Chapter 111: The Map

POV: Georgia

The circled date stares back at me from the page, black ink on white paper, three days from now. I sit cross-legged on my bed with the notebook open on my knees, the lamp throwing a small yellow circle around my hands, and the rest of the room swallowed in shadow. My knee has gone stiff from sitting in one position too long. I don’t move.

It started three hours ago in the hallway outside the supply closet.

Bella had vanished around the corner, her blazer a blur, and I stood there with my cane and a racing heart, unable to make her talk. I couldn’t make Liam talk either, or Mandi, or Puck. Everyone who knew something seemed bound by a rule I couldn’t see.

But I could count. That much I was good at. I’d spent my whole life counting - revolutions in a jump, seconds in a program, degrees of lean on an edge. If nobody would tell me what was happening, I’d build the answer myself, one tally mark at a time.

I went back to my room and found Mandi gone. A sticky note on my pillow read *Council again. Send help. Or pudding.* I peeled it off, stuck it to the corner of my desk, and pulled the notebook out from under my mattress.

It had gotten fat, its pages warped from pen pressure and crowded with arrows, circled names, and a sketch of a wolf with golden eyes. I flipped past the Venn diagram, past the pages about Dominic, past the article printouts, and stopped at a clean sheet near the back.

At the top, I wrote one word: ABSENT.

Then I drew a grid - dates down the left side, names across the top. It looked like a seating chart, or a grade book. If anyone found it, I could claim a school project.

First I needed dates. I scrolled back through my phone, through weeks of notes I’d made at two in the morning without knowing why. Alexa hadn’t moved for eleven seconds after the howl. The full moon when everyone vanished and Mandi appeared in the doorway. The night of the council in the clearing, the one I’d watched from my window. The morning after, when scratches showed up on forearms. I pulled up the lunar calendar I’d bookmarked weeks earlier, the one I’d opened almost without thinking, and started filling in the grid.

Full moon, September. Puck, Liam, both twins, Alexa, at least six hockey players - missing from dinner, missing from morning check-in. I wasn’t guessing. I remembered it, and I’d checked the dining hall attendance sheet pinned outside the dean’s office, the one where students sign in for meals. I’d walked past it three times that week and photographed it when no one was looking. The signatures had gaps, and the gaps lined up.

Full moon, October. Same names, plus four more.

I sat back, studied what I’d written, then flipped to a second grid - this one for nights that weren’t full moons.

That proved harder. I dug through texts, through half-remembered conversations, through a habit I’d picked up that semester of noticing who wasn’t in the room. A night in early October when Puck skipped our lit project meeting and Liam showed up instead. A Tuesday when Alexa looked exhausted at breakfast and the girl who sits behind me in history disappeared for the whole day. A Thursday evening when I saw the older man from the council clearing crossing the quad, three students following him in a silent row.

I marked each one. When memory ran out, I started checking records - the sign-out sheet at the front desk, the library’s late-night log, the gym’s key card list, which a bored student worker let me read when I pretended to be waiting for a friend. I wasn’t proud of how easy it was. I told people I was tracking my physical therapy hours, and they nodded and slid the clipboard across.

By the time the light outside turned orange, my grid held forty-one entries.

Patterns emerged, obvious now that they sat in ink. The full moon nights were a given - the big gaps, the ones where half the school emptied out. But between them, smaller absences repeated. Every few days, a handful of students vanished, always returning tired. And the next morning, there was always something: a bandage on a wrist, a scrape along a jawline, a student limping and refusing to explain.

I started a third column and labeled it MARKS.

It filled fast. A long scratch on a boy’s forearm, covered by a sleeve too long for the weather. A girl in my history class wearing a scarf in a warm classroom, a faint red edge showing at her collar. A hockey player with a black eye that faded to yellow by lunch and vanished by dinner.

I used to think the injuries were random - sports, accidents, Mandi’s easy "hockey." But the marks only appeared after the absences, every single time. Not a coincidence. A cycle.

Something small and uncomfortable pricked at the back of my mind as I looked down at the neat columns, the careful handwriting, the names and dates and times, the observations about people who’d been kind to me.

This wasn’t a school project. It was a file. I was keeping a file on my friends.

For a moment I felt sick, thinking of Alexa passing me the pizza, Mandi making me eat soup, Liam shaking in the rain and begging me to believe him. I imagined how it would feel to find a notebook like this about myself.

I almost closed it. I almost tore the page out.

Almost.

Then I remembered Bella’s amber eyes in the closet, the sound of the blade shifting under my weight, a boy’s spine, a scrubbed article, a PR firm hiding in a gray footer. People had been protecting a secret at the expense of other people. I didn’t know yet who was good and who was bad. I only knew I was tired of being the last person in the room to find out.

So I kept the page, telling myself I’d make it right once I knew more. I was done being the last to know.

I turned to a fresh sheet and drew a calendar, a simple month grid, then copied the dates from my tally onto it - blue pen for full moons, red pen for smaller absences, a dot for each missing student so the days that mattered would look darker than the rest.

When I finished, I held the page up to the lamp.

The dots formed a shape: a clock. The full moons made heavy circles. Between them, red dots clustered tighter and tighter, like waves closing in on a shore. Not random. Building toward something.

I ran my finger down the calendar, following the dots toward the present. The cluster at the end sat thick and dark, pointing to a single square.

Three days from now.

I checked it twice, then checked it against the lunar calendar, expecting another full moon. It wasn’t one - the moon that night would be only a few days past full, bright but already waning. A night with no reason to be special.

Except every pattern I’d found insisted otherwise.

The dots stacked until the square went almost solid black. More names clustered on that night than on any other in my notes - students, older ones, a few faces I recognized only from the council in the clearing.

Something was being planned. Something bigger than a normal gathering, bigger than a full moon run through the trees. I didn’t know what, or who was organizing it, or why.

And that brings me back to now - to the lamp’s small yellow circle, the dark window, the stiffness in my knee that I refuse to acknowledge. Down on the quad, the lamps are coming on one by one. Behind them, the tree line stands like a black wall, and somewhere inside it, three days from now, something is going to happen.

Footsteps pass in the hallway outside my door, quick and uneven, then fade toward the stairwell. I don’t move. I wait until the silence settles back in before I pick up my pen.

I draw a circle around the square, slow and firm, and write one word beside it.

*Go.*