Alder

Cass did not go to registration. In six years of school he had never once walked out of the gate before the bell. He was not the sort. He was the sort who put his hand up when the register reached the wrong name and quietly said the right one. But there was a talking creature the size of a kitten buttoned inside his coat. There was a sea rolling in over the playing fields that only he could see. It turned out that when the world went strange enough, the register stopped mattering all at once, the way a house rule stops mattering when the house is on fire. So he walked. Past the bike sheds, past the caretaker…