"We Broke Into an Abandoned House for a Party"

The body was already going when they got there—forty or fifty kids, a speaker on the kitchen counter, battery lanterns, fairy lights taped to the banister. The house had been sealed by the council: every ground-floor window and door covered in grey perforated steel, the kind meant to keep squatters out. But one screen round the side, past the wheelie bins, had been worked loose at the bottom corner. You could lift it, go in feet first, and pull it back behind you.

The narrator followed his friend Dom through the gap, fixed the screen, and hit record on his phone. He filmed the crowd, the maps still on the walls, the fairy lights. He got a clip of Dom in the front room with a girl from the year above. Then the battery drained—he always thinks he'll charge it, and then he's out the door. He went upstairs looking for a girl named Liss and a power bank. Found a back bedroom with a mattress somebody had dragged in, an open window letting cold through the screen. He sat down to wait. Put his back against the wall. That's the last ordinary thing.

What He Saw Before