Alex Erikson slipped beneath a desk as alarms rang through the entire school. With sluggish movements, other students crawled under their own desks. They held up their phones when the teacher flicked off the lights, pulled out their lunches and began eating and talking in hushed tones while waiting for the drill to end. Alex, and the rest of them, figured it was yet another fire drill—one that had gotten quite old.

Alex smiled over at a young man, a few years older than herself, and the two reached out to hold hands.

“So after this, want to go out and get some lunch?” he asked.

“Rebel,” she snickered.

He lifted her hand and pressed his lips against the top of her knuckles. “And you love it.”

The two chuckled, clinging to the other’s hand when they heard them. Footsteps echoed down the halls and an occasional squeak of a boot against the floor.

Everyone went silent and cast their eyes to the door. The teachers never walked down the halls during these drills. There was a first time for everything though, right?

Alex glanced down one of the aisles and caught a small glimpse of her teacher. Beneath his open-front desk, he furrowed his brows. His own confusion shifted to horror as the classroom door slammed against the wall and the hinges broke. Everyone moved to their proper positions without a moment of hesitation. Alex jerked her hand away from Zack’s and cowered beneath her desk. She pulled her knees to her chest. She put her forehead to the floor and steadied her breath. This was a test. It was a trial. That was all. There is nothing more going on than a drill, she told herself.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first gunshot made her eyes widen. She looked to Zack in fear, but she was greeted with nothing more than anger as he snarled at the sound of violence from beneath his desk. He was offended. They were Healers, after all. Any wound inflicted upon them could be mended in a matter of seconds. Alex figured that was why one of the students from behind her stood and charged at the man. Right by Alex’s desk, the student was gunned down with a single bullet to the chest. She fell to her knees. After a moment gasping for breath, the highest ranking Healer fell face-first onto the floor in a pool of her blood.

Alex waited for her to get up. Alex held her breath and smiled, knowing the teen would stand like nothing happened. She waited for the girl to stop bleeding.

She did none of these things.

When realization came to everyone in the room that she wasn’t getting up, panic erupted. Alex stared at the dead girl with horror etched into her face.

People screamed around her and students got up from under their desks. Some ran towards the door. Some charged the man. Alex considered running as well; the gunman couldn’t kill them all. No human was that fast.

The bodies piling up and the blood surging closer begged to differ.

Alex watched a boy on the track team stand and charge for the door. From the lips of the murder, a soft cackle whispered through the chaos. The alarms were still ringing. Shivers ran over Alex’s back. The boy was shot in the leg and he toppled and staggered to the side, shoving Alex’s desk over. It clattered to the ground and his body fell atop hers. Before Alex could utter a prayer, a second body fell over her, further hiding her. The blood that trickled from his chest shielded her from the killer’s eyes.

The murderer continued shooting, sending two more teenagers collapsing to ground.

Her breath caught in her throat as her unfocused eyes stared forward. Her heart thundered in her ears and she couldn’t hear the shooter’s footsteps. Was he moving? Was he loading his gun?

Her lungs stopped working. Her nerves split. Her throat closed up. She just needed to act dead. Just act dead. But her curiosity betrayed her and her eyes flickered in the chilling silence. At last, she saw him. He smiled at her, a sort of pitying, sad smile that seemed oddly sincere. Then the man lifted his gun to kill the last of the twenty-two students.

The muzzle of the gun vanished, his arm vanished, his body vanished. One moment he stood there, and ready to end her life, the next he was nowhere to be seen. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath—the eyes of the killer engraining themselves into the front of her skull. But she wanted nothing more than to forget it.

He was one of them, she realized. One with a Gift. One who seemed unable to properly control his Gift. A wave of terror choked the breath from her lungs. He had killed them. He had killed all of them. And he couldn’t even control his Gift.

The muzzles of more guns sliced through the air before three men jolted through the door, covered with bullet-proof vests. The shortest of them stood at six feet tall, and all of them possessed orange-hued skin beneath their lines of protective clothing. Despite their monstrous height and skin, their eyes held sadness and terror. Two of them stooped down to get a pulse from one of the dead while the third came to help Alex up from under bodies.

“You’re alive,” he gasped. “You’re alive!”

Yet despite his help, Alex wasn’t listening to him. Her eyes widened and rested on the body that had fallen over her. She didn’t know why, but she had held onto the hope that Zack had survived. That somehow, he had kept away from the bullets. That somehow, he hadn’t been shot by the bullets that tore through their abilities.

“No!” she cried, grabbing Zack’s arms. “No!” She pulled him onto her lap, tears dripping off her chin. Her hand pressed against his chest, the wound pushing the bullet up into her palm as it sealed. Her lower lip quavered; her vision blurred. Alex bent over and put her forehead against his.

“Zack…Zack, please…No.” Her shoulders shook and she placed a whisper of a kiss upon his lips. She ran her fingers under her eyes when the man placed a hand against her shoulder.

“Miss—”

Alex whirled, hurling the bloodied bullet at him. He jerked back, blood staining his visor.

“You killed him,” she hissed through her teeth. “You, all of you!” She threw her hand to the others in the room, “If you had been here—if you had done your job—none of this would’ve happened!” She whipped back to the man beside her, grabbed his hand, and pushed her bloodied palm against his. The blood on her flesh stained his glove.

“There is blood on your hands,” she cried, her eyes wild. “Zack’s blood is on your hands!”