A woman in a room. Stone walls. Four points of light—silver, blue, red, purple—blazing from the corners. She stands in the center with her arms spread and her head tilted back and the magic is pouring into her from every direction at once.
She looks like me.
Same dark hair. Same build. Same face, or close to it—the jaw slightly different, the cheekbones higher, but the resemblance is close enough that my sleeping brain doesn't question it. She's wearing something white that's already singed at the edges, and her hands are open and the light is flowing into her palms and she's taking it, holding it, all four at once—
Then it's too much.
I see the moment it tips. Her face changes—not gradually, not in pieces, but all at once, the way a window looks fine until it doesn't and then it's nothing but fragments. Her mouth opens. The sound that comes out is not a scream. It's bigger than a scream. It's the sound of a body trying to hold something that bodies were never meant to hold, and failing, and the failure is not quiet.
Light pours from her eyes. From her mouth. From the cracks forming in her skin—yes, cracks, spreading across her armslike the crack in my sphere, running from her fingertips to her shoulders. She's coming apart. She's shining and she's coming apart and she's screaming and the sound is—
Run.
The word. The last word Atlas's mother ever said.
The woman in the dream looks at me. Through me. Her eyes are gold—pure, burning gold, the color my sphere flashed for three seconds and then never again—and in them I see recognition. Not a stranger. Not a ghost.
A warning.
The light reaches her chest and she—
I wake up gasping.
The room is grey with dawn. Brittany is still asleep. Herbert is on my pillow, legs tensed, watching me with all his eyes like he saw it too.
My hands are shaking. The sphere in my jacket pocket is glowing—visible through the fabric, four colors cycling fast, shadow-storm-blood-chaos-shadow-storm-blood-chaos, and the crack is warm to the touch when I reach for it.
Friday.
It's Friday.
Chapter 21: Everly
Chapter 21: Everly
The demonstration has the pageantry of an execution.
I know this because I grew up watching true crime documentaries with my mother on Sunday nights, and the one thing those shows taught me is that there's always a ceremony. The reading of charges. The walk to the chamber. The audience, seated and waiting, watching you approach the thing that's going to end you with the polite, expectant silence of people who bought tickets.
Nexus Courtyard is a stone amphitheater on the north side of campus that I've never seen used for anything. It's old—older than the fraternity buildings, older than the academic halls, maybe older than Nyxhaven itself. Carved directly into a natural depression in the granite, the rows of stone benches rise in a half-circle around a flat platform at the bottom, and the whole thing is open to the sky. The stone is dark, almost black, veined with something that catches the late-afternoon light and glitters faintly. Mica, maybe. Or old magic.
Today it's full.
Not just students—everyone. Faculty in their academic robes, clustered along the upper rows. Fraternity members in their colors, separated into blocks like a stained glass window—silver and white for Mors, blue and yellow for Tempest, crimson and black for Sanguis, purple and silver for Tumult. The sorority girls sit in their own sections, whispering behind their hands. I see Miranda Voss in the Tempest block, arms crossed, watching me with flat dark eyes. Dahlia is somewhere in the Tumult section, looking confused as always. The ancient librarian who keeps a log of my restricted section visits is seated near the top, hands folded, face unreadable.
Banners hang from iron poles at each corner of the amphitheater—one for each fraternity, the sigils rendered in silk that moves in the wind. The raven with its skull exposed. The lightning bolt bisecting a cloud. The black rose dripping blood. The dice over a single card. Four banners. Four disciplines. No fifth.
I count roughly three hundred people as I descend the stone steps toward the platform. Three hundred people who have come to watch Everly Grey do something interesting or die trying. The October air is cold enough to make my breath visible, and the sky above us is the hard flat grey of a New England afternoon that can't decide if it wants to rain.
My legs feel wrong. Not weak, exactly, but disconnected—moving because I'm telling them to, not because they want to. The four magics inside me are doing something I've never felt before: humming in unison. Not the restless jostling of the past few days, each discipline pulling in its own direction, but a single frequency. A chord. Like they know what's coming and they're bracing for it.
The sphere in my jacket pocket is almost hot.
Brittany is in the third row of the general section—the block of seats reserved for unaffiliated students, which at Nyxhaven means freshmen who haven't been sorted and the handful of upperclassmen who washed out of their disciplines. She catches my eye as I pass. Her face is doing the thing it does when she's refusing to show emotion—blank, set, her jaw tight enough that I can see the muscle working. Herbert is on her shoulder, all eight legs braced, watching the platform like a security detail.
She doesn't wave. Doesn't nod. Just holds my gaze and then looks pointedly at the exit—the stone staircase at the top of the amphitheater, the one that leads back to the main campus and the parking lot beyond it. Where my car is. Where my keys are, sitting in my jacket pocket.
If things go bad, take my car. Get out.
