"Forget it," Ren says.
"No." Atlas's voice has gone dangerous again—low, tight, the kind of quiet that comes before a storm. "Say it. Than what? Than who?"
"I said forget it."
"Than the people who 'handled' them? Is that what you were going to say? The Administration? My mother's fucking diagnosis that saidovercapacitylike she was a blown fuse instead of a person?"
"Atlas—"
"Say it."
A long beat. I can hear Ren breathing. Can almost feel it—the blood magic humming behind my ribs, responding to the elevated pulse of someone nearby, two heartbeats that aren't mine drumming faintly at the edge of my awareness.
"I was going to say it makes us no better than the people who watched it happen and did nothing to help her." Ren's voice is careful. Measured. Like he's setting each word down on a surface that might shatter. "Your mother deserved better. So does Grey."
Atlas makes a sound. Not a word—something deeper, something animal, the kind of noise that gets ripped out of a person when the grief is too big for language. Footsteps—fast, hard, echoing off the stone—and he's leaving, storming down the covered walkway with a force that makes the ivy tremble on the walls.
I stay perfectly still. My hand over my mouth, my back against the pillar, my pulse hammering in my ears.
Ren doesn't leave right away.
I can feel him standing there—the blood magic telling me exactly where he is, ten feet to my left, motionless. His heartbeat is elevated but steady. Controlled, the way everything about Ren is controlled, even now, even after that.
For one horrible second I'm sure he knows I'm here. Blood magic is about connection, about sensing the life in the things around you, and I'm standing fifteen feet away with my heart rate through the roof and three of his discipline's magics humming in my chest. There's no way he can't feel that.
But he doesn't come looking. Doesn't call out, doesn't walk toward my pillar, doesn't do anything except stand alone in the courtyard for what feels like a very long time.
Then his footsteps, quieter than Atlas's, measured and even, heading in the opposite direction. Away from me. Away from the argument. Into the growing dark.
I slide down the pillar until I'm sitting on the cold stone, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. The courtyard is empty now, and the wind has picked up, sending dead leaves skittering across the ground like small animals fleeing something.
Atlas's mother was a grimoire.
A grimoire who absorbed storm magic—just one discipline—and couldn't stop. Who went overcapacity and exploded. Who killed her husband, her neighbors, her son's entire world, while screaming that she was sorry.
And Atlas watched.
I think about the storm in the quad. The way his eyes went distant, seeing something that wasn't there. The lightning pouring off him, uncontrolled, responding to a grief so deep it had its own weather system. He wasn't attacking me. He was reliving it. And when I pulled his lightning into myself—instinct, reflex, the grimoire magic doing what it does without asking permission—he looked at me and saw his mother.
You're a walking bomb. And every day you stay here, the clock ticks closer to zero.
He wasn't being cruel in the library. He was being honest. In his version of this story, the only version he's ever known, it ends the same way every time. The grimoire absorbs too much. The grimoire loses control. The grimoire kills everyone she loves.
And I've already absorbed three disciplines. One more than his mother ever did.
I sit in the courtyard until the cold seeps through my blazer and into my bones, until the bell tolls eight and the last light fades from the sky and the shadows settle around me like they've been waiting.
She was trying to save them. She was trying to contain it.
I think about the shadows that curl around my fingers when I'm not paying attention. The lightning that hums under my skin when a storm is close. The blood magic that beats like a second heart, always aware of the living things around me, always pulling.
I think about Ren, standing alone in the courtyard after Atlas left, choosing not to come find me even though he must have known I was there. The healer who won't heal me. The blood mage who feels my heartbeat and walks the other way.
Maybe he's not being cruel either.
Maybe he's doing the same thing Atlas is doing—keeping his distance from the thing that might explode. Not because he doesn't care, but because he's already decided how this ends, and getting close only makes the ending worse.
I get up. Brush the grit off my jeans. Walk back to Bellamy Hall with dead leaves in my hair and three magics churning inside me and a new piece of the puzzle sitting in my chest like a splinter I can't reach.
