ONE MINUTE FRASER was boasting about how much he had to drink on Saturday night. And the next minute he was gone.

There.

Gone.

No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.

Roxanne Hay blinked at the empty seat he left behind. She was sitting in geography, a class mostly made up of fourth-years with a handful of fifth-years like Fraser. While the teacher faffed with the overhead projector, they'd been catching up after the weekend. Everyone had been over at Jenny's house for her fifteenth except her. She'd just been about to call Fraser a liar but now he was gone.

She turned to her best friend Carla- who by coincidence was also named Hay- sitting behind Fraser. She still had her nose deep in her book but as a silence fell in the classroom, she began to look up and the pencil she'd been chewing fell.

Philip Borthwick, Roxanne's 'desk friend', prodded her arm. 'You saw that, right?'

'Yeah, he just blinked out,' she said. Her mouth felt like sandpaper.

'Dude, like half the class just vanished,' he said. 'Do you think it's a prank?'

Sharing her desk with Philip was pretty decent, she thought. He read as fast as her, so sharing textbooks was never an issue, and he didn't make a fuss inhaling snot the one time he had the cold. She'd had to sit next to someone like that before. The sound had always made her feel sick.

The three girls in the far corner giggled nervously.

'Maybe it's aliens?' Suggested Rebecca Robertson before muffling a laugh with the sleeve of her cardigan. She was an airhead type, perhaps not as dumb as she seemed in class discussions- she'd somehow made it into the top geography class- but she did lack common sense. Roxanne had little to do with her but found her annoying all the same.

She looked around the room, counting who was missing. 'Miss Sinclair can't work a projector without disrupting the whole class, do you think she could get herself and eight other people out of the room in one instant without any of the rest of us noticing?' She asked Philip.

He shrugged. 'We could have been hypnotised or something.'

'No, we weren't,' Eva Jones said from his left.

'Maybe they're still in the room, pissing themselves laughing, and we've been tricked into not seeing them.' Philip shrugged again. 'I mean, maybe.'

'It doesn't work like that, and I'm going to prove you wrong,' Eva said. 'But I can't get on the internet for some reason.'

'Log into the school Wi-Fi,' Roxanne said.

'Do you think I'm not already? I can't get on at all.'

Carla finally spoke, 'Is anyone else's phones not working?'

There was a scrabble as everyone got up to pace the classroom in search of a spot where their phones would get internet. Wherever she stood, Roxanne still had three bars and 4G, but not even one of her apps could refresh. She wrote a text to Amy, her sister who should be in her Spanish class just across the courtyard. The text wouldn't send.

She bumped into Rebecca, oblivious while her phone was pressed to her ear. A few second passed, then she let her listen.

'There's no dial tone,' Roxanne said. Her mouth dried out again.

Rebecca's eyes were wide. 'That's 999 I called. What the actual heck is going on?'

'This is all wrong,' she heard Carla say.

'Wrong how?'

'We're fifteen.' She drummed her nails on her phone. 'Do you think this is all over town?'

'Or over the whole world?' Roxanne asked. 'There must be a teacher still here, though. Right? They'll know what to do.'

Philip and Rebecca nodded. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Has to be.'

'Are we looking?' Rebecca started munching her sleeve again. 'Because I'm scared.'

'Yeah.' She nodded. 'Let's look. Carla?'

'But we're fifteen,' she said. Her pale eyes were fixed on the floor and Roxanne couldn't work out if she was having a mental break or just deep in thought. 'Yous go ahead, I'll come up with something here.'

The three of them walked on to the modern studies staff room. The door was wide open, but it was empty inside. A couple of coffee mugs lay on the floor, the carpet soaking up the dregs. No sign of the teachers or where they'd gone.

'Ok, maybe this is more than just a prank,' said Philip. 'Having an internal freak-out right now.'

'Do you hear that?' Rebecca asked.

She couldn't hear anything but kids in the classrooms all having a carry on. Somebody screamed but was drowned out by laughter. Everyone had the same idea: this was a joke.

'If we're still here then there's got to be a teacher somewhere.' Roxanne picked up the mugs and placed them in the sink. When she turned around there was a third-year, she thought his name was Blake, standing in the doorway.

'Have you seen Mr Bloom?' He asked. 'We can't get the iPads online, and he must have walked out.'

Rebecca frowned at her. 'Who?'

'He's new,' Roxanne told her.

'Did you see him walk out?' Asked Philip. There was a hopeful tone to his voice.

Blake shook his head. 'No one did.'

'Has anyone else vanished?' Roxanne asked.

The boy scrunched his face up. 'No?'

The fourth years shared a glance. Could it be that only their class was affected by this vanishing? When they returned, would they find Fraser and Miss Sinclair explaining to the class how they did it?

'Wait, have kids gone missing? How old were they?'

'Some fifth-years,' Roxanne replied. 'Like, sixteen-year olds.'

'Not fifteen?'

A chill ran down her back. Fifteen. The same number Carla had been muttering. What did the two of them know that everyone else didn't?

'We're fifteen,' said Rebecca.

'Why would fifteen-year olds vanish, too?' Asked Philip. 'Seems kind of random to me.'

'No,' said Blake. 'So, has every single person over sixteen vanished?'

'I don't know,' said Philip. 'Have they?'

Roxanne gasped as she had a bolt of inspiration. 'Mr Dalton has an advanced higher class right now. Sixth-years. They'll all be sixteen, seventeen.'

The four of them pelted down the hall to Mr Dalton's classroom, tripping over each other as they burst through the door and landing in a pile. She leaned on the nearest desk as she got back to her feet. Her cheeks were burning. Imagine the trouble they'd be in if the teacher was here?

But the room was empty of people. She looked around while she dusted herself off. The tables were strewn with papers and pens. The lights were out as a film played on the Smartboard. A documentary about the Somme, as far as she could tell. They were in the far end of the building now, facing out onto the main road. She could hear it by straining her ears: car alarms.

Philip went to the computer and hit pause. He then opened the web browser and tried a few different addresses. Google, BBC News, Wikipedia, but the server couldn't connect, even after troubleshooting. 'Somehow I don't think the phones will be working yet either.'

'They… poofed,' said Blake. 'But…'

Roxanne sat down. 'But what?'

Blake looked at her, his eyes wide and reflecting the blue light of the projector. His voice wavered as he spoke. 'In the books, it's everyone older than fourteen who poofs. But the phones, the internet, that's accurate.'

'What books?' She asked, but then she thought back to what Carla had been saying and she knew.

Carla and Roxanne were both bookworms. Roxanne regularly came into school exhausted because she'd stayed up the night before, nose in a book. Her favourites were romance and thrillers while Carla preferred speculative genres, but they always swapped the really good books, and their shared library was now bigger than the Young Adult section in the local bookstore. For a while now, Carla had been pushing this series, six books of apocalyptic dystopia, too long to get into with exams not too far off. Then September saw the warning on the back cover and decided it was too dark for her tastes, anyway. At one point last year, Carla was obsessed and wouldn't stop talking about for six months straight.

'It's amazing,' she'd insist. 'It's like Stephen King's Lord of the Flies and X-Men crossover fanfiction. It's got aliens and politics, gratuitous violence and superpowers!'

She didn't like Lord of the Flies or Stephen King. She'd never liked X-Men either. Superpowers were too unrealistic, she thought. And yet…

Blake had stopped explaining the premise of Gone now. The whole time his voice verged on breaking. He didn't want to believe what he was saying, either.

'You're kidding me,' she said. 'No.'

He nodded. 'The FAYZ. It's happening to us.'