Chapter 1 The Corridor That Remembers

The first bell at Blackthorn Academy doesn’t just ring.

It rolls through the stone like a memory, a low vibration that seems to pass through the walls, the floor, the railings, then slide under Anil’s skin as if it has been looking for her all along. The sound doesn’t echo the way it should in a building this old. It settles. It recognizes.

She pauses just inside the main gate, suitcase bumping the back of her heel, and looks up.

Blackthorn rises out of the mist like somebody took a cathedral, a fortress, and an overachieving ivy plant and mashed them together. Arched windows, slate roofs, spires that claw at a sky too gray to be morning or evening. Crosses carved into stone. Gargoyles that might have been decorative once, before time shaved their faces into something less friendly.

“Okay,” Mira announces at her side, hiking her backpack higher on her shoulder, “creepy castle rating: eleven out of ten. But the lighting in the courtyard is insane. Your transfer post is going to destroy my engagement rate.”

Her voice snaps the moment back into motion. Students weave around them, lugging duffel bags, laughing too loudly, pretending this isn’t the strangest place they’ve ever seen. The air smells like wet leaves, old candlewax, something herbal, and underneath all of it—iron. Rain on stone. The inside of a church.

It shouldn’t feel familiar.

It does.

Anil swallows, shifting her grip on the suitcase handle. Her right wrist tingles, a tiny prickle under her sleeve. She rubs it without thinking, thumb tracing the faint raised line hidden by wool.

The scar is half a circle, like a broken ring. Her mother used to tell her she was born with it, then later said it was from some childhood accident. The story changed often enough that, eventually, Anil stopped asking.

“Hey,” Mira nudges her. “You good?”

“Yeah.” Anil forces a small smile. “Just… taking it in.”

“You’re doing the thousand-yard stare thing again.” Mira tips her head, studying the building. “Very ‘I’ve seen this in a dream.’ Or a horror movie. Or both.”

“Jetlag,” Anil says, even though they both know Thessaloniki is a bus ride away, not a transatlantic flight.

Mira grins like she expected that answer. “Sure. Come on, roomie. Before someone steals all the good outlets.”

They cross the courtyard together. Blackthorn looms higher as they approach, the bell in its tower still humming faintly, as if the sound hasn’t quite finished existing yet.

Inside, cool air presses against Anil’s cheeks. The entry hall is all stone arches and polished floors, the kind that make every footstep sound guilty. Portraits line the walls: saints, founders, donors, and a few whose names have been polished off the plaques. Some are painted, some carved in relief. More than one pair of eyes follows them as they pass.

They climb the central staircase, steps hollowed in the middle by centuries. The bannister is smooth under Anil’s fingers, worn down by hands that climbed here before her. She runs her palm along it anyway, feeling the indent of all those other grips. It’s like touching a riverbed and knowing, somehow, how the water used to flow.

Her wrist throbs once, quick as a heartbeat.

She pulls her hand back.

“You’re quiet,” Mira observes, not unkindly.

“I’m just—” Anil searches for a word that isn’t broken, haunted, or insane. “Overstimulated.”

“Relatable.” Mira swings her suitcase around a landing, reading the sign painted in neat gold letters: Dormitories – Third Floor. “But also, you walk like you’ve already done this. The stairs, the turns. I was fully prepared to get lost and die of starvation in a forgotten hallway, and you’re over here moving like Google Maps.”

“I’m guessing,” Anil says quickly. “It’s a corridor, not a labyrinth.”

“Wow, the bar for weird is high with you.” Mira’s tone is light, but she’s watching again. She does that—jokes first, listens second. “Good. You’ll fit right in.”

They reach their room at the end of a long, high-ceilinged hallway that smells faintly of floor cleaner and incense. The wooden door is carved with a small cross at eye level; someone has taped a printed paper over it that reads 3F – GIRLS’ DORM, the font cheerfully at war with the ancient door.

Mira shoulders inside first, hauling her suitcase in behind her.

The room is narrow but tall, two windows rising almost to the ceiling, framed by heavy curtains the color of old wine. Two narrow beds face each other across a strip of polished floor. There’s a wardrobe, two desks, and a sink in the corner with a mirror that’s seen better decades. The radiator under the window clicks quietly like it’s trying to make up its mind about working.

It smells like lavender and furniture polish. And something else—metal and dust and faint, ghosted music.

