tight, the passenger's hands rigid on a laptop mount. Jason felt the ripple that meant something had already gone wrong tonight.
Dorms. Stairs. Hallway that smelled like laundry detergent and beer. The door with MITCHELL/Hale scrawled in marker over peeling wood.
Inside: chaos. A couch that had come from the curb. A TV balanced on a stack of textbooks. A poster of a DJ with his face melted into neon. And Ryan Mitchell, lanky, overcaffeinated, voice like a party talking to itself.
"Yo! You made it! Jason, right? I'm Ryan. Roomie. Best tour guide on earth. You like beer? You like pizza? You like both at the same time? Thought so."
Jason stood in the doorway with his bag and took in: the steak knife thrust into the drywall like a dart—that meant games after 2 a.m.; a row of red cups rimmed with black fingerprints; a window that didn't latch all the way. "I like sleep," he said. "But beer's fine."
Ryan grinned. "Beer is sleep's cooler cousin."
Jason smiled with one half of his mouth. His hands were already working—unpacking, folding, lining things up until the world made angles that didn't bite.
Later, with the window open to let the room breathe, he lay on his back and let the city's new sounds file themselves: the hum of distant traffic, a woman's laugh cutting off too quickly, the elevator cables vibrating like a low cello. The vow again. Observe. Don't attach.
His phone buzzed. Unknown number. He rolled onto an elbow and read:
DON'T LET THEM GET CLOSE.
A prank, he told himself. Satellites crosswiring. Some app. He blocked the number with a thumb that was steady because he'd trained it that way.
Outside, a siren peeled past, much too late for Amanda Price.
⸻
First Class
Criminology 203 was in a lecture hall that still had chalkboards alongside a projector. Professor Harold Knox dressed like a man who owned exactly three suits and wore each until it deserved rest: charcoal grey today, tie crooked. His hair went white early and decided to stay. He didn't do jokes. He did sentences like stairs.
"People tell you killers are monsters," he said, chalk ticking on the board: MEANS / MOTIVE / OPPORTUNITY. "They are not. They're people. They are not even unusual people. They simply stop saying no to themselves."
Jason took notes because it looked like you were present, and because his mind worked hardest when his hand moved. Around him, keyboards rustled like rain. A girl with pens in five colors doodled eyes in the margins. The guy two rows down searched for "best time to take creatine" and then for "how to tell if my roommate is a sociopath."
Knox glanced up mid-sentence. Jason felt the glance land and stay.
"You," Knox said, pointing a stick of chalk like a gavel. "Back row. New face. What's your name?"
"Jason," he said, not adding the Hale because the class had already heard it in the roster call.
"Jason. Tell the room something people miss at a crime scene."
Jason's mouth went ahead of him. "The absence of normal."
A few students looked up. Knox's eyebrows made a move that might have been amusement. "Go on."
"The mindset is to look for anomalies," Jason said, hearing his own voice and feeling like he might step out of it any second. "But the big tells are often the normal things that got erased. The mug that should be there at breakfast. The dog food bowl that's full on a Friday because the dead person always empties it Friday morning. The… the heater that's off when the person always complains about being cold. The absence of normal."
Silence drew itself tight. Knox's mouth accepted the idea like a coin dropped into a slot.
"Useful," he said. "And dangerous. Sit with both words."
Elena Cruz's pen had stopped. She looked at Jason from three seats to his left, a half-smile like a dare. "Sounds like a guy who's been in a few rooms he didn't want to be in," she said after class, sidling up with journalist energy.
"Most rooms are like that," Jason said.
Elena laughed, a bright sound that tried to make Ravenswood look less like brick and more like possibility. "I'm Elena. Campus paper. I'm doing a piece on Professor Knox's—" She waggled her fingers. "—whole deal."
"His deal is not doing deals," Jason said, and something in Elena's expression said okay, this one has edges. She didn't back off. She wasn't that kind of person.
