"If you die," she says, "I'm keeping your laptop."
"Fair."
The hallway is chaos. Students in pajamas, clustered in doorways, pressing against windows to watch the sky tear itself open over the northwestern hill. The lights flicker with every lightning strike—on, off, on, off—and I can hear the building's old pipes groaning as the wind hammers the stone walls.
I push through the front doors and the storm hits me like a wall.
Rain—sideways, stinging, so heavy I'm soaked in seconds. Wind that rips my hair loose and shoves me sideways, strong enough that I have to lean into it to keep my feet. The campus is dark except for the lightning, which comes in sheets and forks and great jagged bolts that strike the ground and leave the smell of scorched earth hanging in the air.
And above it all—Fulmen Hall.
The Tempest headquarters sits on the highest point of campus, those sleek metal towers with their lightning rods silhouetted against the churning sky. Every rod is lit up, conducting bolt after bolt, the metal glowing white-hot. But the lightning isn't staying in the rods. It's arcing off them—wild, random, striking the ground in wide circles around the hill like the building itself is having a seizure.
I run.
The path up the hill is slick with rain and fallen leaves, and I slip twice, catching myself on the iron railing that lines the walkway. The wind screams in my ears. The lightning inside me screams back, a high, thin whine that vibrates in my fillings and makes my vision go white at the edges.
He's notatFulmen Hall. He's in front of it—standing in the open space between the building and the hill's edge, completely exposed, while the sky unravels above him.
Atlas Knox looks like the end of the world.
He's soaked through, his white-blond hair plastered to his skull, his midnight-blue jacket hanging off one shoulder like he tried to take it off and forgot how to halfway through. Lightning arcs off his body in random bursts—not the controlled, directed strikes he used on the rooftop or in the quad, but erratic, spasming, the magical equivalent of a scream. His hands are at his sides and they're shaking so hard I can see it from thirty feet away.
His conductor—that metal wand that stores and directs his power—is on the ground at his feet. Discarded. He's not channeling through it. He's not channeling at all. The magic is just pouring out of him, unfiltered, uncontrolled, a live wire thrashing in the rain.
"Atlas!"
My voice is nothing against the wind. I push closer, fighting the gale, and the lightning inside me is going haywire now—every bolt he throws into the sky pulls at the electricity behind my ribs like a hand reaching into my chest. The sensation is overwhelming, a sympathetic echo that makes my bones ache and my teeth buzz and the fine hairs on my arms stand straight up.
Twenty feet. Fifteen. Close enough to see his face.
His eyes are open but he's not here. He's somewhere else—somewhere years ago, somewhere with smoke and screaming and the smell of burning that never leaves. I've seen that look once before, in the quad, right before his mask came down. But the mask isn't coming down this time because there's no mask left. It's just him and the storm and whatever memory is shredding him from the inside out.
"Atlas." Closer. Ten feet. The lightning strikes the ground between us and I flinch but don't stop. "You need to stop. You're going to bring the whole hill down."
His eyes find me. Focus. And the look in them—God. It's not anger. It's not fear. It's the look of a child watching something terrible happen and knowing he can't stop it.
"Get away from me."
"No."
"Getawayfrom me, Grey!" A bolt arcs off his right hand and hits the ground three feet to my left. The earth splits. Dirt and stone spray up, stinging my arms, and the thunder is so loud it's not a sound anymore—it's a pressure, a physical force that rattles my skeleton.
I should run. I should run and I know it and every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to turn around and get off this hill. He's unstable. He's dangerous. He's everything he warned me I would become, right here, right now, a mage who can't control what's inside him.
I move closer.
"Tell me," I say. "Not what you told Ren. Not the facts. Tell me what you remember."
His face twists. "Why? So you can understand why I want you gone?"
"So I can understand why you're scared."
The rain pounds down. Lightning crackles around him, building, climbing, the air so charged that I can feel it pressing against my skin like hands. His jaw is clenched so tight the muscles are cording in his neck, and his whole body is rigid with the effort of holding something in—not the magic, something else, something worse.
"I was seven." His voice is barely audible over the storm. Not the hard, commanding tone I'm used to—stripped down, scraped raw, the voice of a kid who never stopped being seven in the ways that matter. "It was a Tuesday. She was making dinner. I remember because she was cutting tomatoes and she stopped—just stopped, knife in her hand, and looked at the ceiling like she could hear something."
Another bolt. Closer this time. I feel the heat of it on my face, smell the ozone, taste the metal.
