The sun went down early in Ravenville.

It hovered behind the woods west of town, casting the threetops into black silhouette against the twilight blue sky. Shades of violet loomed above, slowly seeping across the horizon as the last of light fled into the forest, leaving windows and doorways as the bastions left behind. Streetlights dotted the stretch of road splitting the rows and rows of similar suburbs, beacons like unbuffed topaz in the fields and patches of trees, illuminating patches of the road in a way that fell just short of being warm.

Michael kept his eyes on the road as he drove past streetlight after streetlight, pools of yellow light washing over his car before dropping it back into darkness for a few seconds, until he passed beneath the next one. It was dark, and dinner would soon be ready back at home, but he wanted to get some snacks sooner rather than later. The snack cabinet had run empty only a few days ago, but a few tests were coming up, and a small stash to fuel him through that couldn’t hurt.

The road was empty as he went along, barren of animals and debris. The first leaves were only beginning to fall, and even if it wasn’t the time of year that the sun fully set in the mid-afternoon, it didn’t matter that much when it would always fall away behind the woods with no mind paid to the season. So the only shadows on the road was the one cast by his car and the edges of the streetlight’s glow, purely the illusion of contrast making the pavement seem just a little bit darker.

There were shortcuts that he could use to get to the store sooner, back paths by the schools or side roads north of where he lived, but those were more meant for subtlety, and even if they were sooner, it wasn’t worth looking for unmarked passages over a bag of Doritos and some Cheez-its. He wanted to get back home before dinner turned to leftovers, so consistency took place over uncertain expediency.

The convenience store was one of the smaller stores, tucked between the handful of other shopping venues that Ravenville had and sticking out a few gas pumps into the chilly dusk air. Michael parked the car out front, in the glow of the backlit plastic sign mounted above the doorway, green and white plastic marred by scratches and grit and crowned on the top border with scratches in the shape of bird talons. He was one of the only ones in the lot then, with one other sedan all the way at the end of the row and a few more by the dumpster behind and to the side of the store. Likely whoever was working in the store, then.

It was nearly empty inside the convenience store, no chatter between employees, and no customers to fill the air. Michael grabbed his snacks off the shelf in silence, the quiet electric thrum of the lights covering the background as the snacks shook around in his grip and he swiped them under the scanner. A bill tossed to the cashier, and he was out with his snacks. Back at home in ten minutes, probably less.

He would have been, if he hadn’t heard the sound of ripping paper off to the side upon exiting.

Michael turned his head to see Sarah again, tearing away posters taped to the walls of the convenience store. They seemed to be job advertisements, a phone number visible on one scrap lying on the ground, but the rest of the text was obliterated by her attempts to tear the paper down. She was destroying all of them, either going for the corners to take them down in one piece or just tearing them off the wall in fragments, leaving them in pieces before tossing them to the ground.

She pulled the last poster down and ripped it up in her hands, letting the shredded remains fall to the ground. Michael didn’t say anything, merely watching her in place before she turned to face him with a startled look on her face.

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“Do you have something to say now?” She asked, voice thin from catching her breath.

If she was asking, then he would answer, to see what she thought.

“Your form was poor,” he replied. “You put too much effort into it, and took far too long to execute a fairly small task. You would have done better if you had used both hands to tackle separate pieces of paper and thrown them all away at once, or if you had recruited a partner to keep an eye out while you took some extra time.”

She stared at him, baffled, and he took that as a signal to continue. “Your coverage of eyewitnesses was poor as well, as that partner could have kept an eye out for employees or anybody that might want to try to catch you off-guard, or the security cameras. One is right there,” he stuck his free thumb over his shoulder at said camera mounted on the other end of the front wall, “and it almost certainly saw you. The manager may not know who you are, but he would certainly recognize your face, and could ask somebody that works here to identify you. This store’s been targeted before, and to my memory the manager doesn’t mess around, so you would be running a fairly high risk if you ever wanted to try this again, much less anything serious.”

A thought struck him then, and he paused, mulling the concept over in his head. Her reaction had been entertaining to watch so far, and he was going to be devastatingly bored in the weeks to come if the first month and a half of the semester had been an accurate prediction. Perhaps he could keep himself busy somehow.

“If you’re interested, I could teach you how to do things properly,” he offered. “How to stay hidden, how to properly plan, some of the more neglected principles besides the application of immediate-term violence. I know that your primary questions were about what I think of Ravenville, so if you care so much about this place, then you could benefit from learning how to survive here.”

Sarah stopped and shook her head, pressing her lips together in disagreement. “I don’t care about Ravenville. I don’t want to be some bloodthirsty killer that just kills people for the sake of it and for party invites or whatever they pass around in there. I don’t care about what they do in the night, and I don’t want to care. Leave me out of it.”

She huffed and waved her hands at the ground around her. “I didn’t even tear these things down because I wanted the credit for it. They just…they made me mad. It’s like a trap for the people that don’t want to go to college, telling them that they’re fine, they can stay, but it’s all anybody says. Like they want people to come here and get stuck instead of doing anything else with their lives.”

A moment of silence hung in the parking lot before she looked back up at him with a gleam of conviction in her eyes. “It’s why I want to leave. As soon as I can.”

Michael made a noise of acknowledgement. “Is that what you were trying to ask me?”

“To see if you agreed with me, yeah.” She shrugged. “Nobody really does.”

He didn’t care. Whether she wanted to leave or not wasn’t something that weighed on his mind at all. It meant she had some motivation, though, to try and survive until whatever plan she did have turned out to work. Leaving was certainly a drastic goal, too. Nobody ever really left Ravenville. Even if they did for some reason, they’d always come back eventually. It was just how it was. But if she wanted to, then she could certainly try.

“The offer still stands,” he said. “If you want to survive until you can leave, it’s still on the table. Must be some good motivation for you.”

Sarah was silent again, staring at him with shaded and steeled eyes, just the two of them in the parking lot with crickets chirping in the distance and the muted rush of cars moving through the air as people went to and from the other stores. It was like she was judging him, trying to find out if he was leading her on or baiting her into an easy kill.

If she’d been really paying attention she would have known that he wouldn’t have actually cared enough about that to put so much work into it.

“Let me know what you decide.” He turned and opened his car door, tossing the snacks into the passenger seat before climbing in himself and starting the engine. He was out of the parking lot and speeding back towards home in a handful of minutes, not a glance cast at whatever Sarah was doing. He didn’t know what she was thinking, but if she did end up deciding, then it could be good. He hadn’t taught anybody before, James had handled himself solidly well to the point where he hadn’t needed to show him any tricks to keep him alive and safe.

It was time to worry about snacks. He’d see what Sarah wanted in the morning.