"You transferring in the middle of the year?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Running from something or toward something?"
He considered saying "credits" or "financial aid." He considered lying because people like Elena made lying easy. "Both," he said instead, and watched a point land in her ledger.
"Grab coffee and let me quote you sounding smarter than me?" she asked.
"I don't drink coffee." It sounded like a line. It was just true.
"Tea, then. Or water. Or air." She shrugged. "You seem like a guy who drinks air."
Ryan appeared like noise has flesh. "Dude! We're doing a kickoff tonight. You in?" He grinned at Elena. "You in?"
Elena considered Jason for one beat longer than was casual. "Maybe," she said. "If Sherlock here promises not to profile everybody in the room."
Jason opened his mouth to say I don't profile, except he absolutely did.
"I'll try," he said.
⸻
The Party & The Window
The party had the smell of a hundred bodies pretending to be one fun body. Beer and sweet liqueur and sweat and a cologne that believed in itself too much. Music throbbed so loudly that people's laughs came out like physical things; you could see them push against the air.
Jason stood near the kitchen archway with a red cup sweating in his hand and let details through like cars in a zipper merge. A guy in a letterman jacket touched his jaw every eight seconds exactly—recently shaved badly. The girl who kept leaving her phone face down on the counter picked it up to check it every time a certain song phrase hit; Pavlov with better speakers. The apartment's front door stuck unless you put your shoulder into it. The window's latch didn't catch.
He kept checking the window.
At 11:07, the window became a mirror. Something white outside. Not snow. A mask, suspended in night like a sign. The cracked porcelain looked like it had been smiled on by a hammer.
Jason blinked and the mask was gone.
He put his cup down and elbowed through people to the door. The hallway was a strip of carpet and light and staggered laughter. He took the stairs two at a time, shouldered the building door, and came out under a sky that had put its stars away.
"Hello," he said, which was stupid, which was exactly the point. "If you're a prank, congratulations. I'm pranked."
Silence. Somewhere a car shuddered past with bass that made the streetlamps think about it.
His phone buzzed.
I SEE YOU, JASON.
His thumb hovered over Block and then lowered. He typed, absurdly, because sometimes you answer the wrong question to see what answer comes back. Who is this?
A dot pulsed. Stopped. The screen stayed empty.
He looked up at the window he'd been watching from. Inside, Ryan shotgunned a beer and looked like a speed blur of bad choices. Elena sat on the arm of a couch and talked with her whole body, hands drawing lines in the air. For a second, the vow felt like a thin T-shirt in a blizzard.
"Don't let them get close," Jason said aloud, reciting a line he didn't believe but would obey if it kept people whole.
Behind him, under the party's thrumming, a siren uncoiled like a scream learning how.
⸻
The News
Ravenwood woke the way a field wakes under frost: slowly, completely. By midmorning, the campus had a skin of rumor. Jason crossed the quad and felt conversations eddy around him.
"—police tape—"
"—in the library?"
"—someone said her throat—no, don't—"
He could have not gone. He could have gone the other way and pretended he believed in lectures and office hours. Instead, he found the yellow ribbon of tape and the uniform at the door, arms crossed, visible boredom like a shield.
"Restricted," the officer said before Jason had a chance to pretend otherwise.
Jason stood off to the side and watched. The absence of normal. The glass door with a scuff near the lock at knee-height, like somebody had propped it open earlier with a sneaker and then thought better of it. The cleaning cart parked nearby and offset by half a foot, wheels pointing like toes. A thin, watery smear at the edge of the rubber matting that wasn't dirt. Bleach sits on the air like a false memory; it was here, heavy as guilt.
"Sir," a new voice said—not a question, a correction.
Detective Marla Vance wore a fitted blazer over a polo that said she'd put it on because someone above her liked polos. She had the eyes of a woman who slept in a chair sometimes. She flipped a leather notebook open without looking at it. "You a student?"
