Mira Chen POV
The dark wasn't empty.
That was the first thing I understood — standing in my room with both suitcases open at my feet and my phone the only light source, its screen casting a pale rectangle across the floor. The dark wasn't empty the way it normally is. It had weight. Presence. The feeling of something very large and very old folding itself into a space too small for it, like trying to fit an ocean into a cup.
"I'm not afraid of the dark," I said. Out loud. To a voice with no body, in a room with no light.
"Of course you are," the voice said warmly. "But you're more afraid of leaving. That's what makes you interesting."
The shadows near my wardrobe shifted again — that same deepening, like ink dropped in water, spreading slowly outward.
"What are you?" I asked. Second time. I needed an actual answer.
"Nyx." Simple. Final. Like the name was enough, had always been enough. "I've lived in the foundations of this building since before it had a name. I feed on emotion — the kind this place generates in abundance. Shame. Ambition. Cruelty. Desire." A pause that felt almost thoughtful. "Yours has been particularly fine. Three months of the purest rage I've encountered in forty years."
"You've been feeding off me," I said slowly. "This whole time."
"Feeding off everyone. You've simply been the most... generous."
I should have been more frightened than I was. Looking back, I understand that — a rational person would have screamed, or run, or at minimum turned the light back on. But I'd spent three months being afraid of things with faces and names and school uniforms, and somehow a voice in the dark felt almost manageable by comparison.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"The same thing you want," Nyx said. "To watch them burn."
The shadows stilled.
My phone screen lit up with a new message — Mom, sending a second photo, a close-up of the framed picture on the restaurant wall. Can't stop looking at it, the message said. My daughter. My heart.
I looked at it for one second. Then turned the screen face-down.
"Tell me what you're offering," I said. "Exactly."
The cold in the room intensified — not painfully, but noticeably, like stepping out of a building in November. The shadows peeled away from the wall and arranged themselves differently, and though I still couldn't see a figure, couldn't point to anything and say there, I had the clear sense of something turning its full attention toward me.
"Invisibility," Nyx said. "True invisibility — not hiding behind pillars or taking the long way round the courtyard. I mean becoming genuinely unseen. Walking through a room full of people who cannot register your existence. Hearing every word spoken in private. Accessing every locked space. Watching the Trinity from three feet away while they discuss their plans, their secrets, their fears."
I didn't speak.
"You want to know what Sebastian's note meant? Invisible, you could read every private message he's ever sent. You want to know what Victoria is really hiding — what she's so terrified of losing? Walk invisibly into her room tonight and find out. Marcus's surveillance network? Walk right through it. Invisible to cameras. Invisible to sensors. Invisible to everything."
"And what do you get?" I asked.
"The emotions your revenge generates feed me. Every moment of their fear, their humiliation, their exposure — I consume it. You do the work. I feast on the results. We both win."
I thought about the bathroom today. The cold water. Sebastian's voice — make it quick — and his footsteps walking away.
I thought about three hundred and forty-seven students and their laughing comments.
I thought about Richard Ashford's voice: she'll be gone before Christmas.
"What's the cost?" I said. "The real one."
Silence — but a pleased silence, like I'd passed a test.
"Clever girl. Yes, there's a cost." The cold shifted slightly. "Every time you use my power, you fade. Not visibly at first. You'll look exactly the same in the mirror. But from other people's perception — from memory, from existence — you'll dim. Slowly. People will forget your name. Forget conversations. Forget you were ever in a room."
"And if I use it too much?"
"You'll fade past recovery. Your teachers won't remember your name. Your friends will lose the thread of who you are. Eventually—" Nyx paused, and in the pause I heard something that wasn't quite cruelty, just absolute, indifferent honesty, "—even your mother won't remember you clearly. You'll be a ghost in your own life before you're a ghost in mine."
The words landed in my stomach like stones.
Even your mother.
I looked at my phone, face-down on the desk.
My daughter. My heart.
"How much use is too much?" I asked.
"That depends on how greedy you are. Carefully done — targeted, strategic, enough to dismantle them without excess — you could accomplish everything you need and keep most of yourself. I've seen it done." Another pause. "I've also seen people enjoy the power too much and forget to stop."
