The door to her office is open. Mother never leaves her door open.
I go in anyway. What else would I do.
The orchids need water.
That's the first thing I notice—stupid, irrelevant, but there it is. The white orchids in the crystal vase have started to droop, their petals going translucent at the edges, and Mother hasn't replaced them yet. She replaces them every Monday. It's Wednesday. The orchids are dying on her desk and she hasn't noticed or hasn't cared, and either option is so unlike her that it sticks in my brain like a splinter.
The second thing I notice is the papers.
They're spread across the glass desk in a fan—old parchment, the real thing, edges cracked and yellowing, handled with the cotton gloves that are folded beside them. Ink that's gone from black to the color of dried blood. Diagrams. Geometric patterns, concentric circles, a notation system I half-recognize from the family crypts—the archaic Mors shorthand that hasn't been taught at Nyxhaven in sixty years.
In the center of the largest page: a five-pointed star. A human figure drawn inside it, arms spread, head tilted back. Lines radiating outward from each limb to the points of the star, and at each point a word pressed so hard into the parchment that the ink has bled through to the other side.
My shadows contract. Pull tight against my body like hackles rising. I've felt them do this exactly once before—in the family crypts, when I was fourteen, when Mother showed me the room where Bolingbrokes store the things they don't want history to remember.
These are family papers. Old ones. The kind that live in locked drawers in locked rooms in the parts of the estate that don't appear on floor plans.
Mother is at the window. Cream suit. Platinum hair in the twist. She's looking out over the quad with the expression she wears when she's watching students—pleasant, removed, the way a bird watcher looks at sparrows.
"Close the door, Callum."
I close it. Sit. The white leather chair does its job—makes me feel exposed, examined, like I'm the specimen and she's the glass.
She lets me wait. Fourteen seconds. I count because counting is something I can control and this room has a way of stripping control from everyone who isn't her.
She turns. Smiles.
I know this smile. Donor smile. Board-of-trustees smile. The one that makes you feel warm and welcome and completely certain that you're being managed. It reaches her cheekbones and stops dead, like it ran into glass.
"How is Grey?"
Three months of the same question. Three months of me sitting in this chair and delivering my answer in the voice she built for me—precise, factual, scraped clean of anything that could be mistaken for an opinion or, God forbid, a feeling.
"Three absorptions confirmed. Shadow, storm, blood. No overcapacity indicators, no loss of control." The words come outright. They always come out right. "She's been in the restricted section. She's found the Grimoire Girls material, the Schism records, the Concordia Hall references. She knows what she is."
"Good." Mother sits. Her posture is mine—or mine is hers, the original and the copy, and lately I've been wondering which parts of me are the copy and which parts were mine to begin with. "The others?"
"Knox had an uncontrolled storm event. Three days ago. Major output, no direction. He's compromised." I pause. This is the part where the report gets complicated, because the clean version and the true version are diverging and the gap is getting harder to bridge. "Ferrix is observing. Ashford is keeping his distance."
"Distance." She says the single word the way she says everything interesting—like she's holding it up to the light and turning it. "Curious. Blood mages usually can't resist a grimoire's power. Ashford is fighting his own instincts."
Not a question. She already knows. She's always already known—my reports are audits, not revelations. She checks my answers against the answers she already has and measures the gap between what I tell her and what's true. I've been passing that test for years. I'm less certain I'm passing it now.
"I want a full demonstration." She folds her hands. The pearl ring on her ring finger catches the light. Her nails are manicured like always, perfect in every way, not a chip or a rough edge anywhere on her body. "All four presidents, channeling simultaneously. All directed at Grey."
The cold in my chest is not shadow magic. "That's not standard."
"No."
"Four simultaneous channels into a single subject—there's no precedent. The energy load alone could—"
"Callum." Just my name. Just the two syllables, delivered with the particular patience she reserves for moments when I'm being slow. "I'll handle the faculty. Professor Warrick has concerns, naturally. I've scheduled a meeting with her Thursday to discuss the safety protocols we’ll have in place." She picks up her fountain pen, uncaps it, makes a note on a pad I didn't notice beside the diagrams. Her handwriting is perfect. "The venue will be the Proving Grounds. Friday evening, after scheduled classes. I'll need you to coordinate the other three presidents and ensure they understand the channeling sequence."
The mundanity of it hits me harder than the horror. She's scheduling this like it’s some kind of faculty review. Venue, time, logistics. Safety protocols, which means she's already decided what level of damage is acceptable and built a framework to contain it.
"What are we testing for?" I ask.
"Full capacity." She caps the pen. Aligns it with the desk's edge. "I need to see how she responds to all four disciplines at once. Whether she can hold them. Whether there's a threshold." The smile again, thinner now—a blade showing through silk. "The Bolingbrokes have been waiting a long time for this, Callum. We can't waste the opportunity."