Mira crosses the room and flops onto the bed on the left with zero ceremony. “I claim this kingdom,” she declares. “But I’m emotionally open to sharing snacks.”

“That was a very fast decision,” Anil says, setting her suitcase at the foot of the right-hand bed.

“Oldest sibling survival instinct.” Mira grabs a pillow and hugs it to her chest. “Always stake your territory first, negotiate feelings later.”

Anil laughs despite herself. The sound bounces off the wooden beams overhead and comes back thinner, smaller.

Her gaze snags on something on her desk.

It’s a music box.

The kind people put on mantels in old movies: shaped like a miniature cathedral, complete with tiny sculpted spire and stained-glass windows painted in reds and blues. A thin crack runs down the front, through the suggestion of the door and along the base, as if lightning struck it.

She moves closer.

The air around it feels… denser. Quieter. Her wrist tingles again, stronger now, heat blooming under the skin.

“Creepy,” Mira says from the bed. “Bonus points if it plays a lullaby in Latin.”

“Was this… supposed to be here?” Anil asks.

“We’re in a converted monastery,” Mira says. “I’m sure there’s a whole graveyard of cursed decor in the basement. Maybe we won the lottery.”

Anil reaches for the box before she can talk herself out of it.

Her fingers brush the cracked roof.

The world slips.

For just a heartbeat, the room isn’t the same room.

The air goes hotter. Smoke, not lavender. The windows glow orange, not pale gray. Someone is shouting down the hall. The floor vibrates with running feet. The music box in her hand is whole and bright, playing a melody that aches with familiarity.

There’s a boy’s silhouette in the door—backlit, wings outlined in firelight, voice raw.

“You always find this room.”

Anil’s breath catches.

The vision is gone.

The walls are just walls again. The air is cool and too clean. Mira is still sprawled on the bed, scrolling through her phone, humming along to something tinny from her earbuds.

The music box sits quiet under Anil’s hand, as if it never did anything.

Her knees feel a little weak.

“Okay,” Mira says slowly, looking up now. “You just went full ‘I see dead people’ in the face. What happened?”

“I…” Anil’s voice comes out hoarse. “Nothing. I just didn’t sleep much.”

Sleep. Right. Sure.

She forces her fingers to move, lifting the music box gently. It’s heavier than it looks, as if something in it doesn’t want to be moved. There’s a small key at the side, brass worn dull with use.

“Don’t you dare,” Mira warns. “If that thing summons a nun, I’m dropping out.”

“We’re already here,” Anil says, more wry than she feels. “Might as well see if it works.”

She winds it carefully, one turn, then another. A third.

When she lets go, the box shudders faintly.

One single note spills out. High and clear, a thin bright thread of sound that seems to hang in the air longer than it should. It’s not a melody. Not even the beginning of one. Just… a tone. Simple. Pure.

And it feels like recognition.

The note fades.

The box goes still.

“That’s even worse,” Mira announces. “Haunted and underperforming.”

Anil manages a small smile. “We’re keeping it?”

“Oh yeah,” Mira says, already reaching for her phone. “This is content. ‘Top Ten Objects Definitely Trying to Eat My Soul: Number Three Will Make You Cry.’”

“Please never say that again.”

“No promises.” Mira stretches, then rolls off the bed. “Orientation in twenty. I want to see which teachers look like they drink holy water and which ones snort chalk dust. You coming?”

“In a minute,” Anil says. “I want to wash my face first.”

“Copy that. If you get possessed, text me before you start speaking in tongues. I need exclusive rights.”

She breezes out of the room, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Silence settles again, thicker this time.

Anil sets the music box back down, very gently, like she’s afraid of bruising it. The scar on her wrist is still buzzing, a bee trapped just under her skin. She pushes her sleeve up.

The mark is faint, a narrow pale line in the shape of a broken circle, slightly raised at the edges. Today, the skin around it looks a shade warmer, as if she pressed something hot there and pulled back too late.

She touches it with the tip of her finger.

A shiver runs up her arm.

“Stop being dramatic,” she tells it under her breath. “One of us has to be normal.”

She splashes water on her face at the sink, watching herself in the mirror. Dark hair escaping the braid she did on the bus. Olive skin that looks a little washed out in the weak dorm light. Eyes too big when she’s tired. Other than that, she looks like any other girl who got sent to a weird boarding school for reasons no adult wanted to fully explain.

