Poof.
Gone.
No sound, no warning, no flashing lights. Just gone.
"What the fuck?" It was Drake Merwin, sitting to my immediate left. Out of all the people I expected to show reaction, Drake was not very high on the list. He'd been staring blankly at the wall, eyes half closed, as if he were about to fall into deep sleep any second. But he wasn't dozing anymore. Now he was sitting up, his shark-like features alert and confused. "Where'd he go?"
I was asking myself the same thing. One second Mr. Palmer was there, and the next he wasn't. Just like that. He'd been writing on the overcrowded whiteboard, his blue board marker moving vertically to draw the axis on an exponential graph, when he'd blinked out. The marker was still there, only now it was lying on the ground where it had rolled away after falling from a hand that was no longer there. I was still trying hard to process that information when I felt someone shoving my shoulder. "Oi, Ladris," Drake sneered, obviously peeved by my ignoring him, "I'm talking to you."
"So I've noticed," I shot back coldly, but I didn't say anything else. I knew it was a dangerous move, getting him angry. I could already feel the malice in his gaze, but I had looked away. Two desks down, the dark-skinned girl Dekka had got up to examine the place where our Math teacher had been just fifteen seconds ago. She crouched down and picked up the marker, warily, as if he might reappear any second and knock her out of the way. But nobody appeared, and she stood right back up with the thing in her hand.
"He's gone," she remarked matter-of-factly.
"Excellent observation dyke," Drake shot back. I saw the girl's eyes narrow, but she didn't challenge him. Not many people challenged Drake Merwin.
"He was standing here, right here," she insisted, shuffling into the exact spot, "and then he wasn't. He couldn't have run out the door."
"Maybe he teleported?" Some boy whose name I didn't really care to know mocked her snidely.
"Lisa's disappeared too," I noted, suddenly realising that the strong, flowery perfume the girl usually wore was no longer tainting my air canals.
"Hey, Craster's gone too," a boy called Mallet shot up, pointing to an empty seat a few rows behind him. "And Tanner, and Jamie!"
The other kids in the classroom started to panic right about at that point. Some of them were already getting up from their seats, moving away from the mysteriously vacated chairs of their classmates. I could taste the panic starting to congeal in the air. I stood up. "Where are you going?" Drake asked me, a slight flicker of fear in his piercing blue eyes.
"To find Caine."