44. Amiyah
Chapter forty-four
Amiyah
The alarm is the sound of a dying animal—high, sharp, and designed purely to ruin whatever pathetic illusion of peace sleep provided.
I slap it silent with the instinctive brutality of a woman trained to treat her phone like a tripwire, and make the catastrophic mistake of unlocking the screen before my eyes have fully adjusted.
Forty-two notifications. All of them from ThornsUp.
My spine locks. I sit up so fast my temples throb, the morning light slicing across the glass at an acute, blinding angle.
Top of the feed, pinned by the algorithm like a dead body in a public square: a frame-grab from some random video someone took at the Sigma Chi frat party last month.
The strobe lights cutting through the dark, my head thrown back in a laugh I never meant to let anyone outside our unit see, blonde hair catching the flash.
Half-cropped beside me is his profile—the clean, arrogant line of his jaw, his dark hair falling across his forehead, looking entirely too reckless for a man hiding behind an alias.
His face is circled in red. Across a dozen campus gossip channels, his features are mapped out in digital ink, accompanied by headers written by people who treat human lives like reality TV: IS THIS KAI RYU?
, BLACKTHORN’S SECRET STAR?, and, my personal nightmare, EXCHANGE STUDENT OR GLOBAL PHENOM? WE INVESTIGATE.
Below that, the student paper’s official account has dropped a teaser: Exchange Student or Global Star? The Mystery of Jae Kim. Entertainment blogs have already scraped it, reposting it with the breathless, predatory panic of people who need clicks to survive.
I keep scrolling. The floor drops out.
A TikTok shot from the third floor of humanities, shaky and zoomed in on Jae crossing the quad this morning.
The caption: That’s 1000% Kai Ryu from C it's broken entirely. If I go to him tonight, I’m walking into a fishbowl of flashing lights and live microphones to make a choice I can't take back.
What other choice do I have though? I’m already in over my head.
My thumb taps out four final words, hits send, and lets the silence close in.
Me: I'll be there.