Chapter 12:
The following Monday, the air in Ms. Albright's Chemistry class was different. It wasn't the usual dread of a pop quiz. It was a thick, unnatural stillness. The scripts of the students were muted, as if waiting.
Ellie felt it immediately, a low-grade hum of wrongness that made the back of her neck prickle. Kael, sitting two rows over, was rigid, his silver static a barely-contained storm.
Ms. Albright walked in, but her script was... new. It read: [MS. ALBRIGHT]: "Class, we have a new student joining us today."
But Ellie knew, with a certainty that chilled her blood, that the script last Friday had mentioned a review session for the midterm. There had been no mention of a new student. This was a fresh edit. A retcon so seamless it was terrifying.
"Class, this is Jeremy," Ms. Albright said, her voice sounding rehearsed.
The boy who stepped into the room was a collection of carefully chosen, slightly off-kilter details. A shock of unnaturally red hair. Thick, black-framed spectacles that reflected the light, hiding his eyes. A smile that was too polite, too still.
[JEREMY]: (Smiling) "Hi everyone. It's great to be here."
His script was the most horrifying thing Ellie had ever seen. It wasn't blue, or green, or silver. It was a flat, perfect, soulless gray. And it was simple.
[NARRATION]: Jeremy smiled a friendly smile.
[JEREMY]: "I'm really interested in chemistry."
There were no inner thoughts. No hidden emotions. No complexity. He was a cardboard cutout. A character asset dropped into the game.
"He's an Insert," Kael's voice was a tense whisper in her mind, a skill they'd been practicing. "A custom-made character. The Ghostwriter's work. He's not real."
Jeremy's gaze swept the room and landed on Ellie. The smile didn't change. The gray script didn't flicker.
[JEREMY]: "You must be Ellie. I've heard a lot about you."
The class let out a soft, collective "Ooooh," as if on cue. The script was writing a connection between them, forcing a narrative.
Ellie's blood ran cold. Heard from who? He didn't exist until this morning.
She tried to look at his past, to see the "code" that made him up, but it was like hitting a firewall. [ERROR: CHARACTER_BIOGRAPHY_RESTRICTED]
After class, Jeremy appeared at her locker. His movements were smooth, economical. Too perfect.
[JEREMY]: "This school is so much bigger than my last one. Could you show me around, Ellie?"
The gray script pulsed, and Ellie felt a subtle, external pressure, a gentle nudge to say yes. It was a low-level narrative compulsion, the kind her new achievement was supposed to block. She resisted it, the effort like pushing against a soft, insistent wall.
"Sorry. I'm busy," she forced out, slamming her locker shut.
His smile remained, a fixed, porcelain expression. "Another time, then."
As he walked away, Chloe bounded up, her script a whirlwind of excitement. "Oh my god, Ellie! He's so cute! And he totally likes you! Did you see how he looked at you?"
"No, Chloe, he's—" Ellie stopped herself. How could she explain? Chloe's memory, her perceptions, had already been edited. To her, Jeremy was a real, interesting new boy.
Kael fell into step beside her as she walked away. "He's a probe. A data-collection tool. The Ghostwriter is using him to study how you interact, how you form relationships. Every conversation with him is a debriefing."
The horror of it was absolute. This wasn't an enemy she could fight with a fire alarm. This was an enemy who wrote himself into the supporting cast of her life, who twisted her friends' perceptions, who made her doubt the very reality of the people around her.
The war was no longer about dramatic fights in the cafeteria. It had become a quiet, insidious invasion of her everyday life. And the most terrifying part was that nobody else could see the strings.
The bell for fifth-period Biology was a welcome relief. It was a structured environment, a place of facts and procedures where the script was usually predictable. Ms. Albright's dry lectures, the smell of formaldehyde, the precise steps of an experiment. For forty-five minutes, she could pretend the world wasn't made of fragile, editable code.
She walked into the lab, her backpack heavy with textbooks. Chloe waved her over to their shared station. The script above her head was its usual bubbly self.
[CHLOE]: "Finally! I am so ready to dissect this frog. Okay, not really, that's gross. You're doing the cutting."
Ellie managed a weak smile. "Deal."
She put her bag down on the floor next to her stool. She remembered unzipping it. She remembered pulling out her lab notebook and a pen. She placed them on the counter. The script noted it plainly.
[NARRATION]: Ellie prepared for the day's lab, the routine a small comfort.
She reached into her bag for her goggles.
And then—nothing.
Not blackness. Not a blink. It was a cut. A hard edit.
One moment, her fingers were brushing against the plastic of her safety goggles at the bottom of her bag.
The next, she was standing upright, her lab notebook open in front of her. A detailed, half-finished diagram of a frog's circulatory system was drawn in her own handwriting. Her hand held a pencil. The clock on the wall read 1:25 PM.
Class had started at 1:05 PM.
Twenty minutes. Gone.
A cold, visceral dread, far worse than any fear she'd felt before, washed over her. It was the terror of a void, of lost time. Her script, when she could focus enough to see it, was a mess of confused, panicked text.
[NARRATION]: She felt disoriented. Where had the time gone?
"—and as you can see, the arterial system is clearly defined in Ellie's excellent diagram," Ms. Albright was saying, pointing at her notebook. "Well done, Ellie. You and Chloe are ahead of the class."
Ellie's head snapped towards Chloe. Her friend gave her a wide-eyed, impressed look. "When did you become a biology genius? You just zoned out and went to town on that thing. You were in, like, a trance."
A trance. That's what it looked like to them.
But Ellie knew. She hadn't been in a trance. She had been elsewhere. Or nowhere.
She looked down at her own hands. They were clean. There was no trace of the dissection, no smell of preservative on her skin, even though her diagram showed the frog had been perfectly opened up. She hadn't done it. She knew she hadn't.
She felt a phantom sensation, a memory that wasn't hers—the slippery feel of the specimen, the snip of the scissors. The script had performed the actions for her, puppeteering her body while her consciousness was... switched off.
Kael was across the room, his face pale. His silver static was agitated, buzzing violently. His script was a frantic, silent scream only for her.
[KAEL]: (Thinking) *A narrative skip. They edited you out. They can control your character directly now. This is bad. This is very, very bad.*
The rest of the class passed in a blur of rising panic. When the bell rang, she stumbled into the hallway, clutching her notebook like a lifeline. The evidence of her missing time was right there, in her own handwriting.
Jeremy was leaning against the lockers opposite the lab door, as if waiting. His red hair was a bloody smear in her vision. His gray script was calm, observational.
[JEREMY]: "You did great in there, Ellie. It was like you were a completely different person."
He smiled, a small, cold thing, and walked away.
Ellie slumped against the cool metal of her locker, her breath coming in short gasps. This was a new level of violation. They weren't just changing the world around her. They were editing her. Her actions, her memories, her very continuity.
She had become a file they could open, modify, and save without her consent. The Ghostwriter wasn't just observing her. He was starting to rewrite her.
And the most terrifying question echoed in the void of those twenty missing minutes: What else had they made her do?