February 20, 2007.
People vanish.
That's not really news, is it?
People vanish every day. Probably happening right now. Somewhere, someone's forgetting to come home for dinner.
The newspapers like to soften it, call it missing persons or unexplained disappearances—as if the mystery sounds prettier when you wear a bowtie and use long words. But what they're really saying is:
"We don't know where they went.
We don't know how it happened.
We don't even know if they're alive.
Good luck sleeping tonight."
That day, I came home from school, and my parents weren't there.
Which was fine.
They were firefighters. Not exactly a nine-to-five. Emergency calls, overnight shifts, whole days spent running into buildings that want them dead. That's just the job.
But my parents were fine, i'm talking about a different kind of vanishing.
No bodies.
No warnings.
Silence.
I told my sisters I was home and went straight to my room like nothing was wrong. Routines are good for pretending the world isn't falling apart.
Of course, that was a mistake.
If I'd known what was coming, I might've done something—anything—different.
But I didn't.
And so, life went on.
Until March 26th.
And by April 7th, the world had cracked wide open.
Spring break.
When I learned anyone can talk to the dead.
Lucky me, huh?
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's rewind a bit.
—
A couple days before everything started, I overheard whispers at school.
"Swear to god, people digging up graves at night…"
"My cousin saw it. They take something. Relics or treasures, I dunno."
"Don't mess with them. Ren. Daigo Ren. Him and his crew. Dangerous guys."
Names. Faces. Shadows.
That's how you know gossip's real.
Still, I didn't care.
Grave robbers, relics, violent gangs—oh no, how terrifying. What's for lunch?
I shrugged it off.
If I've learned one thing, it's that the living are plenty scary already.