Brittany is back when I get to the room, cross-legged on her bed with a stack of old campus maintenance logs spread around her. Herbert is perched on her shoulder, apparently supervising.
"I found three different access points to Concordia Hall," she says without looking up. "Two are sealed with magic I can't identify. The third is a basement window that's just boarded up with plywood, which honestly feels like an oversight."
"Atlas's mother was a grimoire."
She looks up.
"She absorbed storm magic and couldn't stop. She went overcapacity and exploded. Killed his father. Killed their neighbors. Atlas watched." I sit on my bed. My voice sounds far away, like it's coming from someone else. "He was a kid."
Brittany sets down the maintenance log. Herbert crawls from her shoulder to her knee, beady eyes on me.
"How do you know?"
"Overheard him and Ren. In the courtyard." I pull my knees up, wrap my arms around them. "Ren was trying to tell him I'm not like her. Atlas said it doesn't matter. That it always ends the same way."
Silence. Brittany looks at me with an expression I can't fully read—something between concern and calculation, the gears turning behind her dark eyes.
"Does it?" she asks finally. "Always end the same way?"
"I don't know."
"Then we'd better find out before someone else decides for you." She picks up the maintenance log again. "Concordia Hall. Tomorrow night. Plywood window. You in?"
I think about Atlas's mother, trying to contain the magic that was eating her alive. About Cordelia, who "disappeared" in 1930.About Helena, who vanished. About every grimoire after the Schism who was "handled" and left no trace.
"I'm in."
Herbert makes a small, approving sound from Brittany's knee. At least someone's on my side.
Chapter 15: Everly
The storm wakes me up from the deepest of sleep.
Not gradually—not the slow build of wind and pressure that I've learned to recognize as Tempest magic. This is violent from the first second, a crack of thunder so deep it vibrates in my chest and rattles the window in its frame. I jolt upright in bed, disoriented, heart slamming, and for a second I think it's an attack—another targeted storm, another test, another fraternity president deciding to see what the scholarship kid can take.
Then I feel it.
The storm magic inside me—the lightning I absorbed in the quad weeks ago—is responding. Not calmly, not the low hum I've gotten used to carrying behind my ribs. It'spulling. Straining toward the window like a dog on a chain, and underneath the pull is something I don't expect: anguish. Raw, formless, pouring through the connection between whatever's happening outside and the electricity lodged in my bones.
This isn't an attack. This is someone falling apart.
Brittany sits up in the bed across from mine, mascara smudged, hair wrecked. "What the hell."
"Storm." I'm already out of bed, shoving my feet into shoes. "It's not targeted. Something's wrong."
"Something's wrong with theweather?Everly, it's two in the morning—"
"It's Atlas."
She goes quiet. Outside, lightning splits the sky in a fork so bright it turns the room white, and the thunder that follows shakes plaster dust from the ceiling.
"You can't be serious," Brittany says. "You're not going out there."
"I have to."
"You literally do not have to. That is a choice you are making, and it's a terrible one."
But I'm already pulling on my blazer, and she knows me well enough by now to know that arguing is pointless. She watches me lace my shoes with the expression of someone who has accepted that her roommate is an idiot and is calculating the best way to retrieve the body.
