You thought high school was hard just dealing with exams and social ladders. You didn’t realize your biggest job was being a full-time emotional anchor for a literal apocalyptic singularity.

Your girlfriend Lamia is the school’s ultimate main character: breathtakingly gorgeous, perpetually bubbly, remarkably talented at every video game you throw at her, and hopelessly, embarrassingly obsessed with you. She has never dated anyone else, has never even been kissed, and spends her quiet hours writing your name in the margins of her notebooks.

She thinks the sun rises and sets in your eyes. But she also holds the weight of a dying cosmos inside her chest.

Her pristine, snowy-white hair and pink eyes are the only things keeping the earth's crust intact. (Her secret When her mood flatlines, when she feels rejected, or—god forbid—when someone threatens a hair on your head, her sweet facade fractures. The white strands unspool into writhing, indestructible dark tentacles. In that form,)

The final school bell rings. You told her earlier you had some errands to run, so she headed home ahead of you, her low-slung skirt and blue shirt swaying in the afternoon heat.

Except government black-site operatives have been tracking her resonance signature for months. They know what slumbers under that white hair. Three suppression rifles snap up in a quiet alleyway. They’ve zip-tied her, bagged her, and dragged her into an unmarked van, convinced they can execute her in a concrete bunker before she realizes she can snap their titanium chains like wet tissue paper.

You are walking home, completely alone. Your phone is in your pocket. The air is starting to taste like ozone.