In the icy corridors of Aurora Academy, Aeris clings to her routine while whispers from the recent incident twist through every lesson and glance. As new rules tighten and friendships are tested, she struggles to keep her head down—even as something inside her begins to shift. Rivalry, uncertainty, and the chill of being watched settle over a day when being ordinary is the hardest mask to wear.
The morning frost was relentless. It crawled up the windows of Aurora Academy, branching into white veins that resisted the electric hum of the vents. Even inside, the air felt raw. Students hunched deeper into their mismatched layers: patched coats, old world military sweaters, scarves in family colors, gloves traded from the campus market. Aeris, as always, was easy to miss—her uniform a study in anonymity. Blue-gray sweater, sleeves longer than regulation, collar buttoned high. No name patch, no family crest. Her skirt fell to mid-calf, heavy with the weight of repeated washings, her boots scuffed and unadorned. Where others wore themselves like banners, Aeris wore absence. She moved like the shadow between beams of morning light.
The incident in the cafeteria had become story, but not certainty. Some said Rowan had led the charge. Others insisted the instructors had been the true heroes. Sera, loyal and sharp-eyed, swore that Aeris had pulled someone out of the shimmer, but even she could not explain what had really happened.
In truth, there was nothing for anyone to see. No one remembered a glow, no one had caught anything more than a girl stepping into the haze, emerging with another student gasping at her side. When the new warning signs went up—REPORT HAZARDS. KEEP MASKS ON IN SHARED SPACES—the story grew, not clearer, but stranger. How had she done it? Was it luck, panic, or something the instructors refused to explain?
The only thing that lingered was confusion. Aeris became a puzzle. She did not become important.
In biology, she took her usual seat at the edge of the room, near the warped window that let in just enough weak light to remind her of the cold. Sera slid in beside her, curls tucked under a hand-knit cap, glasses fogged from the run down the corridor. “They’re saying the inspector’s making rounds again,” she whispered, pressing her gloved hands between her knees. “Rowan’s already volunteered for every demo.”
Rowan Vale stood at the front, back straight, hands folded behind her. Her uniform was altered for precision: shirt sleeves rolled up, utility vest bristling with pockets, boots laced high. Her hair was cropped short and straight, jawline tense. There was nothing soft in her profile, not even when she answered the instructor’s questions with crisp, perfect authority. If she looked at Aeris, it was only as one looks at a loose thread—something to be trimmed.
Instructor Idris began the lesson with the usual dry authority. The liaison from the central office—a tall, silent figure in a charcoal suit, slate tucked under one arm—stood at the back, watching the class with a gaze that seemed to weigh more than record.
Aeris kept her head down, tracing the outline of her hand beneath the sweater. She could still feel the echo of that cafeteria day—a strange, low hum under her skin, gone now but not forgotten. Her body remembered what her mind tried to deny.
Rowan’s voice broke the hush. “Some of us have to move on, sir. Can we focus on the experiment?” Her words were clipped, and a few students laughed, but there was no humor in her face. Sera bristled, but Aeris shook her head—better not to draw fire.
As the class turned to microscopes and notes, Aeris tried to lose herself in the pattern of routine. Root systems, decay rates, filtered soil. Her hands shook as she worked, not enough for anyone but Sera to notice. Sera passed her a slide, whispering, “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” Aeris lied, eyes on the soil sample, jaw set.
Idris and the liaison circled the room, checking results. When they paused by Aeris’s station, the inspector’s eyes lingered—not in suspicion, but as if cataloguing absence itself.
Class ended with a clatter of chairs. “Vale, stay behind,” Idris said. Rowan nodded, showing neither surprise nor irritation. Aeris slipped from the room, sleeves hiding her fists, pulse drumming in her ears.
The corridor was a slow-moving river of students. Aeris merged with the flow, blending into the crowd. She caught bits of conversation, all vague:
“She just ran in—why’d they let her?”
“I heard the spores settled. They don’t do that, right?”
“Maybe she’s just lucky. Or crazy.”
Most didn’t even notice her. When they did, their eyes slipped past. Aeris was a placeholder in every memory, a name nearly forgotten on every attendance sheet.
Sera hurried to catch up. “Ignore them. Rowan’s making a point of reminding everyone it wasn’t you alone. Says you were ‘out of position’.”
