His grief. Stored in me alongside the lightning. And I don't know how to put it down.
I haven't seen Atlas since that night. He hasn't been in the dining hall, hasn't shown up at Tempest practice, hasn't crossed the quad where I'd normally feel his storms prickling at the edge of my awareness. Miranda Voss—his inner circle, the one who went too hard in combat training—has been leading Tempest activities in his place. When I asked a Tempest girl where he was, she looked at me like I'd asked about a funeral.
Callum I've seen, but only from a distance. Crossing the quad in his silver and white, phone in hand, posture perfect. He doesn't look at me. Not once, not even the cool, assessing glances I'd gotten used to. Whatever opened between us in that classroom—the cracked mask, the hand that almost touched me—he's sealed it shut. Boarded it up like Concordia Hall: condemned, off-limits, pretend it was never there.
Ren is the same as always. Quiet. Present. Impossible to read. I feel him before I see him now—the blood magic responding to his proximity, a warm pulse that picks up whenever he enters a room. He never acknowledges it. Never meets my eyes. But twice this week I've caught him watching me from across the dining hall, and when our eyes met he didn't look away immediately the way he used to. He held my gaze for a second—just one—before turning back to his plate.
I don't know what any of it means. Two presidents have cracked open in front of me and I still don't understand what I'm looking at. Is it guilt? Fear? Something they don't have names for? Or is it another layer of the same game—make the grimoire feel confused and off-balance so she doesn't see what's coming?
I don't know. I hate not knowing. And I really hate that a small, stupid, traitorous part of me is starting to care about the answer.
Wednesday. Warrick's Magical Theory class.
I'm trying to pay attention—she's lecturing on fixed channeling theory, the theory that magical energy retains characteristics of its source, which would explain why Atlas's lightning feels different from the bolt I absorbed in the quad—but my mind keeps drifting. To Concordia Hall, which Brittany and I still haven't broken into because she said we need to wait for a night when campus security does their monthly sweep of the eastern grounds, which leaves the central buildings unwatched for about ninety minutes. To the sphere on my desk, which showed gold for three seconds last week and hasn't done it since. To the phrasethe matter has been handledand the eleven documents and the women who disappeared without a trace.
After class, Warrick stops me.
"Miss Grey. A moment."
The other students file out, giving me the wide berth that's become standard. I wait by her desk while she arranges her notes with the precise, unhurried movements of someone who has been teaching for longer than most of these students have been alive.
"You've been tired," she says. Not a question.
"I haven't been sleeping well."
"No. I imagine not." She looks at me over her glasses—grey eyes, sharp, missing nothing. "I want you to know that whatever happens in the coming days, my classroom remains a neutral space. Do you understand?"
The cold thing in my stomach tightens. "What's happening in the coming days?"
"I can't say more than that." Her hands pause on her notes. For a moment she looks almost pained—the expression of someone who wants to say more and can't, won't, has been told not to. "Just remember what I've taught you about fixed channeling. Magic retains the character of its source. That's true for channeling, and it's true for people."
"Professor —"
"That's all, Miss Grey." She turns back to her desk. Dismissed.
I walk out into the hallway with her words sitting in my chest like a splinter.Whatever happens in the coming days.She knows something. She can't tell me what, but she wanted me to know she knows, and she wanted me to remember.
Magic retains the character of its source.
I think about that all the way back to Bellamy Hall, turning it over, trying to see the shape of what's coming. Something in the coming days. Something Warrick felt she needed to warn meabout, obliquely, carefully, in the way everyone at this goddamn school communicates—sideways, in code, never just saying the thing that could save my life.
I'm so busy thinking that I almost miss Brittany.
She's pacing.
I've lived with Brittany Leigh for weeks now. I've seen her bored, annoyed, deadpan, mildly concerned, and once—the night I told her I was a grimoire—genuinely unsettled. I have never, not once, seen her pace.
But she's doing it now. Back and forth across our tiny room, five steps each way, Herbert perched on her shoulder like a lookout. Her black nails are bitten down—also new, also alarming—and when she sees me in the doorway, the look on her face stops me cold.
Brittany Leigh doesn't get scared. It's one of the fixed points of my universe. The girl who responded to "I might be a magical nuclear bomb" with "are you going to explode?" doesn't do fear. She does sarcasm, and dark humor, and the kind of bone-dry pragmatism that keeps you alive in a place like this.
She's scared now.
"Close the door," she says.
I close it. The click of the latch sounds very loud.
"Sit down."
