This was not real. She was in that hollow void that seemed to follow her wherever she went, that endless blackness where souls waited to send her a message. And, as always, she wasn’t alone. The Lost Eight circled her, their solemn faces staring down at her with pity.
“Do you see now?” asked Letitia Rose, stepping forward to help Ellory to her feet. “They take us, and then they take from us, until we have nothing and we are nothing. But you’re different. Special.”
“I’m not special,” Ellory whispered. “They took from me, too. Isn’t that why I’m here?”
“You’re not special because of the power you were born with,” said Eugene Kang, a handsome Korean boy with round cheeks, a wide nose, and thick lips. “You’re special because you’rekind. You chose to care about us. To research our stories and restore our voices.”
“You knew that this was bigger than you,” Angel Mclaughlin added. She was a bronze-skinned girl with a septum piercing. “You cared that we were lost. You wanted to find us, and you did.”
Ellory looked from one face to another, and though she should have been scared by where she was and what she had seen, she felt held. Protected. Even with Letitia breaking the chain, there was strength in the circle of ghosts around her, beside her.
“What do I do?” She looked down at her hands, through which she could see a floor that was little but shadows. “I have to stop them, but how?”
“You already know,” said Kristopher Douglas.
“You already have,” said Joel Carroll.
Olivia Holloway touched her shoulder. “For now, stall them. When the time comes, you will have our power to aid you.”
“But first,” said Letitia Rose, “wake up.”
And then she slapped Ellory across the face.
***
Strength returned to her in increments. As soon as she thought herlegs could hold her weight, Ellory rolled onto her feet. She was too far from the tower wall to put her back to it, but she wielded the Taser like a sword as she stared down the rooftop. Even if she hadn’t felt like she was being watched, she couldseeeyes in the tenebrous distance, dozens of them pointed in her direction. There was no safety in these watchful gazes. There was only the knowledge that she was trapped in this dangerous place, with these dangerous people, and she had no idea what the Lost Eight thought she already knew.
“I know about the School for the Unseen Arts,” she said, trying to sound braver than she felt. Comforting herself with the facts shehadgathered. “I know that you guys have been killing students of color once they’re no longer of any use to you. And I know you made everyone forget about Hudson except me. Why did you take him? Stop hiding in the shadows, andanswer me.”
The orbs began to move, creating a circle of illumination before her. Into that circle stepped various pairs, an elder and a younger, a master and an acolyte, each someone she recognized from her investigation. First came two generations of Arthur O’Connors, so similar in appearance that they could have been clones. Stasie’s father, Chip, had her brown hair and pixie-like features, though he was taller and broader than she was. Her grandfather—the misleadingly named Pop-Pop—had silver hair, a silver mustache, and blue eyes the icy color of a blizzard. Half of her expected Stasie to be with them, smug and sinister, but her roommate didn’t materialize. Perhaps she was too young, or too spoiled, to have merited an invitation to this exclusive club.
Next, Preston Colt, leaning heavily against Gaia Hammond. Then, Boone Priestley, twisting her flashlight in his fingers like it was a baton. Miles Clairborne, grinning with malicious satisfactionat how helpless she looked trying to point the Taser at so many people at once. Nathaniel Graves, Hudson’s father, who cut an even more imposing figure in real life than he had in his portraits.
And beside him—
“Hudson,” she breathed.
He looked at her like she was a stranger, dressed in an olive sweater over a beige button-down, black slacks, and matching boots. His peacoat was open, his hands in its pockets. He was taller than his father by three inches, but next to Nathaniel, he looked smaller. Diminished.
She should have noticed that he wasn’t chained or gripped, wasn’t visibly injured or reaching for her, but the testimony of her eyes was swept away beneath a powerful relief. Hudson was here. He was alive. The tower was full of living batteries and human leeches, but Hudson washere, and together they would figure this out.
“You know,” said Nathaniel Graves, before she could ask what he had let them do to his son. “Every time we find you here, this situation plays out a little differently. After three years, I thought I might be bored, that you would be more trouble than it was worth to contain you, but Hudson was right. Your power is of great value to us.”
“Us?” Ellory echoed. She lowered the Taser, feeling foolish as she looked at Hudson for the second time. As the fact that he was standing with them, rather than with her, finally sank in. “What do you meanus? Hudson, what does he meanus? Are you—are you one ofthem?”
His eyes were empty. “Yes.”
Ellory was trembling again. If she hadn’t been gripping her only weapon, she would have wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t believe you.”
He was like a robot rebooted to factory settings. There was no flicker of emotion on his face, no trace of anything they’d shared over the course of the school year. The warmth. The joy. Thetrust. She would have thought she had created him, too, but she would never create a version of him that watched her like she was no more interesting than a fly hovering over a too-full trash can. Maybe months ago, but not now. Not anymore. Not after all they’d become to each other.
“Hudson,” she managed, “tell me it’s not true.”
“I can’t.” His jaw ticked. “Ellory, I—”
“You performed commendably, Mister Graves,” said Colt. He steadied himself, waving Gaia away so he could lord over Ellory without assistance. “Don’t you see the beauty of it? The entire world you’ve been living in was catered to take you down the same paths in different ways. You, Miss Morgan, have the strongest wild magic we’ve found in a while. In almost four years, you’ve powered spells so small and so large, it’s like we’re back in a time when magic was everywhere. Our spell needs you to repeat certain actions, to gain certain knowledge, to return to certain places. It reinforces the boundary of the siphon.”
The conversations that had felt familiar. The confrontations that had seemed inevitable. The truth she could never escape, not really, because it was not in her nature to stop searching for it. Ellory hadn’t been making leaps and putting puzzle pieces together to form a whole picture. She had been guided by an invisible hand down a path to the same discoveries, threatened just enough to make her dig her feet in and then baited into standing right where they’d always wanted her to be.
