Chapter 1: “Two Phantoms”
Both pairs of glasses buzz at the same time.
I’m sitting in the library – same table, same shadow, same 78 on the HUD that used to mean safety and now just means home – with my backpack wedged between my knees and Ms. Osei’s Warden glasses hidden inside the front pocket. My player glasses are on my face. The Warden pair is zipped away. Two lenses, two systems, two versions of the game, and right now both of them are screaming for my attention.
The player HUD flashes first:
[SYSTEM – PRIORITY ALPHA] WARDEN SUCCESSION: FINAL SELECTION PROTOCOL INITIATED. Candidates: 2. Format: Full infiltration scenario. Location: CLASSIFIED. Timeline: 72 hours. Report for briefing.
I reach into my backpack. Pull out the Warden glasses. Hold them below the table and angle the lenses toward my face without putting them on – a trick I learned three weeks ago, tilting the frames so the HUD projects onto the surface of my regular glasses like a ghostly second layer.
Ms. Osei’s message glows against the organizational directive like a candle next to a floodlight:
[WARDEN – OSEI] This is the moment. Everything you’ve learned. Everything you’ve become. Show them who you are – not who they want you to be.
Two messages. One cold. One warm. Both about the same thing.
The endgame.
I haven’t seen Sable Reyes since Book 4. The district competition. The rival Phantom from Ridgemont who matched me move for move across three schools and four elimination zones. She ghosted through environments I’d spent weeks mapping like she’d been born in them. Every time I found a shadow zone, she was already leaving it. Every ghost path I calculated, she’d calculated faster.
We never spoke. We never needed to. Two Phantoms don’t communicate with words. They communicate with absence – the space you leave behind, the silence you carry, the impression of movement that lingers after you’re gone. I knew Sable the way you know your own reflection: familiar, reversed, slightly wrong.
She was better than me. I’ve spent five months trying to convince myself otherwise, and the data doesn’t cooperate.
Eunji slides into the seat across from me. Her notebook is open. Her pen is moving before she’s fully settled, which means she’s already processing.
“You got the alert,” she says. Not a question.
“Both pairs.”
“Sable Reyes.” Eunji writes the name in her notebook. Clean, precise letters. She underlines it once. “I’ve been building her profile since the district competition. Cross-referencing Archive data, Ridgemont game records, and three dead-drop reports from Kai.”
Kai. The Northridge Phantom who saw through my cover in Book 8. The one who profiled me with the patient accuracy of someone who recognizes his own species. He and I have maintained communication since my cover burned – careful, coded messages passed through the public library dead-drop system. He doesn’t owe me anything. He helps anyway. Phantoms, it turns out, are loyal to each other even when they’re on opposite sides.
“What does his data say?”
Eunji flips to a page dense with annotations. “Sable Reyes. Fourteen. Ridgemont Middle. Class: Phantom. Active since age eleven – she’s been in the game three years longer than you. Her Warden is one of Calloway’s allies. She knows about Project LONG GLASS. She knows about the recruitment pipeline.”
“And she doesn’t care?”
“She sees the pipeline as an opportunity. Not a corruption. She wants to be selected. She wants the career.” Eunji pauses. Adjusts her glasses. The analytical look. “She’s not wrong to want that. She’s just willing to accept a system you’re not.”
The library is quiet around us. Students at other tables do homework, unaware that they’re sitting in a surveillance zone, unaware that three hidden cameras track their movements, unaware that the ranking system running silently through Westbrook’s infrastructure has assigned each of them a point value based on how difficult they’d be to eliminate.
Unaware that two Phantoms are about to compete for the right to control all of it.
“Her record since district play?” I ask.
“Flawless.” Eunji says the word like a diagnosis. “Zero detections. Perfect elimination rate. Ranked first in Ridgemont’s system for six consecutive months. She hasn’t made a mistake since April.”
“Everyone makes mistakes.”
“Not Sable. Or if she does, they’re invisible. Which, for a Phantom, is the same thing.”
Diego finds us ten minutes later. He drops into the chair next to Eunji with the energy of someone who has been physically restraining himself from running through the hallways. His graphic tee today shows a cartoon bomb with a lit fuse and the caption CONTROLLED DEMOLITION.
“Please tell me we’re doing this,” he says. “Please tell me this is the big one. The final boss. The championship round. The –”
“It’s the Warden succession,” I say. “Me versus Sable Reyes. Full infiltration scenario.”
Diego’s eyes go wide. Then wider. Then he grins with every tooth he has.
