The Sunburst Beneath the Wood
The library after midnight smells different than it does during the day—less like paper and lemon polish, more like dust that's had time to settle into corners where the cleaning staff never quite reach. Elena Carter presses her back against the door of the East Reading Room, easing it shut behind her with the kind of practiced silence she's cultivated over three weeks of minor rule-breaking. The latch clicks so softly she barely hears it herself.
Her phone flashlight throws a cone of white across the floor, illuminating dust motes that drift like slow snow. Somewhere above her, the vaulted ceiling disappears into shadow, its carved beams the same ones that have watched over this room since the school's founding, according to the brass plaque by the entrance nobody reads anymore. Saint Aurelia's loves its plaques almost as much as it loves its silence.
She's not supposed to be here. Curfew struck an hour ago, and Ms. Ferris does her rounds at eleven and again at one, which gives Elena a narrow window to finish the essay she's been avoiding for a week—an analysis of *The Turn of the Screw* that her English teacher, Mr. Abernathy, will absolutely notice if it's late, because he…
