Priya Nair

I back away from him, shaking my head. "I'm not pointing him at anyone." Mr. Avery's tired face goes hard. "Then he picks for himself," he says. "And …

I open the door. Marrow walks in slow and sure, hops onto the bed, and curls against Mr. Avery's chest. The old man lets out a long breath and smiles.…

I'm done being scared of a cat. I scoop Marrow up before he can settle and carry him to the far end of the hall. If he can't sleep by Room 14, maybe t…

I keep the door shut and cover my ears. The calling stops after a while. At dawn I open the door. Mr. Avery is fine, sleeping peacefully, color back i…

I push the door open and step inside. Mr. Avery is sitting up, breathing fine, watching the TV with the sound off. "You okay?" I ask. He smiles. "Bett…

Mara smashes the tank without reading a word. Fluid floods the floor and the hum chokes to silence. The frozen timer goes dark. She runs upstairs and …

She fires too late. Reyes is already through the door and the lights cut at 11:59 like always. But this time she follows the syringe, not the man, and…

'I saw nothing,' Mara snaps, but Reyes just grins from the rail. 'Voss filmed you, that first night. The bribe. The body you dumped. The loop's been h…

Instead of saving Elias, Mara decides to catch the killer in the act. She slips into the alley behind the laundromat and waits in the shadows, gun dra…

Elias sets down the coffee, suddenly pale. 'You said an hour. How do you know that?' Mara explains the loop, the rain, the forty deaths. He doesn't la…

Milo sits in the admin seat. The screen asks for a password he couldn't possibly know. On a hunch he types the time the sky first glitched: 4:07. The …

Wren tells Milo the catch: a backup that stays awake remembers every reset. 'If we fail, we'll know we failed, over and over,' she warns. They fail th…

Milo figures the words came from somewhere, so he chases them. The text was scrolling toward the old radio tower on Hartley Hill. He grabs his bike an…

Priya pulls up an old coding forum on her laptop. People all over town are posting the same thing: skies skipping, clocks jumping back, the words WORL…

Priya waited on the roof for the steerer to appear, but no one came. At midnight her phone buzzed with one text from an unknown number: "Look up." The…

Priya texted the one person who'd believe her: Marcus, who ran the school's tiny astronomy club. "New star in Cassiopeia. Not on any map. Get up here.…

The pulses weren't random. Three short, three long, three short, over and over. Priya knew that one from old movies. It was Morse code for SOS. Someon…

Mara got greedy and cranked the dial hard. The coil shrieked and the air folded again. When it cleared, the gap was gone, but it had flipped: now Ines…

Mara panicked and ran for the door. Maybe getting away from the coil would help. But the second she crossed the hallway, the gap jumped to four minute…

While they waited for Dad, the coil's hum changed. The gap started climbing faster, three minutes, then four, on its own. Waiting wasn't safe anymore.…

As Mara set up the countdown, the screen flashed a warning: the coil was overheating. One shot before it shut down for good. No practice run. She wrot…

Mara wrote down what she saw before Ines did, like a two-minute weather report. 'Beaker tips over in 90 seconds.' She moved it. No spill. Ines watched…

Mara doesn't move. She stares at the package and the rule on the slip: do not open it. Whoever wrote this knew she'd want to peek. Her thumb finds the…

The other Mara takes the package and tucks it under her arm. 'Now get back in your car and don't look back,' she says. 'And when it's your turn, do no…

We grabbed everything we could in two minutes: a wheel of cheddar, a fancy ham, and somehow a single fork. Out on the sidewalk, panting, we realized w…

Big Dennis raised his hand. "Question. Why are we robbing a cheese place at all?" The room went quiet. Marv blinked. "Because... the cheese is worth a…

Marv crept forward and walked straight into a coat rack, which crashed down with a sound like a small avalanche. We all held our breath. Nothing happe…

Nadia did the only sensible thing. She put the lid on tighter and backed out of the kitchen. "Nope," she said to the empty room. "Not today." She woul…

By lunch a new note had appeared, written in flour right on the jar: 72 IS TOO COLD. I AM A LIVING THING. Nadia bumped the thermostat up two degrees. …

Before Veska could act, the healer came to her, setting a bowl of soup down between them. "You understand bones," the old woman said gently, "so you u…