New Sunnydale Academy

New Sunnydale Academy rose at the end of a boulevard lined with ornamental pears that would bloom white in the spring and contribute nothing else for the rest of the year. The school itself could have been a Silicon Valley campus if Silicon Valley had decided to raise children instead of capital. Glass. Steel. Climate control so precise you forgot what season it was outside. VoreTechs logos everywhere, tasteful and insistent, like a signature on a painting you weren’t allowed to touch. The company had bankrolled the whole thing, and the whole thing knew it.

Students arrived in vehicles Nova could only identify because the internet existed. Teslas. BMWs. A sleek black Lyriq glided up with a purr, and Hugo stepped out, fist-bumping his uniformed driver with the studied casualness of someone trying very hard to make chauffeured arrival look relatable.

He joined his crew. “Yo…”

Hugo’s geekiness lived in the details: the vintage game tee, the references that landed half a beat too late for everybody else, the slightly overclocked look of somebody whose brain never really powered down. He was proud of what he was. But being one of the wealthiest kids in school had purchased him a seat at the cool table, and a purchased seat could be repossessed at any time. So around these boys, something in him tightened. The references got tucked away. The enthusiasm got translated. The real Hugo went somewhere safe and sent out a representative.

Cole looked him over. “Hu-go! What’s with your shirt? Galaga?”

Hugo glanced down at the vintage print. “What? It’s vintage. We hitting Vampire Weekend tonight?”

“Dude. Lame. Geeks in costumes and shit?”

A beat of wobble. Then Hugo corrected for it. “No, man, there’s a reason they call it the Fang Bang. Cosplay chicks show skin like it’s an art form. What I saw at Comic-Con, like, defied gravity.”

He mimed a shape in the air that was neither subtle nor necessary. The boys exploded. Cole slapped his hand. Hugo grinned, the tension gone out of him for the moment.

Then he spotted Nova stepping off the bus.

He gave her a small nod, quick, discreet, the sort of greeting you could pretend never happened if somebody cooler noticed.

Nova looked right through it.

The school swallowed them into its clean, bright hallways.

Extracurricular sign-up tables lined the common area, each staffed by students who looked disturbingly enthusiastic for a Wednesday morning. Chess. Coding Club. Academic Decathlon. Cheerleading. PETA. Nova drifted through them like a visitor at an aquarium and stopped, despite herself, at the Drama Club table.

“Oh wow,” she said. “You guys are doing Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

The drama kid lit up. “Yeah, but don’t worry. We’re not doing the original text. We’re setting it entirely in the metaverse.”

Nova made a face she hoped resembled polite interest, failed, and moved on before she said something she’d enjoy too much.

At her locker, she found herself adjacent to a small knot of evangelical students in designer clothes and Christian Canyons Ministry gear. They were having an overly polite debate about whether attending Vampire Weekend constituted spiritual endorsement of vampirism.

Jessica thought it did. “I just think we shouldn’t go. Vampires are satanic, like, by definition. They’re mocking God.”

Kent disagreed. “Vampires don’t exist.”

Keiko seemed prepared to grant the existence of demons on a provisional basis. “But God does, right? And demons… don’t?”

Confused eyes flew to Gracie. Gracie, who had the bright, dangerous energy of someone who genuinely believed ideas mattered and was willing to make a room uncomfortable to prove it. She was the group’s centre of gravity, and she knew it.

“We all know God’s real,” Gracie said. “So what if it’s all real?” She leaned in, lowering her voice. “We’ve all heard the rumours about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

That got their attention. The whispers had always been there, woven into the town’s foundations like rebar: not something you talked about at school, but not something you could entirely forget, either.

“What if she’s not just some urban legend?” Gracie pressed on. “What if she was sent here by God? Like a Joan of Arc for our time?”

Jessica shook her head. “I have faith, but that doesn’t mean I believe some girl actually slayed demons. Unless they were, like, inner demons.”

“Maybe,” Gracie said. “But we don’t know what we don’t know, you know?”

“But we do know,” Kent said. “Those vampire stories were just cover for a crazy crime wave. In old Sunnydale.”

“And we’re gentrified now,” Keiko added, as if gentrification were a kind of exorcism.

Gracie paused. “Then explain the earthquake. Or the Sunnydale Sinkhole. Or the fact that there hasn’t been a single earthquake here since.”

She let that sit.

“Sounds pretty biblical to me.”

The group absorbed it with the slow, wide-eyed silence of people who had just been shown the edge of something they’d been circling for a while.

Nova rolled her eyes and moved on, the verdict settling into place with depressing familiarity. No. Definitely not her people.

In Mr. Burke’s history class, Nova had to excavate her textbook from beneath the geological layers of novels crammed into her bag. Hugo sat down beside her, and she could feel him building up to something the way other people built flatpack furniture: badly, with hidden strain.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s Nova, right? I’m—”

“Hugo. I know. We’ve been sitting next to each other for six weeks.”

He blinked. Absorbed that. “Right. Cool. You hitting up Vampire Weekend?”

