Chapter 1: Penta Kill in Homeroom

Twenty minutes before the exam, Room 214 smelled like lemon cleaner and somebody’s nervous sweat.

Priya came back from the bathroom with her hands still wet. She held them out in front of her, fingers spread, like she’d forgotten what the paper towels were for. “They’re already staging in the gym,” she said. “The hall monitor said the west doors are shut.”

Staging. Like it was a dance.

Devon had his chair turned all the way around, both arms folded over the back of it, telling the three rows behind him a story he’d already told twice. He kept his voice flat.

“Three of them. Last year. Seniors.” He looked at the floor between his shoes. “Hanging ghosts. You know what one does when a kid runs? It doesn’t chase him. It doesn’t have to. It gets to the other end of the hall first.”

Nobody asked him to go on. He went on anyway.

“My cousin says the burning ones are worse. He says when they’re finished there’s nothing to put in the bag. They don’t find a body. They find the place where he was standing, and it isn’t the color of the rest of the hall.”

Two rows up, a girl put her head down on her desk and started crying without any noise, just her shoulders going.

“Enough.” Mr. Hollis didn’t raise his voice. He’d been teaching long enough that he didn’t have to. He had a tablet in one hand and a marker in the other, and he stood where the light hit him. “Phones in your bags. Water bottles stay here, you can’t carry them in. Devon, turn around.”

The chairs scraped. The room got the particular quiet of thirty people trying not to be noticed.

“Check-in is at the gym doors, alphabetical, and I’ll be at the front of the line, so if you don’t see me, you’re not where you’re supposed to be.” He read something off the tablet, then stopped reading it and said it again in his own words, which was how you could tell he meant it. “If you get separated from the group, you do not come looking for me. You go to the second staging point and you wait there. If you can’t get to the second staging point, you stop moving and you keep your mouth shut until somebody with a badge finds you. Clear?”

“Yes, Mr. Hollis,” the room said, in about nine different keys.

“Nobody in this room is going to be a hero. Heroes are what we call a student we have to go in after.”

Behind him, on the board, someone had written the date and, underneath, in a different hand, GOOD LUCK, which somebody had crossed out and then written again.

At the back, in the corner where the fluorescent tube had been flickering since September, Milo Grant had his phone braced against his pencil case and his thumbs moving.

He was losing. He’d been losing for eleven minutes, which in GRAVEBOUND was two team fights and a lane. His jungler had gone quiet in the chat — not angry, just quiet, which was somehow worse — and the enemy carry was one item away from being a problem nobody on Milo’s team could solve.

The wave hit the tower. He saw the flank coming half a second before it came.

He went in anyway.

“Penta—“ His voice cracked across the whole room. “Penta kill. Penta kill—“

The chair went up on two legs. He got a hand on the desk edge and hauled himself back over it before gravity could finish the argument, and the phone came down flat on his pencil case, faceup, and there it was. VICTORY.

For three seconds he looked at the word the way you’d look at a word in a language you’d spoken your whole life until this morning.

The kitchen was gone. That was the part he kept coming back to. A kitchen with a drawer that never shut all the way, a bus that came every twenty minutes, a phone in his pocket with a cracked corner, a town where the worst thing that could happen to a person was a bad grade — all of it there, and then all of it on the other side of glass.

What the body had brought with it was paperwork. Grant, Milo, on a roster in the office downstairs. A seat in the back corner of Room 214, second floor, Halcyon North. A birthday in March. A number.

What it hadn’t brought was a single page of the coursework.

He knew things nobody in this room had taught him. He knew that ghosts came in surges the way weather came in fronts, and that a surge could take a town between dinner and dark. He knew that what was left of the map was a dozen places worth dying over, and that the reason people still lived in them was a profession with no respectable equivalent — people who signed their names to a dead thing and made it fight. In the old life he’d have called them something stupider. Here they had a union.

And he knew what everyone in the room had known since they were five, when a woman in a white coat put a sticker on their hand and told their parents the number.

The number didn’t change. You got it once and you kept it. Zero meant you went and did something else with your life. Half meant you could bind half a ghost — a wreck, a remnant — and if you ever reached for a whole one it would eat you and the report would say it was your fault. One meant a real ghost. Two was average. Three got you looked at on the street.

Milo’s was a half.

He turned the phone over, screen down, and pressed both hands flat on the desk.

Two rows up, somebody whispered did you see his screen, and somebody else whispered he’s playing, he’s actually playing, is he insane — and Milo discovered that being thought insane was, on the whole, restful. Nobody was going to ask the crazy kid for an answer.

