Seventeen-year-old Lena enters an abandoned high school to find her missing friend and discovers a ritual that may open a way into a colourless other world.
The abandoned high school on Vulture Street was the kind of place people crossed the road to avoid. By day it sat empty and blind behind its boarded windows; by night, the neighbourhood swore the corridors held their breath. Lena had listened to those stories for years without believing them. Tonight, with her torch shaking in one hand and Mai's last message burning in her pocket, disbelief felt dangerously thin.
She pushed through the side entrance and the door groaned shut behind her. The air inside was cold enough to sting. Dust drifted through the beam of her torch as she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, each step answering her with a hollow echo. Mai had disappeared three days ago. Before that came the texts about the dreams, the mirror, the colourless place she kept seeing whenever she fell asleep. Lena had told herself it was stress, exhaustion, anything rational. But Mai's notebook had led her here, and rational explanations had run out somewhere below the second landing.
The biology lab door stood half-open.
Lena stopped in the threshold. The room smelled of old chalk and wet plaster. Desks were still lined up beneath sheeted windows, their surfaces scarred by years of scratches and carved initials. Her torch beam snagged on a chalk circle on the floor. It was wide enough for someone to stand inside. Strange symbols ringed the edge, too sharp and deliberate to be random graffiti.
Near the teacher's desk lay Mai's notebook.
Lena crossed the room and picked it up with numb fingers. The page was open to a hurried note in Mai's cramped handwriting:
"If you say it out loud, the door will open. I don't know if I can come back. If you're reading this, you have to decide fast. You only get one chance."
Her throat tightened. She looked back at the circle. The symbols seemed to shift when she wasn't staring directly at them, as if they were trying to arrange themselves into something she could almost understand. A broken mirror hung on the far wall, its cracked surface catching her torchlight in splinters.
Then the room changed.
The air pressed in, thick and expectant. The torch beam trembled across the walls, and the reflection in the mirror rippled like disturbed water. Lena took one step back, but her foot caught on the edge of the chalk line. The symbols flared pale and cold beneath her shoes.
Somewhere just beyond the mirror, in a voice so close it might have been inside her own head, someone whispered, "Lena, don't go through..."