Chapter 17 · Loopbound - Chapter 17: Ten Seconds Still

The campus is frozen.

Not dead. Not collapsed. Frozen.

Callum stands in the quad and the fountain spray hangs in the air like glass spikes. A first-year is mid-step on the path, one foot off the ground, mouth open in a laugh that never finishes. The admin building clock reads 11:59:50. The second hand doesn't move.

Ten seconds before the blast.

He's been through this moment a hundred times. The ward always explodes at midnight. The whole academy goes down. He dies with eight hundred people and wakes up at six a.m. in the dorm.

Not this time.

This time the world stops ten seconds early and doesn't let go.

"Vera." He tries his comm link. Static. He tries the emergency override. Nothing.

He's alone in a campus full of frozen people and the one person who might know what the hell is happening isn't answering.

So he runs.

The restricted archive is across campus. Normally it's a five-minute jog. Now it feels like moving through a photograph. The frozen students don't blink when he passes. Their eyes track nothing.