Yuki Tanaka kept a list of the students who had vanished. Six names now, all seniors like her, all gone in the two years before graduation. Nobody said the word aloud. Teachers marked them absent and moved on. But Yuki had heard the whispers in the stairwell: something took them, one by one, and it hunted students her age. She had four months left until she could walk out with a diploma and never come back. To survive, she needed to know how it chose. And no one who knew was talking. So she went looking for the one person who had worked at the school longer than anyone. The old groundskeeper spent his afternoons behind the gym, near the tall firs that lined the fence. Yuki found him there, kneeling in the dirt, tearing a young sapling out by the roots. His flat cap was crooked. His boots were caked with mud. "You shouldn't be back here," he said, without turning. His voice was rough, tired. "You know what happens to the students," Yuki said. "I know you do. Six of them are gone." The old man stopped. He looked at the sapling in his fist, then dropped it. "I plant these," he said. "Every spring. And every spring one grows wrong." He nodded at the fir he had just pulled. Its needles were dark and oily, almost wet. "That one. It's not a tree." Yuki stepped closer. The thing on the ground did not smell like a plant. It smelled like meat. "It waits where students go alone," the groundskeeper said. "Empty halls. The far corner of the yard. Anywhere quiet. It smells fear, or maybe it smells the ones who feel trapped. The six who went missing—all of them walked home alone. All of them scared." He wiped his hands on his coat. "It doesn't chase. It sits. It waits for you to come to it." Yuki's mouth went dry. "Then how do I stay safe?" "Stay where there are people," he said. "Never alone. Never afraid where it's quiet." He picked up his spade. "But you came back here alone, didn't you." Yuki turned. The row of firs stretched along the fence. She had walked past a dozen of them to reach him. Now she looked, really looked. One tree, four back, had dark oily needles. And it was closer to the path than she remembered. Her breath caught. She had her answer. She knew how it hunted now. But knowing had cost her something—she had walked the whole length of that fence alone, scared, past a tree that should not have been there. "Go," the old man said quietly. "Straight to the crowd. Don't look back at it." Yuki ran. Behind her, she heard the wet needles shift, though there was no wind.