"Jason Hale. Criminology."
"That's adorable," she said, and it might have been sympathy if her mouth had learned how. "Also not a badge. Go to class, Jason. If you think you saw something relevant, you can tell the tip line. You won't. But you can."
Jason nodded. He stayed one second too long. Vance's eyebrows did an almost-smile. "Or you can stand right there and play statue until my patience turns into a pumpkin."
He went.
Elena intercepted him twenty paces away, hair pulled back like someone going into a fight. "You were there, weren't you? Not inside—God, I hope not inside—but you saw the scene. Your eyes are screaming, 'I'm making a flowchart.'"
"I didn't see anything I could prove," Jason said. "Bleach. Something with the door. The cleaning cart's wrong."
"Wrong?"
"People leave things straight when they can. The wheels were angled like it got parked fast."
"You think the killer cleaned up?"
"I think somebody did." He glanced past her shoulder toward the tape again. "And whoever did it wanted whoever found her to think it was clean."
Elena's pupils dilated the way hunger does when it finds food. "So you'll help me. For the paper."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because people near me get hurt." He hadn't planned to say it, and now that it was out there he wanted it back. But Elena's face didn't do mockery or the soft condescension of wow, deep. She just looked at him as if the sentence might have a source.
"Is that superstition or data?" she asked quietly.
"Both." He paused. "I'll talk off-record. No quotes. You don't write my name."
"I'll call you Sherlock in my notes," she said, gap-toothed grin showing for the first time. "Better than 'guy who drinks air.'"
Jason looked down at her notebook. The headline space was still blank. It always is, until the world brings you something you wish it hadn't.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn't check it until he was walking away, because looking at it while she watched would mean explaining. On the screen:
SHE'S NEXT.
He turned. Elena was already talking to a campus cop, pen flying. The sun lit her hair up like something you keep if you can. The vow didn't feel like a vow. It felt like a choice he would have to fail at on purpose.
⸻
Knox
Professor Knox's office was a museum of old methods: framed case notes, a cork board with newspaper clippings, an ashtray with a single unlit cigarette like a relic placed just so. Knox himself stood with his jacket hung on a coat tree shaped like a dead branch.
"You wanted to see me," he said when Jason knocked.
"No," Jason said, then corrected: "Yes."
Knox waited.
"I think whoever killed the girl last night staged the scene. Not staged like a performance—staged like they scrubbed the wrong things."
Knox steepled his fingers in front of his chest like prayer had once been useful to him. "What's your basis?"
"Cleaner smell. Cart position. The door bar says alarm will sound but the door didn't look reset. The security desk computer was on, but the chair was turned completely under, tucked, like a person who is interrupted doesn't tuck their chair."
Knox studied him, a stillness that made Jason feel like he had been placed in the world as an example. "You have… appetites," Knox said finally.
"I don't want them."
"What a relief," Knox said dryly. "You'll do less damage. Very well, Mr. Hale: don't tell the police your theory unless you enjoy being on lists. Tell me. Quietly. And in return I will tell you something no one put in a lecture: killers are not swooping hawks. They are patient goats. They butt and butt and butt until a gate opens."
"I don't want to be the gate," Jason said.
Knox's mouth flickered. "Then don't open."
Jason nodded, turned, and was halfway into the hall when Knox said, "And, Mr. Hale—people near you get hurt? You're twenty-four. That sentence belongs to old men. Be careful what you make true by saying it too often."
⸻
The Room at Night
Ryan fell asleep like violence, spread-eagled, mouth open, a slight whistle. His phone kept lighting with messages that boiled down to where's the party next. Jason turned his own phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling.
He did the thing he had done since he was a kid: ran backwards through the day, reheard every sentence, re-smelled every room. He catalogued the shape of the masked figure's shoulders in the party window—how the coat had hung. He measured, in his mind, the distance between the library exit bar and the alarm wire that ran into the wall. He pictured the cleaning cart as if he could place it back into the correct angle with thought alone.
