Chapter 554 | A Ghost Town with a Curfew

Chapter 554: 554 | A Ghost Town with a Curfew

Dr. Voss signed off on my release with the specific reluctance of someone who knew the numbers didn’t add up but had decided to stop asking questions she didn’t want documented answers to.

She handed me a folder full of follow-up instructions, aftercare protocols, and a prescription for pain medication I wouldn’t need because my body had already decided that pain was a suggestion rather than a requirement.

"Take it easy," she said, which was doctor-speak for "I know you won’t but I have to say it anyway."

"Always do."

She gave me a look that suggested she had access to the monitor data from two nights ago and had formed opinions about it. I decided not to explore that particular conversational thread.

The hallway outside the medical wing was empty. Not the normal kind of empty, where people happened to be somewhere else at the moment. This was the specific emptiness of a building that had been deliberately evacuated, the silence of a space that should have been full of noise and movement and the constant low-level chaos of several hundred teenagers learning to be Heroes.

I walked.

My footsteps echoed off the white concrete walls in a way they never had before. The fluorescent lighting hummed overhead, casting that particular institutional glow that made everything look slightly more sterile than it actually was.

The air smelled like cleaning solution and the faint chemical sweetness of whatever they used to sanitize surfaces after medical emergencies.

Emergency security protocols. That’s what Juno had said. Campus closed until Monday. Essential personnel only.

The doors at the end of the medical wing opened onto the main Academic Spine, and I stopped in the threshold just to look at it.

The corridor stretched east-west through the center of campus, glass and white concrete and clean geometry, the specific aesthetic of a place that had been building toward a standard for sixty-one years.

Natural light poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the south side, throwing long rectangles of sunlight across the polished floor. The shadows were wrong. Too sharp. Too defined. There was nobody walking through them to soften the edges.

So this is what an empty Halloran looks like.

I’d seen the campus during orientation week, when it was so full of bodies that you couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into someone. I’d seen it during the first week of classes, when the initial chaos had settled into something resembling a routine but the hallways still buzzed with the energy of people figuring out where they were supposed to be.

I’d seen it during the Invitational, when the entire place had been packed with spectators and media and agency scouts treating teenage Heroes like investment opportunities.

I had never seen it like this.

The benches along the windows sat empty. The notice boards were still covered with flyers for clubs and events that wouldn’t happen for at least another week.

The small coffee kiosk near the intersection with the northern corridor had its shutters down, and the absence of the smell of brewing coffee felt like a personal insult.

Someone had left a single textbook on one of the study tables, spine up, pages splayed, like whoever was reading it had stepped away for just a moment and would be right back.

They wouldn’t be right back. Nobody would be right back for days.

I pulled out my phone and typed a message to Sloane.

discharged. campus is a ghost town. where are you?

The response came back in under thirty seconds, which meant Sloane had been staring at her phone waiting for exactly this message. I could picture her doing it, sitting in the back of whatever car Diane had sent, pink hair loose around her face, blue eyes fixed on the screen like she could make me text faster through sheer force of will.

mom had a meeting in verano. we’re coming to get you. 2 hours out.

Two hours.

I looked at the empty corridor stretching out before me. Two hours of wandering through a campus that looked like the setting of a post-apocalyptic movie where everyone had vanished but left all their stuff behind.

i’ll find something to do

don’t get into trouble

when have i ever gotten into trouble

literally always.

that’s slander

it’s documentation.

I smiled at the phone and slipped it back into my pocket.

The walk from the medical wing to the central courtyard took about eight minutes under normal circumstances. Today it took closer to fifteen, because I kept stopping to look at things. The empty classrooms with their chairs still arranged in neat rows.

The training simulation chambers with their observation windows dark and their control panels powered down. The equipment storage lockers that lined the walls near the Combat and Training District, all of them sealed with biometric locks that would have been scanning student IDs constantly just a week ago.

The silence had weight. That was the thing that kept getting to me. It wasn’t just the absence of sound. It was the presence of all the sounds that should have been there and weren’t. The conversations. The laughter. The occasional explosion from one of the outdoor training fields when someone’s Aspect got away from them. The constant low rumble of activity that you stopped noticing until it was gone.

I reached the central courtyard and stood at the edge of the grass, looking up at the main administration building. The architecture was aggressive in its optimism, all soaring white columns and glass facades that caught the afternoon light and threw it back at you like a challenge. This is what Heroes build. This is what we protect. This is the standard we hold ourselves to.

Right now it just looked empty.

A bird landed on one of the benches near the fountain. It hopped along the back of the seat, head tilting, eyes bright with the specific curiosity of an animal that had noticed the humans were gone and was trying to figure out what to do with this information.

I watched it for a moment, and it watched me back, and we reached some kind of mutual understanding that neither of us was going to explain ourselves to the other.

The fountain was still running. That seemed wrong, somehow. Like someone should have turned it off when they evacuated. The water rose from the central spout and fell back into the basin with a constant gentle splashing that was the only sound in the entire courtyard besides my own breathing.

I sat down on the edge of the fountain and pulled out my phone again.

No new messages. Sloane was probably in the car staring at her phone and trying very hard not to text me again because she’d already told me they were two hours out and texting me again would look like she was worried and she had a reputation to maintain.

I scrolled through my notifications instead.

The internet had been busy while I was unconscious.