More magic. More. The door is still open and the hunger is still pulling and I can feel everything now—not just the four presidents but the crowd, the faculty, the ambient magic in the stone and the soil and the air. It's all flowing toward me. The whole amphitheater, the whole campus, every scrap of power within range being drawn toward the open door in my chest like matter toward a black hole.
Catalina watches from the edge of the platform.
She has not moved. Has not flinched. Has not cast a single spell or spoken a single word since the sphere exploded. She stands with her hands folded and her cream suit immaculate and her ice-blue eyes fixed on me with an expression that is not fear.
She's taking notes.
Not literally—her hands are empty, her pen is in her office—but the look on her face is the look of a scientist watching an experiment produce exactly the results she predicted. Cataloguing. Measuring. Assessing and observing.
She knew this would happen.
She knew, and she planned it, and she put her own son on the platform and watched his magic get ripped from his body, and she is standing ten feet from me with the thin smile and the pearl earrings and she issatisfied.
The pulling intensifies. I feel Callum's heartbeat faltering—his death magic nearly drained, his body going cold in a way that's not shadow magic but something worse. I feel Atlas's storms guttering out, the lightning dimming to sparks, his massive frame crumpled on the stone. I feel Felix's probability branches collapsing one by one, futures winking out like stars, his chaos magic almost gone.
And Ren. Ren's heartbeat, which I've been tracking since the library, since the night he pressed his thumb to my pulse and our rhythms locked—Ren's heartbeat is a whisper. A thread. A candle flame in a hurricane, guttering, and if it goes out—
If it goes out, something in me will go out with it.
Atlas reaches me first.
Chapter 24: Everly
He grabs my arm.
His hand closes around my wrist—the same wrist he bruised on the rooftop, the same wrist he grabbed in the quad—and the contact is like touching a live wire. The pulling surges through the point where his skin meets mine and his magic floods in faster, harder, a torrent of storm energy that pours through his palm and into my blood and the hunger behind the door roars with it.
Atlas screams.
The sound is barely human—ripped from somewhere deep in his chest, the scream of a body being emptied of the thing that makes it alive. Lightning arcs between us, visible, blue-white and searing, jumping from his skin to mine and back in a circuit that neither of us can break. His hand is locked on my wrist—not by choice, the magic has fused us, his fingers rigid, the tendons standing out in his forearm like cables.
He's trying to pull his magic back. I can feel it—the desperate, failing attempt to reverse the current, to drag the storm energy out of me and back into himself. But the door is open and the door doesn't give things back and every effort he makes just pulls the connection tighter.
"LET GO!" I'm screaming at him. "ATLAS, LET GO OF ME!"
He can't. His hand won't open. The lightning has welded us together and his eyes are rolling back and his legs are buckling and he's going to die on this platform holding my arm because he was the first one brave enough or stupid enough to try to save me—
Callum's hand lands on my shoulder.
He's on his feet—barely, swaying, his face the color of old paper—and his fingers dig into my shoulder through my jacket and the shadow magic surges through the new contact point. Another channel. Another flood. His cold magic pours through my shoulder and crashes into Atlas's lightning inside my chest and the collision makes my vision white out.
When it clears, Felix is there.
He crashes into us—not graceful, not calculated, just a body slamming into the tangle of limbs and magic with the desperate, uncoordinated lunge of a person who has seen every possible future and chosen the one where he doesn't stand by. His hand finds my other arm, fingers closing around my forearm, and chaos magic joins the flood—probability branches exploding through my consciousness, futures branching and dying in millisecond cascades.
Four. All four of them touching me. Three on their feet—barely, staggering, held up by the magic more than their bodies—and one on the ground, Ren, still motionless, his heartbeat a thread I'm tracking through the blood magic with the frantic focus of someone watching a life support monitor.
The hunger surges.
All four channels open at once, wide, wider than they've ever been, and the magic pours in from every direction—shadow through Callum's hand on my shoulder, storm through Atlas's grip on my wrist, chaos through Felix's fingers on my arm, and blood, still blood, still pulling from Ren's collapsed body ten feet away through the channel that doesn't need touch because blood magic never did.
I am full. I am past full. I am the sphere with the crack spiderwebbing, the glass bulging, the pressure building toward the break that shatters everything—
And then something happens that is not breaking.
It starts in my chest. In the space behind the door, the vast dark hunger that's been pulling and pulling and pulling. The space contracts. Not closing—connecting.The four rivers of magic that have been pouring into me find each other inside the dark and they twine together the way they did in the sphere—shadow and storm and blood and chaos, not colliding but braiding, weaving into something that is none of them and all of them.
The braid reaches outward. Back through the channels. Back through the points of contact—Callum's hand, Atlas's grip, Felix's fingers, Ren's blood. It reaches into them the way they reached into me, and I feel it latch on.