"Is that a warning?"
"It's information," Nyx said simply. "What you do with it is your business."
I sat down on the edge of my bed.
The suitcases were still open in front of me. Half-packed, waiting.
I looked at them for a long time.
The rational version of me — the one who'd existed before three months of organized, institutional, carefully funded cruelty — would have said no. Obviously. Would have said you don't make deals with ancient things in the dark, you leave, you survive, you rebuild somewhere safer.
But that version of me had believed in merit. Had believed that headmasters investigated complaints and teachers gave fair grades and that somewhere in any institution there was one adult who would choose a frightened seventeen-year-old girl over a donor family's reputation.
I'd spent three months proving that version of me wrong.
"Show me," I said. "Prove it's real. Then I'll decide."
The shadows moved.
The lamp came back on — but different. Dimmer. Like something was standing between the bulb and the room, absorbing the light.
"Touch your reflection," Nyx said.
I stood up. Walked to the small mirror above my desk — the one I'd looked into every morning for three months and practiced keeping my face blank.
I lifted my hand and pressed my palm flat to the glass.
It rippled.
Not like glass. Like water. Like pressing your hand to the surface of a still pond and feeling it give, accept the contact, close around your fingers. Cold and smooth and deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way that made my brain scream that this wasn't possible.
I pulled my hand back.
My reflection didn't follow.
I was gone from the mirror. My reflection stood there — my face, my hair, my Ashford blazer but I wasn't in it. It stood like an empty portrait.
I looked down at my hands.
Couldn't see them.
I looked at the mirror. My reflection looked back at me from inside the glass — expression blank, waiting.
"You can come back," Nyx said. "Whenever you choose. This was just a demonstration."
I flexed my invisible fingers. Felt them. Real, solid, present — just invisible.
The power of it moved through me like the first warm breath after being underwater.
Sebastian's face. That watch check. Those steady footsteps walking away.
Victoria's voice. You don't belong here. You'll never belong here.
Richard Ashford's phone call. She'll be gone before Christmas.
The restaurant reviews. The stolen essay. The photograph through my window. Ninety days of systematic, cheerful, institutional destruction.
My invisible hands curled slowly into fists.
"I want to see Victoria's face when her world falls apart," I said quietly. "I want Marcus to feel what it's like to be watched without knowing it. I want Richard Ashford to lose everything he's been protecting." I paused. "And Sebastian—"
I stopped.
Sebastian was the complicated one. Sebastian was the note in the bin and the cold eyes and the three-second window that kept opening and closing and opening again.
I'll deal with Sebastian when I get there.
"I want them to understand what they built," I said finally. "All of them. I want them to feel it."
"Mm," Nyx said, and the satisfaction in her voice was ancient and enormous and completely unconcerned with what any of this might cost me. "Do we have a deal?"
I looked at my invisible hands one more time.
I thought about Mom's photo on the restaurant wall.
I thought about the girl who arrived in September with second-hand shoes and fire in her eyes.
I thought about the note I'd thrown in the bin — I'm sorry, I'm watching — and whether it was a trap or the truth, and how I'd never know if I left tonight.
You'll never belong here, Victoria had said.
But she'd been wrong about one thing.
I wasn't here to belong.
I was here to win.
"We have a deal," I said.
The shadows exploded outward — silent, cold, rushing across every surface like a tide coming in — and for one breathless second the room went completely dark and completely silent and I felt Nyx everywhere, ancient and enormous and delighted.
Then it settled.
The lamp came back on, normal and steady.
I was visible again.
My reflection was back in the mirror, looking at me with an expression I didn't fully recognize yet — something harder than the girl who'd arrived in September. Something sharper. Something that hadn't existed this morning.
On my desk, my phone lit up again.
Not Mom this time.
A new message. Unknown number. Four words.
"Made your choice yet?"
I stared at it.
Then from the shadows, Nyx's voice — quieter now, almost gentle, the way a trap is gentle before it closes:
"Interesting. It seems someone in this school has been watching you far more carefully than you realized, little scholar."
"And they knew — before I even offered — that you were going to say yes."