Rubber soles came down the aisle and stopped at the corner of his desk.

Mr. Hollis had walked down without hurrying. He looked at the phone, then at Milo, and he didn’t take it.

“Grant.”

“Mr. Hollis.”

“I could take that.” He nodded at the phone. “I’m not going to. You know why? Because in about fifteen minutes you’re going to walk into a building full of things that don’t care whether you’re paying attention, and I’d rather you learn that lesson here, in front of me, than in there, in front of them.”

“Can I get that in writing?”

A few people laughed, low and quick, and cut themselves off.

Hollis let it go. He had a way of letting things go that felt like a bill being added up somewhere.

“Since you’re so comfortable,” he said. “Answer a question.”

The room turned around.

“Burning ghost. You come around a corner, the room in front of you is already on fire, it’s standing in the middle of it, and there’s a door behind you. What do you do?”

Milo opened his mouth to say he didn’t know, because he didn’t, because whatever had put him in this chair had not seen fit to include the textbook.

And then the air a foot in front of his face changed.

HOST ARRIVAL CONFIRMED.
CONDITION NOT MET: MAKE THE TEACHER BREAK.
REWARD ON COMPLETION: THE BREAK SYSTEM.

He flinched. Nobody else did. Devon was still looking at the back of the room. Priya was picking at her cuticle. Mr. Hollis was waiting with the patience of a man who had already decided what the answer would be.

The letters sat there with no thickness to them at all.

He read them twice. MAKE THE TEACHER BREAK. The word sat there doing nothing, meaning everything.

Milo looked at Hollis. Hollis looked back, arms folded, tablet under one elbow, entirely unaware that there was anything in the room worth looking at except a sullen kid in the back row.

Milo had no theory. He had no notes, no lecture, nothing but a roster and a number and a phone he’d just won a game on. But he’d spent a whole childhood being funny at the wrong moment, in front of people with authority and no sense of humor, and that, at least, transferred.

He stood up.

“Boiler room,” he said.

Somebody said what.

“Burning ghost. It’s already on fire, right? You don’t fight that, that’s free heat.” He put his hands out like he was showing a floor plan to a customer. “Bind it, walk it down to the basement, chain it to the furnace. Winter in this city lasts five months. You’d never pay a gas bill again. You could heat the gym.”

The room came apart.

It wasn’t a polite laugh. It was thirty people who had been holding a scream in their chests for a week and had just found out it could come out the other way. The kid by the window laughed until he had to put his face in his sleeve, and came up coughing. Two rows over, a boy brought his hand down flat on the desk, once, hard, and a pencil case jumped and pens rolled, and one of them went off the edge and hit the floor by Milo’s shoe. In the front row, the girl with the two pins in her hair caught a pen without looking at it, set it down, and didn’t laugh.

Milo waited for the letters to do something.

They didn’t.

Mr. Hollis waited. He waited until the last of it was out of the room, and then he waited a little longer, and the quiet that came after was quieter than the room had been all period. His jaw moved once. He took a breath in through his nose and held it, and the marker in his hand stopped moving.

CONDITION MET.
THE BREAK SYSTEM BOUND.
BREAK POINTS: 60.

Milo felt it happen behind his sternum, a click like a joint going back into place.

Hollis walked back up the aisle to the board. In the upper left corner he wrote, small and neat, the way you’d write it on an envelope: GRANT, M. Under that: DETENTION. Under that: report to me before the exam.

BREAK POINTS MAY BE SPENT TO RAISE YOUR BOND CAP.
NO CEILING.

Milo stopped breathing for a second.

Sixty points. Sixty points of what, at what rate, and how many points was a whole ghost, and could you buy half a point, because half a point was the entire difference between the life he’d been handed and —

No ceiling.

The half didn’t have to stay a half.

He looked up. Hollis had capped the marker and turned around.

“Somewhere in that,” Hollis said, “there was a fact. Not the boiler room. The fact is that a burning ghost’s heat is not what kills you.” He looked at Milo down the length of the room. “You’ll write me the rest of it and bring it to my desk before the exam, and then I’ll know whether you’re as stupid as you’re working very hard to look. Sit.”

Milo sat.

The system text had gone. He could still feel where it had been, the way you feel a step that isn’t there.

Devon was staring at him. Priya was staring at him. The girl with the pins had turned her head a fraction, and then turned it back to the door, where it had been all along.

Milo reached down, picked up the pen by his shoe, and set it on the corner of his desk. Then he looked at the board, at the three lines of Hollis’s handwriting, one under another.

Mr. Hollis set the marker in the tray and looked down the rows of desks.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s try that again. Burning ghost.”