Aeris shrugged. “She’s right.” She wanted to disappear into the comfort of routine, but there was a strange pressure behind her ribs—a sense that the world was about to change, even if no one else could see it.
Lunch passed in a blur. The cafeteria was full of brittle light and the smell of bleach. New safety notices crowded the walls. Aeris sat with Sera in their usual spot, eating slowly, listening to the quiet swirl of voices around them. Rowan was surrounded by her usual circle—upperclassmen, a few instructors, always the center, always controlled.
Afterwards, in the stairwell, Aeris felt the hum return, crawling along her arms. She flexed her fingers, watched the veins rise beneath the skin, then vanish. Her mask was holding, but only just.
She ducked into the bathroom—a narrow, tiled space, always cold, lit by a flickering strip of LEDs. She locked herself in, alone. Her breathing came shallow. She ran water over her wrists, watched the droplets gather and fall, feeling for the edge between what was hers and what was not.
The hum built, a static ache in her bones. Her vision blurred, then sharpened. She gripped the edge of the sink. Pain flared up her arm, sharp and electric. Her hands twisted. The sweater’s sleeves tore at the seam. When she looked up, the mirror showed something she could barely comprehend.
Her eyes burned gold, pupils wide and bright as embers. Thin lines of light ran under her skin, etching her face with new patterns—unfamiliar, wild, not her own. Her mouth twisted. Her jaw seemed to narrow, teeth sharper, lips dark. Her hair, usually flat and tight, stood out as if magnetized.
Even her body—the disguise she’d wrapped herself in—was betraying her. Her hands clawed, bones shifting under the skin, her sweater now a ruin of torn threads. In this moment, no one would have recognized her. The careful anonymity, the posture, the bland face—all erased, replaced by something ancient and hungry.
A sudden, alien sense pressed at the edge of her mind. Not thought—instinct. Something far away, vast and seeking, a presence she could not see but could feel. It moved like a storm on the horizon, its attention grazing her, hungry but not yet here.
Aeris gasped, clamping a hand to her mouth.
The stall door creaked behind her. She whirled. A younger student—small, lost in an oversized scarf and unfamiliar colors—stood frozen at the threshold, eyes wide as saucers. She saw not Aeris, but the thing in the mirror: a flicker of bioluminescence, a monster reflected in broken glass.
For a heartbeat, the girl stared—then turned and fled, the bathroom door banging wide. The sound echoed in Aeris’s skull. She was alone, but not safe.
Aeris pressed her back to the wall, forcing breath into her lungs. The glow faded, the pain receded, her hands became hands again. She yanked the ruined sweater sleeves down, gathered herself piece by piece.
By the time she left, her face was once more the one no one noticed. The torn cuff was tucked under her palm. Her eyes were only tired, not strange. She melted into the corridor, letting the world forget her again.
The rest of the day passed in fragments. In class, Sera passed her notes—“You look pale.” Aeris only shook her head. She could feel the secret burning under her skin, could sense the question in Rowan’s appraising stare.
Rowan’s voice cut through math class, correcting Aeris’s answer with cool precision. “That’s not the right method. You missed a step.” No one laughed, but a few students glanced over, curious, then looked away.
When the bell rang, Aeris escaped to the library. She found a corner seat in the stacks, surrounded by the smell of old paper and dust. She read without seeing, her mind circling the memory of the bathroom, the shape in the mirror, the look on the girl’s face.
Could anyone tie the creature in the bathroom to her? She replayed every detail: the ruined sweater, the wild hair, the unnatural glow. No name, no uniform, no mask—only fear and a flash of gold. If the story spread, it would become just another rumor—something seen in panic, something no one would believe.
But Aeris knew. The mask was thinner than she had imagined.
As the sun set, she slipped from the library, heading home through streets gone blue in the evening frost. In every window, she caught her own reflection—a shape behind glass, sometimes hers, sometimes not. Somewhere beyond the city’s edge, that vast, dangerous instinct still moved. She could feel it even now, threading through her dreams and her waking. It was waiting. And next time, the mask might not be enough.
The walk home was colder than usual, the sun already fading from the narrow city sky. Aeris let her footsteps slow as she approached the apartment—a converted prefab on the upper floor, its windows frosted at the edges, faint light spilling out behind reinforced glass. The building was quiet, voices muffled behind thick doors. Aurora’s residential blocks never felt quite safe, but here, the air was at least familiar.