It’s a good opportunity, her mother had said. A special program. They can help with… the episodes.

Anil had almost laughed. As if her panic attacks, déjà vu spirals, and dreams that didn’t feel like dreams were something a guidance counselor could file paperwork on.

She towel-dries her face and tries to steady her breathing.

It’s just an old school, she tells herself. Old buildings feel strange. Smells get trapped. Sound carries. You’re nervous. That’s all.

The bell rings again somewhere deep in the stone, a shorter, sharper note this time. Official. Practical. Move here now.

“On my way,” she mutters, even though no one can hear her.

She grabs her blazer and steps into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind her. The hallway feels longer than it did when they arrived, like the lines of the place have subtly shifted while she wasn’t looking.

Soft light spills from wall sconces at intervals, halos against the stone. Students’ voices echo faintly from the stairwell at the far end—laughter, groans, someone swearing about lost pens.

But between her and the staircase, for a stretch of maybe eight doors, the corridor is empty.

Her footsteps sound too loud.

She tells herself she’s being silly. Adjusting to a new place. Brains like habits; hers just hasn’t built new ones here yet. The scar on her wrist prickles.

She slides her hands into her pockets and starts walking.

One step. Another.

The silence doesn’t feel like silence. It feels like held breath.

Halfway down the hall, the humming starts.

Not quite sound. Not quite vibration. Something in between. It’s like the music box’s single note never really stopped—it just sank under her hearing, and now it’s rising again.

The fine hairs on her arms lift.

She stops.

Behind her, back toward her door, comes the soft, unmistakable sound of footsteps.

Bare ones.

Not the slap of sneakers or the clack of boots. Skin on polished stone, steady and unhurried.

She turns.

He is standing in front of her door.

He wasn't there a second ago.

He’s barefoot, just as the sound suggested, toes pale against the cold floor. Black uniform trousers, white shirt open at the throat, tie shoved into a pocket instead of hanging where it should. Dark hair falling carelessly into his eyes, like gravity gave up halfway.

It would be easy to write him off as one of those beautiful, bored boys boarding schools specialized in.

Except the air around him is wrong.

Shadows cling a little too eagerly to his shoulders. The light from the nearest sconce bends strangely around his silhouette, refusing to land directly on his skin. And his eyes—

His eyes are not old the way Blackthorn is old. They’re older. A kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep.

He looks at her like someone bracing for impact.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

His voice is low, pitched more like a private observation than a warning, but it still lances down the hallway and hooks into her.

Her mouth is dry. “I live here.”

“I mean this corridor,” he says. His gaze flicks past her, toward the door to her room, then back again. “With that song playing.”

Anil glances over her shoulder, half-expecting to see the music box hovering behind her like a guilty conscience. The door is shut, the room quiet. She can’t hear anything from inside.

“How do you even know—?”

He’s not looking at the door anymore.

He’s looking at her wrist.

Her sleeve is pushed just high enough for the edge of the scar to show, a pale curve against darker skin. She hadn’t noticed.

His expression changes.

It’s small, barely anything: a tightening at the corner of his mouth, a flicker in his eyes that might be relief or dread or both.

“You always forget that,” he says quietly. “But it never forgets you.”

The humming in her bones spikes. Her heart thuds in counterpoint.

“Do we…” She has to clear her throat to get the words out. “Do we know each other?”

He studies her face with unnerving focus, like he’s comparing her to a photograph only he can see. Not in a creepy, stranger-staring way—more like someone looking at a place where a door should be.

“You ask me that,” he says, “in every life.”

Every.

Life.

Not every year. Not every place. Every life.

The words land slowly, as if her brain refuses to accept them all at once.

She laughs, because the other options are scream or faint, and she’s not in the mood for either. “That’s a terrible line,” she says. “Do the girls here usually fall for that?”

His mouth twitches. It isn’t quite a smile, but something like one passes over his face and disappears again.

“I only say it to you,” he replies. “And it never works.”

“So you keep trying?” she asks, unable to help it.

“For some reason,” he says, and this time there is a brief flash of something warmer in his eyes. Not amusement exactly. Recognition. “Yes.”

Silence stretches out between them. It isn’t empty. It’s full of questions neither of them seem ready to touch.

