Page 128 of Black Hollow: Awakening

It didn’t sound convincing.

“Okay,” Will said softly. “We can play for a bit.”

Liam was delighted. So much so that he ignored Will’s ineptitude, encouraging him to keep playing. His love for basketball was plain to see. He probably didn’t have anyone to play with now. It was no surprise; besides his teammates, he only ever hung out with Blake, and Will couldn’t imagine Alden playing a sport like that.

Two hours later, they were walking home. Will was breathless and sore as hell, but all in all, happy.

“…it was okay,” Liam was saying, giving his opinion on the manga he’d borrowed. “I was expecting something better.”

“What?” Those heresy-filled words shook Will to his core. “It’s the best manga under the sun! Okay, fine, at least in the horror genre. Seriously, Nakamura is a genius. I’ve never seen anything more terrifying!”

“Yeah… it’s just that his stories don’t really make sense. Everything is so over the top.”

“That’s why it’s scary, that’s the point!”

“I prefer a different kind of horror. More… psychological.”

“Oh. You’re that deep, are you?” Will asked playfully.

Liam smiled at him.

“Don’t I look the part?” he asked with mock indignation. “You should know, Will, that secretly, I’m a great thinker.”

Okay, that sentence made Will nearly trip, laughing too hard to pay attention to where he was going.

“Uh-huh,” he managed, once he’d finally composed himself. “And what exactly do you think about?”

“Many important things.” Liam tried to sound serious. “But if you doubt me, I can bet you twenty bucks I’ll get a higher score on the literature exam than Blake.”

“No way,” Will said flatly. “Blake loves literature. He writes essays that are a dozen pages long!”

“Yeah, but he completely misunderstands how the exams work. Unlike me.”

“Oh, really?”

“You bet. He doesn’t stick to the rubric. Instead of thinking about what a bunch of professors want to read, he scrawls out these long, off-topic ramblings and then gets pissed when he doesn’t get a good score. Last year he got a sixty-three.” Will’s mouth fell open. It was hard to believe. He himself had only gotten sixty, and Blake was considered a brilliant student. “To this day, I regret not recording him arguing with the principal. Pure gold.”

“And what did you get?” Will asked, not expecting the score to be much different.

“Ninety,” Liam replied casually.

“WHAT?” Will exclaimed, staring at him in shock. “How is that possible?”

“I’m telling you. You write what they expect from you. That’s the whole philosophy.”

“Okay. I stand corrected,” Will declared humbly. “And the bet’s off.”

“Damn it,” Liam said with theatrical drama. “I should have kept my secret techniques to myself!”

Will chuckled. They were passing a single-family house. Two children were playing in the yard. A boy threw a paper airplane toward a girl. The makeshift toy flew for a moment, carried by the wind, before it began to fall.

That’s when Will realized he’d seen something like it before.

The memory returned to him. So distant it was like trying to recall something from years ago, even though it had only happened a few months prior. He remembered walking home on the first day of school. And seeing a slowly falling object, glinting in the sun. He remembered finding it in the grass. He remembered the triangular shape. The ornate structure, the white color, and the green light flickering in its very center. He remembered touching the thing, thinking it was some kind of device and…

That was it. Nothing more.

“Will?” Liam said, a note of worry in his voice.