He thought about Elena's face when he said both.
He thought about the text: SHE'S NEXT.
And then, in the place where the mind grinds itself down and calls it rest, something softer: the smell of rain on brick again, how the town had looked when he first arrived and hadn't known its name.
The closet door made a sound like breath.
Jason sat up. The room had the kind of dark that comes from lights choosing not to help tonight. Streetlight silver came in around the edges of the blind. He listened. Ryan snored. The building's pipes spoke to one another like old men.
The closet door creaked another inch.
Jason's body did the math before his mind agreed. He put his feet on the floor, moved barefoot and slow, weight in the balls of his feet. He clicked the lamp on with a practiced finger and sent light into the closet with it.
Empty.
Not empty. On the inside of the door, painted with something that had texture like dried gum and color like old wounds, four words:
WELCOME TO RAVENWOOD.
The letters were at eye level for someone standing with a brush, or for someone who had all the time in the world with a finger dipped in—paint? No, not paint. Jason leaned in, nose wrinkling. Copper. He didn't touch it. He didn't need to. The air told him.
"Dude?" Ryan said, lifting his head, voice groggy and sanded down. "What are you doing?"
Jason didn't answer. His phone vibrated on the nightstand.
SEE YOU SOON.
The text sat under the other texts like a cousin. Jason looked at the words on the door again and saw something new: the bottom of the E in WELCOME had a tiny hair caught in it. Human hair, light brown, short. The kind that would be almost invisible if you were painting fast with something sticky and didn't believe in trace evidence.
He moved to the window and checked the latch without letting his hands shake. The latch was half-set. You could make it look locked if you didn't care about the click. The sill had a smear of dirt at one side and not on the other. Someone had come in. Someone had left.
He closed it properly. He set a glass on the sill, exactly where the latch would rattle it if the window were touched. He turned off the lamp and let the room become the idea of a room again.
Ryan mumbled, "What's on the door?"
"Art," Jason said. It was a joke he didn't feel. "Don't touch it."
"Okay." Ryan exhaled into sleep again with the faith of a person who has never had to earn safety.
Jason lay back and watched the closet until the closet stopped being a door and started being a black rectangle that could hide anything but mostly just kept his shirts from wrinkling. He waited for footsteps from the hall and heard none. He waited for the glass on the sill to sing and it didn't. He waited for his body to remember how to be a body and not a map of exits.
At 3:03 a.m., the glass rattled anyway.
Not because the window moved. Because a voice, soft as a mother's when she doesn't want to wake the baby, pressed itself against the glass from the outside and spoke through a slit of air he had not seen:
"Don't let them get close, Jason."
He was across the room before he could count, lamp on, blind up. The alley below yawned. Nothing moved. No footsteps. No coat. No mask.
But on the outside of the pane, written backward so it would be correct to someone looking in from the street, in the same sticky, copper-brown:
KNOCK KNOCK
Jason stared until the letters swam. He forced his breath to obey. He turned away from the window and picked up his phone. He did not text back.
He set a chair under the doorknob. He didn't sleep. He listened to the building and waited for morning to find them.
⸻
Morning After
News has a smell. Coffee breath, cheap printer ink, sweat of people who like adrenaline as long as it comes with bylines. Elena caught up to him outside Knox's building with a camera bag bouncing against her hip.
"You look like you didn't sleep," she said. "And before you say 'I look like that every day,' I'm telling you it's different today."
"Someone broke into our room," Jason said. He didn't mean to say it. He did anyway. "They wrote on the closet. And the window."
Elena stopped walking. "Did you call campus police?"
"Not yet."
"Because…?"
"Because I like being able to go to class without handcuffs," he said, and her eyes went soft the way people's do when they slot you into a story they know. He almost resented it. He almost wanted to earn it.
"We'll do it together," she said. "I know Vance. She doesn't hate me yet."
