The cold hand on my shoulder belonged to Jaxon.
"Hey," he said quietly. "Breathe."
I hadn't realized I'd stopped.
He guided me forward with the rest of the Southern group while my brain ran in circles like a hamster on a broken wheel.
We were assigned rooms. Small but decent with stone walls, two beds each, and a narrow window. I was paired with Mira, who walked in and scanned the room. She said nothing I didn't expect her to. Silence from her felt less like coldness and more like a fortified wall. I didn't push.
A knock came ten minutes later. A strangely looking boy stood in the doorway, panting. He wore an expensive cloak, which was already wrinkled and dirty.
"I got lost," he said. No apology. Just a statement, like being late to his own possible death was an inconvenience.
"You're on our block," Jaxon said flatly. "Are you with us?"
He asked the boy.
"Well, first of all, I'm Dani Rizzol, and no, I was kind of late, so I was assigned to this block."
He said stylishly, like he was the main character of a popular book
"Ok if you say so."
"What? Got a problem with that." Dani raised a brow.
"No, as long as you stick to the rules," Jaxon said, turning away
Soon, lunch was served in a grand hall with high vaulted ceilings and long wooden tables. It looked like something out of a medieval painting, except the food was actually good roasted meat, fresh bread, and fruit I didn't recognize. We sat together, the six of us, and for a moment I almost forgot the mask and its horrible voice.
I scanned the hall, and my eyes caught sight of a professor with plump, rosy cheeks, wearing a flower dress that felt aggressively cheerful. She stood at the front and explained the Academy's values, Excellence, Unity, and its Legacy. She also spoke about the library, the training grounds, and the alliance ceremonies between kingdoms.
She made it sound like a prestigious boarding school crossed with a diplomatic summit.
Isaac whispered to me, "This doesn't seem so bad."
I wanted to believe him.
Dinner was quieter. The hall felt different at night, the torches cast longer shadows, and the enchanted ceiling above showed no stars, just endless black. I ate unconsciously, barely tasting anything.
I got up to find water and bumped directly into a wall, or I thought it was a wall, turns out it was a person, a freaking person in my head. I wondered how someone could be as hard as a wall. I raise my head.
Kasai Holar looked down at me from what felt like a mile above. Up close, his skin was flawless, unnervingly so, and those violet eyes with their red flecks didn't reflect the torchlight. They absorbed it.
"Watch yourself, Southern," he said. His voice was low, almost lazy, like he couldn't decide if I was worth the effort of being cruel.
"Sorry," I muttered, stepping back.
His eyes dropped to the necklace at my collarbone. They lingered for one second, two, then snapped back to my face. Something shifted behind them. Not warmth or recognition, more like he'd found a puzzle piece he wasn't expecting.
He walked away without another word.
I stood there, my heart pounding, until Ferine grabbed my arm and pulled me back to the table.
"Stop staring at the enemy," she hissed.
Bedtime was announced by the same porcelain mask, which reappeared silently, its hollow eyes staring at nothing. "All students will retire to their quarters immediately. Compliance is mandatory."
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Mira was already asleep or pretending to be. The book wasn't there. It had never come with me. I was alone inside a story I didn't know the ending of, and tomorrow was the first test, and I didn't know what that meant because the pages were blank.
I didn't sleep. I stared until my eyes burned, and eventually, exhaustion pulled me under like a hand over my mouth.
Cold.
That was the first thing.
Not the cold of a drafty room. Wet cold. The wrong kind of cold.
I opened my eyes, and my feet were submerged in Ice-cold water, ankle-deep, dark, and rippling slightly from something I couldn't see. I sat up so fast my head slammed into something metal. A helmet. I was wearing a helmet. Combat gear, lightweight, fitted, all in white.
I hadn't put this on. I had gone to sleep in a nightgown.
My scream caught in my throat because I wasn't in my room. I was in a corridor with stone walls, narrow, dripping. The ceiling was low and covered in faintly glowing moss that flickered like dying stars. But beautiful and horrifying. Before I noticed the water was rising.
Around me, students were waking up the same way I did, groggy, confused, then screaming.
"What the hell?" someone yelled.
"Where are we? WHERE ARE WE?"
"This wasn't…. I was in BED…" another one yelled.
There was no staff, no teachers. Just forty-something teenagers in combat gear standing in rising water while the walls dripped and the moss flickered and somewhere in the dark, something clicked.
Power-driven. Musical something that was getting closer.
Then the mask appeared. Not in the sky this time. It was projected on the wet stone wall in front of us, massive and grinning with its eyeless face.
"The Siren's Silence. The water rises. The doors are sealed. To escape, sing the harmonic tone inscribed on each exit. The tone changes every ten minutes. Sirens patrol the water. They are blind. They hunt by sound. Fatalities are expected. Begin."
The projection vanished.
"Did it say fatalities again?" Isaac whimpered.
Nobody answered because downstream, a boy screamed. The sound cut off abruptly. Then we heard water splashing. Something clicked and whirred. The water downstream turned faintly pink.
The silence that followed was the worst thing I'd ever heard.
Students started crying. Someone shoved past me, slipping in the water, falling face-first. Dani Rizzol flickered and disappeared for thirty seconds, then reappeared, shaking, because the Sirens didn't use eyes. That's how I knew his powers were invincible
A hand grabbed my arm so hard I almost screamed.
"D-d-did you hear that?" A boy with mousy brown hair and cracked glasses materialized beside me, practically glued to my side. He was clutching a small wooden charm shaped like a fish. "Was that a rule? I didn't catch that I wasn't listening. Were there more rules?"
"I don't know," I whispered.
Jaxon appeared through the crowd, soaking wet, his honey-brown eyes were sharp and scanning the place. He gathered us, me, Fin, Mira, Ferine, Isaac, and Dani into a tight knot. It was like he knew exactly what he was doing.
"No one speaks above a whisper," he said low and Steady. The calmest thing in this nightmare. "Stay close. Move when I move."
We moved.