Another bell rings somewhere below, more ordinary this time. Doors open down the hall as other girls spill out, talking, tying shoes, checking their phones. The spell of the quiet corridor loosens.

None of them look at him.

They walk around him without seeing him, giving him space they don’t know they’re giving. The air shifts as they pass, current splitting around a stone in a stream.

Anil watches, skin prickling.

He doesn’t move.

To everyone else, it’s like he isn’t there at all.

She takes a breath that feels too shallow.

“If what you’re saying is true,” she says carefully, “if we’ve met before, if I… knew you… why don’t I remember?”

His gaze holds hers. There’s nothing performative in it, nothing dramatic for the sake of it. Just a bare, raw honesty that makes her want to flinch.

“Because remembering hurts you,” he says. “And every time you get close, they make sure you don’t.”

“They?” she echoes, hating the way her voice thins.

He tilts his head, as though he’s listening to something far away. The humming in the walls rises again, only to fall like someone smoothed a hand over it.

“Not yet,” he says quietly.

“Not yet what?” she demands.

“Not yet time,” he says. “Not yet safe.”

He steps toward her. Just one small step, but the space seems to narrow when he does, the corridor drawing in like a held breath.

Up close, there’s a faint, charred smell to him. Not smoke exactly. Like something that’s been near too many fires and never completely washed the memory away.

“You should go to the chapel,” he says. “Smile at the Headmaster. Sit with your friend. Sing the hymn you don’t know you know. Let this place think you’re just another transfer who got lost on the bus.”

Her blood runs colder. “How do you know about—”

“Mira?” he supplies. “She talks in her sleep. You used to find it annoying.”

“Used to?” she repeats.

The hurt in his expression sharpens, edges honed by something older than embarrassment.

“I’m not doing this well,” he mutters, half to himself.

“That implies there’s a way to do it well,” she says.

For the first time, he almost laughs. The sound doesn’t quite make it out, but it reaches his eyes.

“I’m supposed to wait,” he says. “Let you come to me. Let patterns run their course. That’s what Cael would say.”

“Who’s Cael?” she asks.

His jaw flexes. “A mistake we both keep making.”

“That’s not an answer,” she says. “You’re very good at those.”

“I know.” He leans a shoulder casually against the wall, as if the hallway isn’t suddenly vibrating a little harder with every second they stand here. “It’s a flaw.”

“Add it to the list,” she says.

“I have,” he replies, without missing a beat. “Several times.”

Despite everything, she feels a wild, frightened bubble of amusement rise in her chest. It’s either laugh with him or drown in questions she isn’t ready to ask.

“So what do I call you?” she asks instead. “Mysterious barefoot boy who apparently stalks my reincarnation cycle is a lot to fit in a diary.”

He goes still again.

Something like relief flickers across his face—thin, fragile, quickly hidden, but real.

Maybe she’s asked that before.

Maybe this is one of the few parts of the pattern he looks forward to.

“You can call me Lucien,” he says.

The name clicks into place in her mind with a sensation like a book landing on a shelf that’s been waiting for it. Too right. Too familiar.

She tries to pretend it’s just because it’s a good name.

“Lucien,” she repeats, testing it.

“Don’t say it too loud,” he says lightly. “They don’t like it when you remember it.”

The hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Who is ‘they’?” she asks again. She’s getting tired of that word.

“You’ll meet them,” he says. “Sooner than I’d like.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“I’m not here to reassure you,” he says. “I’m here to warn you.”

“About what?” she presses.

He glances toward the staircase, where students are still flowing past without really seeing them. For a moment, his outline seems to blur, like he’s half in this corridor and half somewhere else.

“About this place,” he says. “About the bell. About your scar. About the way Blackthorn behaves when it realizes you’re back early.”

“My what?” she asks. “Back when?”

He looks at her for a long moment.

“Too much,” he decides. “Too fast. I always do that.”

“You think telling someone they’ve apparently died multiple times is ‘too much’?” she snaps, fear slipping out sideways as anger. “Wow, can’t imagine why.”

“The dying part comes later,” he says softly. “It always does.”

The floor seems to drop a few inches under her feet.

A group of girls jostles past at the end of the hall, laughing about something on someone’s screen. The spell of the corridor thins, like cold water hitting hot glass.