"Yet."
Elena glanced at his face and didn't say Don't worry or It will be okay. "Tell me everything," she said instead, the three words that had built churches and scandals.
They walked. Jason told her about the glass on the sill, about the human hair, about the latch that looked closed without being closed. He told her about the voice through the window, and he told her the exact words because exact words are the only thing worth saying.
"Don't let them get close," Elena repeated quietly. "Them like… us?"
"Anyone," Jason said. "Everyone."
"You think they're warning you or warning me?"
"Yes."
Elena laughed once, short, like a cough in church. "Okay, Sherlock. New rule. We don't move alone on campus after dark. I'll text you when I walk anywhere. You text me when you—"
"No," Jason said, too fast. "No rules that make us… near."
"Near?"
"Attached."
Elena's face went still. "Copy," she said, reporter sharpness sliding into place like a visor. "We're colleagues, then."
"I didn't say—" He stopped. "We're… careful."
A student zipped past on a scooter and yelled, "MURDER CLUB!" like it was a chant. Somewhere a professor told a class to put phones away and meant it. The day had the gall to be bright.
At the admin building, Jason and Elena stepped into the cool lobby with its portraits of donors and its free brochures about wellness. Detective Vance was already there, talking to a dean whose head seemed to have been polished at the barber.
"Campus reporting," Elena said, raising her hand like a kid in a class where the teacher still wanted questions.
Vance gave Jason a look that said of course. "Tell me about your door," she said.
He did. He left nothing out, including the hair. Vance wrote things down without moving her head. "And you didn't touch the writing."
"No."
"Good." She chewed on the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. "You know what I hate about bleach?"
"It ruins everything and people think it erases," Jason said.
Vance almost smiled. "We're going to get along fine in a way that makes me nervous."
The dean said something about parents and donors and optics. Vance ignored him so completely that ignoring itself had dignity. "Mr. Hale, Miss Cruz—don't go hunting. You'll think you're not. You will be."
"We won't," Jason said, and Elena nodded so dutifully he nearly laughed.
Vance's eyes became briefly human. "And if someone tells you not to let them get close, assume they're talking about me, too."
⸻
Cliffhanger
That night, rain came and made everything slick, and you'd think the world cleaning itself would help. It didn't. The library opened after the crime scene techs decided pictures had stolen enough of it. A candle appeared on the steps with Amanda Price's name tucked under a rock. Someone wrote angel on a note and meant it.
Jason walked alone because he believed in rules until his body didn't. He passed the dark mouth of an alley and saw his own reflection in a shallow puddle: pale, too sharp, eyes with the shut door of a person who owes too much.
His pocket vibrated. He looked without slowing.
SOON.
He looked up. Across the street, in the window of a second-floor apartment, a mask watched him from behind the glass—cracked porcelain, the fracture crawling away from one empty eye like a spider. The figure raised a hand and tapped the glass twice with something hard.
Knock. Knock.
A woman exiting the bodega laughed at a joke on her phone. A bus exhaled. The mask disappeared from the window like a card trick.
Jason's phone chimed again, and this time there was a photo: his dorm room, taken from inside the closet, the shutter peeking through the crack between door and jamb. Jason asleep on his side. Ryan sprawled, face mashed into pillow. In the lower right of the frame, a dark sleeve and a slice of white porcelain reflected in the mirror's edge.
Jason felt his heart do the wrong work. He forced air in, out, like a machine you fix by reading the manual aloud.
Above him, a drip found the back of his neck through a hole in the awning, cold enough to be a finger. He stepped forward into rain that made the world smear. He didn't run. He didn't look back. It was too late for either. He walked toward the dorm with his shadow stretched thin and his jaw set and his eyes scanning every window for the next white oval that would be a face and not a face.
In the dark behind him, in the alley where puddles collected a cheap moon, a voice as soft as paper turning whispered from no particular direction:
"Let's see how many you can lose."