“The rival Phantom from district! The one who ghosted through Northridge like she was made of smoke! This is HUGE. This is the Super Bowl of stealth. This is –”
“Diego.”
“Right. Inside voice. Library.” He drops to a whisper that is still louder than most people’s normal speaking volume. “What’s the play?”
“I don’t know yet. The briefing is in seventy-two hours.”
Marcus appears in the library doorway. He fills it completely – shoulders brushing both sides of the frame, his head clearing the top by about an inch. He’s eating a granola bar. Three more visible in the cargo pocket of his pants. Full supply. He hasn’t stress-eaten yet, which means he doesn’t know.
“Meeting?” he asks, reading the room with the emotional radar that makes him the team’s anchor.
“Succession protocol,” Eunji says. “Final selection. Nadia versus the Ridgemont Phantom.”
Marcus stops chewing. He looks at me. The look that asks everything without saying anything – are you okay, are you ready, do you need me to stand between you and something.
“I’m good,” I say.
He nods. Finishes the granola bar. Sits down. Doesn’t say anything else, because Marcus knows that sometimes the most supportive thing you can do is be present without being loud.
Diego, constitutionally incapable of this, starts making a list of tactical preparations on the back of Eunji’s notebook. She lets him. It’s his way of processing.
That night, I sit on my bed with the glasses laid out in front of me. The Warden pair on the left. The player pair on the right. Two windows into the same game, two perspectives on the same system, two versions of what the world looks like when you can see what’s hidden.
I put on the Warden glasses. The room transforms. Every student in Westbrook’s database appears as a dot on my overlay – 387 active players, ranked, categorized, tracked. I can see their movement patterns, their elimination histories, their predicted behaviors mapped across the next seventy-two hours. The Warden’s view is omniscient. It sees everything.
I switch to the player glasses. The view narrows. Just my immediate environment. Sight cones from hypothetical contacts. Shadow zones based on the room’s lighting. My rank – #4, the highest I’ve ever been – glowing in the corner. The player’s view is limited. It sees enough.
Then I pull up Sable’s profile on the Warden system. What it shows me makes my stomach drop.
The profile is almost empty. Name. Age. School. Class designation: PHANTOM. Six months of rankings showing a flat line at #1. Elimination record: 147 confirmed, 0 detected.
Under weaknesses, the field reads: NO DATA.
Not “none identified.” Not “insufficient data.” The field is blank. The Warden-level surveillance system, designed to track and analyze every player in every school in the district, cannot find a single exploitable weakness in Sable Reyes.
She’s not just good. She’s invisible to the system that tracks invisible people.
I take off both pairs. Put them on my nightstand. Lie back and stare at the ceiling.
My phone buzzes. Marcus. Text message, 10:47 PM: Can’t sleep either?
No.
Want to talk about it?
I stare at the screen. Marcus, who communicates through presence and small acts of care, reaching out through text at nearly eleven o’clock. He knows. He always knows.
Seventy-two hours, I type. Against someone with no weaknesses.
A long pause. Then: Everyone has weaknesses. Some people just hide them better than others. You’d know something about that.
I almost smile.
Go to sleep, Marcus.
You first.
Neither of us will. But the exchange sits warm in my chest for a minute before the anxiety returns.
Seventy-two hours to prepare for a competition against someone with no weaknesses, no detections, and three more years of experience. A competition where the prize is a job I’m not sure I want and the cost of losing is watching someone else get it.
The ceiling has a crack that runs from the light fixture to the corner. I’ve mapped it like a ghost path – the optimal route across the plaster, avoiding the rough patches, threading between the painted-over nail holes. Old habits. I map everything. Walls, hallways, conversations, people. I map things because mapping them means understanding them, and understanding them means surviving them.
But I can’t map Sable Reyes. And in seventy-two hours, I have to beat her.
My phone buzzes. Not the glasses. My actual phone. A text from a number I don’t recognize.
Four words. No signature. No emoji. No context.
I’ve heard about you. The Phantom who makes friends. Cute. But friendship doesn’t win infiltration scenarios. See you on the field.
Sable.
She found my number. A Phantom found my number. That shouldn’t be possible – I don’t give my number to anyone outside the team, and my phone isn’t connected to the game’s systems.
She found it anyway. Because that’s what Phantoms do. They find the information they need, and they use it to tell you exactly how exposed you are.
I read the message again. Four sentences. Each one a data point.
She knows my play style. She knows about my team. She considers friendship a weakness. And she’s confident enough to announce herself before the competition starts.
I don’t respond. A Phantom’s silence is its own message.
But I don’t sleep either.