At Lumenward Academy, everyone knew the rule: first-years never go near the old lighthouse wards. Not for a dare, not for a dropped hat, not for anything.

I, Inez Vale, had written that rule out forty times in my neatest handwriting, which is how you fix a record after your Opening Skywrite explodes into a glowing map of the school. Forty times. My hand still ached.

"You know," Dexter said, dropping onto the bench beside me at breakfast, "if you wrote it forty-one times, the rule might become sentient."

"Go away."

"It'd follow you around. Tiny voice. *No lighthouse, Inez. No lighthouse.*" He did the voice. It was terrible.

What I did not tell him was that I'd been awake since the bells.

Lumenward's bells ring at moonrise, nine notes, always the same. Except Ebony had heard something under them. She found me in the corridor at midnight, headphones around her neck, silver freckles catching the lamplight.

"There's a tenth note," she'd whispered. "It's not ringing, Inez. It's *hurting*."

Clue one, I wrote in my notebook. I keep lists. Lists are how I stay useful.

Clue two arrived at lunch, when Dexter slammed his confiscated ink-launcher onto the table. Professor Halbrook had locked it in the equipment vault three days ago. It was now scorched along one side, and its needle-compass was pointing northwest with the stubbornness of a dog smelling dinner.

"It walked out," Dexter said. "Vault door's still locked. It got *pulled*."

"Pulled where?"

We both looked northwest, toward the old lighthouse standing at the cliff edge of the academy's floating island, gray and patient above the clouds.

"Absolutely not," I said.

Clue three was Abel.

I found him in the portrait hall after supper, standing in front of a painting of the Second Circle of 1891.