“Don’t you mean the Fang Bang?”

A small silence. Something shifted in his face. Not much. Enough. “Oh. I just said that because—”

“You want your friends to think you’re cool.”

He looked at his desk. Nodded once. “Yeah.” A short laugh with no joy in it. “Whoa. I guess that makes me that guy.”

Nova opened her mouth. She had gone clean through the bone there and was aware of it a beat too late. She started to form something that might have been an apology—

The bell saved them both.

Mr. Burke swept to the front of the room with beachy calm and a man bun engineered to seem effortless. He was in his thirties, Cali-cool in the way of someone who had workshopped his entire personality at a teacher-wellness retreat and emerged believing in it.

“All right, let’s bring our energy and focus, everyone. Energy and focus. One cleansing breath, and… let’s begin.”

Nobody breathed with him.

“First up, we still need volunteers for the blood drive.”

Silence.

He smiled through it. “Don’t you want to be the only ones at Vampire Weekend sucking real blood?”

A hand went up in the back. Dillon leaned forward.

Mr. Burke brightened. “Yes! Dillon, wonderful—”

“Can I take a personal day? I can feel my mental health, like, flagging.”

Something clenched in Mr. Burke’s jaw. It vanished almost immediately. “Of course. Mental health is so important.”

Dillon left.

Mr. Burke inhaled through what remained of his professional joy. “Now. Time to pick a historical figure for your midterms. And remember, you must use original texts as reference. No Wikipedia. So, let’s hear it. Jessica?”

“I’m doing Hamilton.”

“I’m also doing Hamilton,” said Cole.

Mr. Burke closed his eyes briefly. “Every year.” Then, recovering: “Okay. How many people are doing Hamilton?”

Half the class raised their hands.

“What if I said you can’t use the musical, only original texts?”

“Federalist Papers, bitch!” someone called out.

The class laughed. Mr. Burke tamped down his annoyance with visible effort. “All right, let’s… use inclusive language.”

The door opened.

Carson walked in wearing tennis whites and the faint aura of someone whose life had already been planned three months in advance by adults with clipboards and ambitions.

“Sorry, Mr. Burke. I had conditioning.”

“Of course. I guess we make exceptions for Junior Olympians.”

Half the room watched him cross to his seat. He was the kind of good-looking that changed the air a little just by walking through it.

Nova was watching too.

Before she had finished forming the thought, before any internal committee had been consulted, she was half out of her chair. “Okay, um, you can sit here—”

Carson looked at her. Then at the empty desk right beside her. “Or I can sit at my own desk?”

There were deaths a body could survive and deaths it could not. This one was the slow kind, the kind where you had to sit back down in the same room as the corpse of your own dignity and pretend to take notes. Nova stared at her notebook with the intensity of someone trying to bore a hole through reality and come out somewhere else.

“Give any thought to your historical figure, Carson?” Burke asked.

“Andre Agassi?”

Mr. Burke looked briefly abandoned by every institution that had ever supported him. “Really? Okaaaay. Who else—”

“Billy Graham,” said Keiko.

“Nolan Bushnell,” said Hugo. Blank looks met him from every direction. “He’s the founder of Atari, you philistines.”

“Agatha Christie,” Nova said, grateful to have a correct answer for something.

“Buffy Summers,” said Gracie.

The class reacted exactly as if she had just nominated Santa Claus for the Hall of Fame.

“Seriously?”
“Come on.”
“You gotta be kidding.”

“Wasn’t she some cheerleader who died at the sinkhole?” someone asked.

Mr. Burke gave Gracie the patient smile teachers kept in reserve for students they hoped would exhaust themselves eventually. “Gracie, Buffy Summers is a myth, not a historical figure.”

“No,” Gracie said. Her voice was calm and certain and completely unbothered by the room. “She was real. And a modern-day saint. I’m going to prove it.”

“Fine. But you’ll have to source from original texts, not the conspiracy claptrap online.”

Gracie sat back, pleased.

Nova leaned over before she could second-guess the impulse. “The public library has an old collection about Sunnydale history. You could start there.”

Gracie turned to her with immediate, unguarded gratitude. “Thanks. Nova, right?”

A silver cross hung at Gracie’s throat. It caught the light from the window.

Nova’s vision cracked.

The classroom didn’t disappear. It thinned, like fabric held up to a flame, and through it came another glint. Cleaner, sharper, impossible. The cross from the dream, not the one resting against Gracie’s collarbone. Sound dropped out of the room. Nova’s hand moved to her own throat without her telling it to.

Then it was gone. The room snapped back, full volume, full fluorescence. Gracie was still looking at her, waiting.

“Right,” Nova said. Her voice sounded normal, which felt like a lie. “You’re welcome.”

At the front of the room, Mr. Burke checked his roster.

“Okay, how about you, Larkin—”

He stopped.

The desk was empty.

He looked up, sighed with the resignation of a man who had climbed this particular hill before and found nothing at the top, and said to the room:

“Anyone know where Larkin is this time?”