"I don't know." She meets my eyes, and what I see there is worse than fear. It's the look of someone who's been at this school long enough to know how it handles problems, and has decided that this time she's not going to look the other way. "But I know what this place does to people who don't fit. I've watched it happen. And I'm not going to watch it happen to you."
It's the most she's ever said. The most she's ever given me in a single moment, without deflection or sarcasm or a well-timeddon't make it weird.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. Just memorize where the keys are." She pulls her hands from her pockets, picks up Herbert, and sets him gently on her bed. "I need a cigarette. If anyone asks, I was never here and this conversation didn't happen."
"You don't smoke."
"I'm considering starting."
She leaves. The door clicks shut behind her and I'm alone in the room with a set of car keys and a spider and the growing, terrible certainty that whatever Catalina Bolingbroke has been building since the day I arrived is almost ready.
I pick up the keys. The skull charm swings gently from the ring.
Four presidents who have each shown me a crack in their armor—and who are still, all four of them, marching toward whatever this demonstration is. Four men who have scared me, hurt me, cracked open in front of me, almost touched me—and who are going to stand in a room and channel all four disciplines into me at once because someone's mother told them to.
I could run now. Get in Brittany's car, drive south, call my family from a gas station and listen to their voices glaze over when I try to explain why I left. Go back to state school. Go back to being normal. Go back to being the girl in the bright clothes who doesn't know what magic is or what it costs.
I put the keys in my desk drawer.
I'm not running.
Whatever's coming—whatever they're planning, whatever Catalina wants to see when all four disciplines hit me at once—I'm going to face it. Because the alternative is becoming another name in a file that sayshandled, and I refuse. I refuse to disappear quietly. I refuse to make it easy.
My sphere pulses on the desk. Four colors, cycling through the crack. Shadow, storm, blood, chaos.
One of those I still haven't absorbed. One president who hasn't cracked open yet. And a demonstration that's going to put all four in a room with me and see what happens.
I think about Warrick's words.Magic retains the character of its source.
I think about Atlas's grief. Callum's cage. Ren's silence. Felix's—what? I don't have a piece of Felix yet. He's the one I understand least, the probability mage who studied me like a lab rat and called it fascination, who told me to be careful in the library like he meant it.
Whatever's coming, I'm going in with three disciplines humming behind my ribs and a list of questions that nobody will answer and a roommate who put her car keys in a drawer for me.
That has to be enough.
It has to.
Chapter 17: Callum
I used to like this walk.
East garden, seven minutes, the oaks dropping their shadows across the path like offerings. My shadows reaching back. A conversation I've been having with these trees since I was eight years old and Mother first brought me to campus for a donor gala and I snuck outside because the hors d'oeuvres were terrible and the adults were worse.
The trees haven't changed. Something else has.
My shadows keep pulling southeast. Toward Bellamy Hall, toward the freshman dorms, toward a location I refuse to acknowledge because acknowledging it means examining why, and examining why is a door I'm not opening. I yank them back. They go reluctantly, like dogs being dragged from a scent. I've never had to fight my own magic before. It's irritating in a way I can't afford to think about.
I check my cuffs. Fine. Check them again. Also fine. The gesture used to be automatic—straighten, smooth, move on. Lately it's started to feel like winding a clock. Like if I stop adjusting, the whole mechanism seizes.
Mother's text came forty minutes ago. Just a time.3:00.No hello. No context. The way she's summoned me since I was twelve. It never used to bother me. It still doesn't bother me.
I'm noting it. That's all.
The assistant—Margaret, her name is Margaret, I've known her my entire life and I just realized I've never used her first name in conversation—waves me through. Her hands are trembling against her keyboard. I notice because I've started noticing things like that. Collateral details. The way people at the edges of Mother's orbit vibrate at a frequency that looks a lot like fear if you let yourself see it.
Three months ago I didn't let myself see it. Three months ago I walked this path and sat in the white chair and delivered my reports and the machinery of it all felt clean. Purposeful. Like I was part of something precise.
