When Leon touches a strange blue pebble, he vanishes at school and finds himself pulled into the mystery behind a string of disappearances.
Late sunlight slanted through the biology room windows, turning the dust in the air gold and laying sharp patterns across the floor. Leon had almost finished copying his homework when something on the windowsill made him stop.
A pebble. Dark blue, glossy, and smooth as glass, as if it had been dropped there by mistake or carried in from somewhere that didn’t belong to this world.
Maja leaned over his shoulder, her eyes narrowing with interest. "Where did you get that?"
Leon shook his head. He didn’t know. He only knew the pebble hadn’t been there before lunch. It had been in his pocket after the dream he couldn’t shake: an empty city, long streets without people, and shadows moving like they were alive.
He turned the pebble in his fingers.
Cold shot through him.
The room went oddly quiet. Not silent, exactly. Just wrong, as if the noise had been pushed far away. Leon looked up and saw Maja staring at him, her expression changing from curiosity to alarm.
"Leon?" she said. "Why are you standing like that?"
He looked down.
His hands were gone.
For one impossible second he couldn’t breathe. He lurched back, the chair behind him scraping across the floor, and Maja flinched as if something had brushed past her. Her eyes searched the space in front of her face, but they slid right over him.
He was still there. He could feel the floor under his shoes, the pebble burning ice-cold in his palm, the panic rising fast in his chest.
Then a siren snapped to life somewhere in the corridor.
From the open door came voices, strained and hurried. "Not again!"
"Someone’s disappeared again!"
Maja took a step toward him, reaching out blindly until her fingers found nothing but air. Leon grabbed her wrist, and she jolted at the contact even though she still couldn’t see him.
Outside the window, something blue flashed across the schoolyard.
A shape followed it. Not a student. Not a teacher. Just a black silhouette sliding past the glass too fast to make sense of.
Leon swallowed hard. If the pebble could make him disappear, then maybe it could help him understand what was happening to everyone else.
He slipped through the doorway into the corridor, unseen, while the smell of ozone thickened in the air and the school around him seemed to hold its breath. At the far end of the empty wing, the old computer room door stood half-open, and inside it, a dim orange light pulsed once, as if something had just woken up.