Jenna was already in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back with practical precision. A pot simmered on the small induction burner, filling the room with the scent of roots and ration broth. Her glasses slid down her nose as she glanced up.
“You’re late,” Jenna said, not unkindly, just factual. “Detour for supplies, or…?”
“Library.” Aeris shrugged off her coat, folding it over a chair. “Needed to study.”
Jenna’s gaze lingered a moment too long. She always noticed what others missed—creases in Aeris’s sweater, the smudge of dirt on her wrist, a note of tension in her walk. But she didn’t push. Instead, she turned back to chopping thin slices of tuber. “Dinner in ten. Wash up. And check your sleeves—I can mend those tonight if you want.”
Aeris stilled. “It’s nothing,” she lied, hiding the torn cuff in her fist. “Just caught on a locker.”
Jenna said nothing, but Aeris saw her eyes narrow behind the lenses, assessing, calculating. “Alright. If you want to talk—about the inspector, the drills, anything—you know where I am.”
Aeris nodded, silent. She washed her hands, scrubbing at the faded light marks on her skin, staring at her own reflection in the warped metal of the tap. Just a girl, tired, her braid coming loose.
They ate quietly, Jenna glancing at the comm screen as news scrolled past.
“There’s talk of more inspections next week,” Jenna said, her tone even but eyes attentive. “And winter’s not letting up. Listen, you should keep a spare change of clothes in your bag. Layers, extra mask, something practical. It’s too easy to get caught unprepared with all the drills and these new safety checks.”
She paused, then added, “I know you hate the weight, but it’s better than being stuck in something soaked or torn. Trust me, it helps.”
Aeris nodded, feigning indifference, but the advice caught on something real. She glanced at the ragged seam of her sweater and tucked it deeper beneath her arm. She imagined a spare set—looser, darker, less memorable, maybe even a different style of jacket—hidden in her satchel, just in case. If she needed to disappear, or if something… happened again, she could change, erase the evidence before anyone noticed.
After dinner, while Jenna cleared the dishes, Aeris quietly dug out an old pair of gloves, a gray tunic, and a nondescript scarf from the back of her closet. She folded them small and slipped them into the bottom of her bag, fingers trembling just a little.
Just in case, she told herself.
In a tiny dormitory room near the south stairwell, Mira—a first year, recently transferred, still new to the patterns of Aurora—sat curled up in bed, knees to chest, hands twisted in her scarf. She stared at the wall, heartbeat loud as footsteps in her ears.
She tried to replay what she’d seen in the bathroom. The memory slid away, fragments already out of order: a splash of water, a light too bright to be from the bulbs, a shape in the mirror that wasn’t a girl—not really. Gold eyes, jagged shadows, a feeling like cold air rushing through her bones.
Mira had run, not looking back. Now, in the half-dark, she wondered if she’d imagined it, if the nerves of starting at a new school had twisted her memory. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen something meant to stay hidden.
She pulled her blanket tighter, staring at the frost creeping along the window. Maybe she would tell someone tomorrow. Maybe she wouldn’t.
Much later, Aeris woke from uneasy sleep, the room dense with quiet and cold. She sat up slowly, heart drumming for no reason she could name. The city outside was silent, rooftops painted with the faintest silver, the sky faded to violet. Lights blinked far off on the horizon—just a suggestion of life against the winter dark.
She pressed her hand to the glass, feeling the chill bleed into her bones. Her reflection floated in the window: tired eyes, loose braid, nothing monstrous. She watched her breath fog, then clear.
But just as her eyes began to close, she felt it—a shiver threading through the marrow of the world, impossibly faint. Not a sound. Not a presence outside her door. Something else, far beyond the city, across old borders and broken landscapes, a ripple in the dark. A warning that belonged to no language she knew, more like a change in pressure, a shift in the wind before a storm.
Aeris held her breath, counting heartbeats. The feeling faded, leaving only the soft tick of pipes and Jenna’s careful movements in the next room.
Tomorrow, she told herself, everything would go back to normal. Tomorrow, she would put on her mask and move unnoticed through the halls.
But tonight, in the blue hush, Aeris let herself feel the shiver from that distant place, and wonder what it might mean.