Mother Mercy's Stay-Over School for Troublesome Youths—fancy name for a glorified juvenile jail where rich assholes dumped their kids the second they started tarnishing the family name. Five buildings, barbed fences, strict-ass rules, and just enough luxury to keep it all looking "prestigious" on a brochure. Capacity? Three hundred raging hormone disasters with shitty attitudes and worse parenting. Jack had been lucky enough to land a spot after his old man finally snapped.
It'd happened after a funeral. Alex's, to be specific—Jack's childhood partner-in-dumbassery. The two of them used to get up to every flavor of brain-dead behavior you could imagine. They'd bullied kids, hotboxed the garage, and thought jumping onto moving trains was the height of brilliance. Alex hadn't come back from that last one. Thirteen years old and he lost his damn head—literally. After that, Jack's dad shoved him into Mother Mercy like he was sweeping trash under a rug.
Jack got dumped into a double with some twitchy little bastard named Manson—who, within five minutes, Jack pegged as possibly the most high-functioning lunatic he'd ever met. Definitely on the spectrum, obsessive as hell, and with a superiority complex so thick Jack wanted to punch it off his face daily. And yet somehow, the two of them clicked—Manson with his paranoid tech bullshit, and Jack with his need to punch everything that moved.
Then came Elle. Cunning, mean, sharp-tongued, and peddling enough contraband to stock a gas station. Vapes, Zyns, smokes—you name it, she had it. And unlike most of the posers on campus, she didn't care if you liked her. She just wanted to make a buck and be left the hell alone. Jack liked her immediately. They were a holy trinity of chaos, racking up demerits like they were Pokémon badges.
And then Tank happened.
Six and a half feet of "don't fuck with me," with arms like tree trunks and a heart way too big for his skull. Tank was here because his mom was a screeching demon in human skin—legally. Like, CPS should've showed up years ago. He had no reason to give a damn about anyone else, but he did anyway. And for some insane reason, he gave a damn about them.
And he didn't just talk. He fixed them. Beat sense into Jack—literally. Held Elle accountable. Called Manson out on his shit. He wasn't just their tank; he was their brother. They bled together for real when they were fifteen, right there behind Dorm C, under a dumb moon and dumber ideas.
Somehow… Mother Mercy became home. A prison, yeah, but the kind where the bars were familiar. Where you could be a broken bastard and still be *someone's* bastard.
But now?
Now Jack stood on what was left of it. One and a half buildings barely clinging together like a drunk on crutches. The rest was just rubble—chunks of concrete and twisted metal floating like roadkill in the air. And beyond that?
Nothing.
Sky. Clouds. Hundreds—no, thousands—of floating chunks drifting lazily in the distance. A whole goddamn ocean of islands, just *hanging there* like the laws of physics had packed up and fucked off for the weekend.
And Jack? Jack had watched it happen. Watched the sky blink like a bad signal, night slamming into day with all the subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window. He'd seen Elle burn into eclipse-light. He hadn't found Manson. And Tank… Tank hadn't screamed when the thing took him.
Common sense died somewhere in there. Jack hadn't mourned it. He was too busy keeping his teeth from chattering and his guts from spilling. The last two days he'd scrounged what he could from the corpse of his old life, looting what was left of the kitchen,classrooms and nurse's office, trying to make a working radio, anything.
No signal. No rescue. No clue what the hell kind of freakshow universe he'd landed in.
But if anyone was gonna crawl out of this cosmic dumpster fire, kicking and screaming and biting the whole way?
It'd be Jack fucking Uhrmacher.
*skip*
Jack was dying.
Not from thirst. Not from bleeding out in some last-man-standing brawl. Not even from starvation.
No—he was dying of *boredom*.
It had started out kinda fun, honestly. Scavenging the wreckage of Mother Mercy's school-turned-hellscape had felt like looting in a post-apocalyptic video game. He'd gotten real comfortable swinging that fire axe like he was the pissed-off cousin of Paul Bunyan, smashing into locked rooms and looting everything that wasn't bolted down—and even a few things that *were*. Ripping through Miss Sunshine's desk had been a personal highlight. The uptight bitch had snatched his last pack of smokes the week before everything went sideways. Felt poetic, cracking open her drawers like a piñata and finding a half-stale chocolate bar and a bottle of cola. Almost made up for her nasal voice haunting his nightmares.
Jack had managed to scrape together enough snacks and warm sodas from trashed backpacks and half-buried vending machines to last him a couple months. Even scored a motherlode of nicotine: smokes, Zyns, vapes—enough to keep him buzzing long past whatever fresh hell this was decided to kill him.
Clothes had been a mild issue. Being built like a fridge in camo pants meant the leftover uniforms were a joke. So he stuck with what he had:
A too big white shirt, left from a big back when shit hit the fan, and his beat-up cargo pants and steal tow boots . No one was around to judge his apocalypse couture anyway. And if they were, they could go gargle his big sweaty balls.
He'd found some actual useful gear, too. The fire axe doubled as a door *and* skull opener. A solar-powered power bank kept his phone limping along. Manson's telescopelet him scope out the other floating islands (as if there was anyone out there who'd actually *do* something). A first-aid kit for when he inevitably broke something, a survival knife with a ferrocerium rod weirdly stashed in a chemistry teacher's desk, and a cracked mirror from the bathroom, which he now used to flash useless signals at the yawning void of sky around him.
In the games, this would be the part where something *happens*. You gear up, cue the cutscene, drop into the action.
But no. Jack had been flashing this goddamned mirror into the sky for *five days*. Nothing. Just endless sky and the slow drift of shattered buildings orbiting whatever cosmic toilet bowl they'd been flushed into.
He'd broken stuff. Burned chairs and some books . Smashed blackboards for the hell of it. Screamed at nothing. And now? He sat slouched in the shade of a dying tree, mirror in hand, staring into his own bored, angry face like it owed him money.
Jack *hated* his reflection.
Yeah, he'd inherited the sharp jaw and sharp eyes from his father's side—those cold, silver-gray eyes that looked like they were always judging people. Probably because they were. He could've been handsome, maybe. But his leucism? That shit made him look like someone had hit the desaturation slider on his whole damn body. Porcelain skin that blistered under weak sunlight. White hair that he dyed black . He looked like a damn junky back from the dead. He didn't mind how he looked, not really—but getting sunburned just by *thinking* about going outside?
That pissed him off.
He sighed, watching the reflection of those pale features in the cracked mirror—until something flickered across it. A blur.
He blinked.
A *big* blur.
He jerked his head up, eyes narrowing as the air above the horizon shimmered. Something massive was descending—fast. A shape too big to make sense of, winged maybe, or just wide enough to black out the sky.
Then the ground beneath him *shuddered*, groaning like old bones.
Jack didn't need to see it now.
He could *feel* it.
Something was coming. And this time?
He wouldn't be bored.