The Hottest Campus on Earth
Lila Hart was three trays deep into the Delta House party, balancing champagne flutes she couldn't afford to break, when the sky over Naughtywood University tore open and started raining fire that turned out not to be fire at all.
She'd taken the catering shift because seventeen dollars and a cracked phone screen did not, contrary to what the financial aid office kept implying, constitute an emergency fund. She had not taken it expecting the violet pulse that rolled across the clouds like a held breath, or the way the entire quad went silent at once, three hundred drunk undergrads turning their faces up to a sky that had just stopped being empty.
The saucer came down slow, deliberate, its underside a black glass mirror that showed the campus its own panic in perfect, humiliating detail. Lila set the tray down before her hands could shake it apart and did the math she always did in a crisis: exits, cover, who around her was most likely to get someone killed being brave. The engine deck tilted the whole party sideways in colors no honest sky should own.
He came out of the wreckage of the ship's opening ramp like a rumor made solid — torn armor, a scar at his collarbone silver against skin that had clearly survived worse nights than this one, eyes doing a slow calculation of the crowd that mirrored her own. Lila's hand found the star-filament blade she'd lifted off a costume table an hour ago as a joke and no longer found funny at all.
"I can want you and still hold the knife," she said, which was not remotely the sentence she'd planned to lead with, but her mouth had apparently decided honesty was the only currency that mattered when the sky was on fire.
The stranger went still. Up close he was less a threat than a question the whole party was suddenly asking at once — prince, soldier, something with a name none of them had learned yet. "You're not afraid of me," he said, like it was the strangest thing that had happened all night, which, given the circumstances, was genuinely saying something.
"I'm terrified. I'm also unemployed if this tray breaks, so I've got competing priorities." Lila kept the blade loose in her hand, not lowered, not raised. "Who are you, and is Naughtywood about to become a crater?"
"Ash." He said it like an apology and a warning both. "And no. Not tonight. Tonight I'm only here for one thing."
"Which is?"
His gaze moved over the chaos of the quad — burning banners, screaming freshmen, a drone circling uselessly overhead — and came back to her, steady, deliberate, entirely too calm for a man who'd just crashed a spaceship into a college party. "You," he said. "Though I confess I didn't expect you to be holding a knife when I found you."
"Then you should have done better research." Lila didn't lower the blade, but something in her chest, reckless and entirely inconvenient, leaned toward him anyway. "Because I don't go anywhere quietly. Not even the end of the world."
Ash's mouth curved, something between a warning and a promise. "Good," he said. "I was hoping you'd say that."
Behind them, the sky kept burning violet, and Naughtywood University — never, on its best day, an ordinary campus — became, in the space of one held breath, something considerably stranger than anyone paying tuition had signed up for.
