THE BELLS were ringing the curfew warning when Ava finally made it up to the top level of the school. She’d left with plenty of time to spare but the staircases had stretched, endless, and a menacing gloom clogged the way. It was exactly the kind of gloom one could imagine mals lurking in, waiting hungrily to leap out at an unwary climber, which made it doubly dangerous because the climber wasn’t unwary, actually, they were perfectly wary and imagining in crystal clarity all the toothy things that could be hiding in that menacing gloom, and since the mals wanted to be there, and the climbers expected them to be there, it was practically ordained that some mals be lurking in a menacing gloom. Except that Ava had been climbing for-fucking-ever and hadn’t met a single one. She wasn’t surprised, exactly. It was a dick move, but it was exactly the kind of dick move the stairs—the school—pulled when it wanted you to give up and turn around, usually because it was busy doing something awful somewhere and didn’t want to be interrupted. Which only made Ava more determined to get upstairs. Finally, she spilled out onto the freshman ring what felt like a million steps and half an hour later, sweaty and panting, to the sound of the ten-minute warning bell.

‘What took you so long?’ Diego demanded when she got to his cell, the little shit.