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He grabbed his phone.

There was a text from his dad from a few hours before. It saidsomething had come up, and he’d be working late.Eat breakfast. Go to the nurse at school for your pill. I’ll text you when I get home.

“I’m an eighties latchkey kid,” Nick muttered to no one. “Probably messed up for life because of it.”

Thunder rumbled as he ate a banana-and-peanut-butter sandwich.

He wondered if it was going to rain all day.

He locked the door behind him when he left the house, fumbling with his umbrella.

Gibby and Jazz were waiting for him on the bench in the train station.

“Did you hear?” Jazz asked as soon as he approached.

He frowned. “Hear what?”

“Shadow Star and Pyro Storm! Apparently, something big went down last night, but no one knows what. Like, hardcore. Explosions and destruction and everything.”

Nick looked at his phone, only to remember he didn’t have internet access. He groaned. “I’m grounded. I can’t look up anything. It’s practically medieval.”

“Here,” Jazz said, holding out her phone.

Gibby snatched it away before he could take it, saying, “We’re going to be late.” Jazz looked confused as Gibby handed her phone back.

Nick glared at her. “Seth’s not even here. We can’t leave him.”

Gibby sighed. “He’s not coming in today. He texted me this morning. Sick again.”

That… didn’t make sense. “He was fine yesterday. And he didn’t text me about it.” Nick pulled out his phone to make sure, but the last text had been from the night before, when Seth had writtennite xx. Nick had stared at it for a long time, smiling wider than he had in a long time.

“I don’t know, Nicky,” Gibby told him. “I just know he’s not coming in today.”

“Is it bad?” he asked, texting Seth to ask if he was really sick.

“What?”

He shoved his phone back in his pocket. “Whatever went on with Shadow Star and Pyro Storm. Dad didn’t come home this morning. Said he had to work late.”

Jazz hesitated. “Well, no one died. Or, that’s what they’re saying. All I know is that it was near Burke Tower.”

Nick sighed irritably. “We can ask Owen at lunch.”

Owen wasn’t at lunch.

Seth hadn’t texted back.

Neither had Dad.

Nick ate part of Jazz’s salad until he realized there was pineapple in it. He’d never been so offended in his life.

Later, Nick would look back and remember it was still raining when his phone started buzzing in his pocket. There was another rumble of thunder when he realized it wasn’t an incoming text as the vibration continued.

It was a phone call.

His blood ran cold as he pulled the phone out of his pocket, glancing down at the screen.

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