“Stop talking in riddles,” Anil says. “If you know something, tell me. Don’t just—drop ominous phrases and vanish.”

“You’re assuming I can still vanish when I want to.” His smile is brief and humorless. “Trust me, that ship sailed three lifetimes ago.”

“Then what can you do?” she demands.

He considers.

“More harm than good, usually,” he says. “But I keep trying.”

She exhales, frustrated. “Do you ever answer questions directly?”

“Sometimes.” His gaze softens even as a shadow crosses it. “Just not at the beginning. The beginning is fragile.”

“This doesn’t feel like a beginning,” she says before she can stop herself. “It feels like walking in halfway through a movie everyone else has already seen.”

A small, pained sound escapes him. It might be a laugh, or it might not.

“That’s exactly what it is,” he says. “You’re late to your own story, Anil.”

The way he says her name is a problem.

Like he’s had a lot of practice.

Like he’s had to say it in too many different contexts: warning, pleading, cursing, praying. None of which she remembers.

Before she can ask anything else, another bell rings. Closer this time. Sharper.

The humming in the walls dies down, abruptly, like someone letting go of a held breath.

Lucien looks past her, toward the stairwell.

“You should go,” he says. “Vale gets touchy if the new arrivals skip the welcome service.”

“Who?” she asks.

“Headmaster Vale,” he says. “You used to call him the Warden. Not to his face.”

Her brain tugs on that word—warden—but whatever it’s trying to reach is just out of reach.

“If I go,” she says, “are you just going to disappear into a conveniently shadowed doorway?”

“Probably,” he says.

“At least you’re honest.”

“Not always,” he says. “But with you, more often than not.”

She doesn’t know why that feels like the most dangerous thing he’s said yet.

They stand there for another heartbeat, neither of them moving.

The corridor feels very narrow now, the walls thick with listening.

“Lucien,” she says, because she suspects she doesn’t get many chances to speak to him before everything gets worse, “do I—trust you? In… the other versions.”

His answer is immediate.

“You shouldn’t,” he says.

It lands like a stone in her stomach.

He sees it.

His expression tightens, as if he wants to snatch the words back and knows he can’t.

“But you do,” he admits quietly. “Every time.”

“That sounds like a me problem,” she mutters.

“I’d call it one of your better traits,” he says. “If it didn’t keep getting you killed.”

The air between them goes thin.

“Go to the chapel, Anil,” he says, more gently than before. “Sit with Mira. Sing the hymn. Let the day be as ordinary as it’s willing to pretend to be. Tomorrow will not extend the same courtesy.”

The fact that he sounds sad about it makes her angrier than if he’d sounded smug.

“And you?” she asks.

He shrugs one shoulder, a movement that makes his bare foot slide slightly on the stone. For a ridiculous second, she imagines he must be cold.

“I’ll be around,” he says. “Hallways. Libraries. Places that remember you. It’s what I do.”

“That’s not creepy at all,” she says.

“I’ve been called worse,” he says.

She doesn’t doubt it.

The stairwell echoes with another burst of laughter. Somewhere downstairs, a door bangs shut. The mundane noises of a school going about its rituals pull at her attention, insisting on their reality.

“Fine,” she says. “I’m going. But this isn’t over.”

“It never is,” he says quietly.

She turns and walks toward the stairs because she doesn’t know what else to do. The air feels thicker as she passes him, as if the corridor itself is reluctant to let them separate.

She doesn’t look back.

Not until she reaches the corner and can’t help herself.

When she does, he’s no longer by her door.

He stands further down the hall now, one hand resting lightly against the stone where her room shares a wall. His head is bowed. He looks like someone standing at a grave he’s visited too often.

As she watches, the light from the nearest sconce flickers. For a second, he seems less human and more suggestion, like a sketch someone nearly erased.

Then he straightens, as if he feels her gaze. Even from this distance, she can tell when his eyes find hers again.

The humming in the walls is gone.

But something else hums in her blood now, low and insistent.

You shouldn’t be here, he’d said.

And yet, standing at the top of the stairs, Anil realizes with a sinking, inexplicable certainty:

She has never been anywhere that felt more like the place everything began.

She tightens her grip on the banister and heads down toward the chapel, the echo of the bell still lodged somewhere under her ribs, vibrating quietly.

Blackthorn watches her go.

And the corridor, for a moment, feels like it remembers her footsteps.