I stopped breathing.
The fog shifted. Just slightly. The way thick fog moves when something large and silent passes through it without disturbing it the way a person would.
Azure told me to stay, I thought, standing completely still in the dark outside Vale 2 with a dead boy slumped against the wall and every light on campus extinguished. She knew. And all the students knew. Lights off, doors closed, no noise. Not coincidence. Survival protocol.
They all know what moves at night here.
[Entity returning. Do not move.]
I waited. I had run my whole life. Twenty years on the plain, running from things that were faster and stronger and more numerous. I had run from level three infected and level five coordinated packs and from Mute's teleportation in a Hogsby corridor at two in the morning.
I was level seventeen now. I was done running first.
