The amphitheater is silent. Three hundred people, on their feet or on the ground, staring at the five of us crumpled on a cracked stone platform beneath a gold-lit sky. Glass shards from the shattered sphere litter the stone around us, and in each piece the colors are gone. Empty. Clear glass, with nothing inside.
Everything that was in the sphere is in me now. And everything that's in me is in them.
I look up.
Catalina Bolingbroke is already moving.
Not toward me. Toward the edge of the platform, where a faculty member—Warrick, I think, grey hair wild, face ashen—is trying to get past the security wards. Catalina intercepts her with a hand on the arm and a murmur too low for me to catch. Warrick's face goes through something complicated—fury, then defeat, then something that looks a lot like nausea—and she steps back.
Catalina turns to the security officer standing frozen at the base of the steps. Her cream suit has a fine layer of dust from the shockwave. One pearl earring is missing—knocked loose somewhere on the cracked stone. A strand of platinum hair has escaped her twist. She doesn't seem to notice any of it.
"Get Ashford to the infirmary," she says. Her voice is calm. Measured. The voice of a woman cancelling a meeting, not standing in the wreckage of an amphitheater with five bleeding students at her feet. "Dr. Kellerman should be on standby already. I called ahead."
Called ahead.She called the infirmary before the demonstration started. She knew someone would need it.
"And have maintenance assess the structural damage to the courtyard. I'll want a report by Monday." She's making a note on her phone now—actually typing on her phone, thumb moving with the brisk efficiency of someone adding a task to a to-do list. "The students can be dismissed. Classes are cancelled for the remainder of the day."
"What did you do to me?"
My voice is wrecked. A rasp. A ruin. She looks up from her phone the way you'd look up if someone interrupted you during an email—mildly, briefly, with the polite attention of a person who's already thinking about the next thing.
"Hmm? Oh. You should go to the infirmary too, Miss Grey. You look pale." She pockets the phone. Smooths the escaped strand of hair back into the twist. Touches the place where the missingearring was with two fingers, a small frown—the first genuine emotion I've seen on her face, and it's irritation about jewelry. "We'll schedule a follow-up for next week. My assistant will send the details."
She steps off the platform. Her heels click on the cracked stone—steady, unhurried, the measured pace of a woman who has somewhere to be and is running exactly on time. A cluster of administrators falls in around her as she ascends the amphitheater steps. I hear fragments of conversation as she goes—something about rescheduling a faculty meeting, something about insurance for the structural damage, something about a call with the board at six.
She doesn't look back.
On the platform, four men are pulling themselves off the stone, and I can feel every one of them—their pain, their confusion, their rage—beating against the walls of my mind like fists against a locked door.
And the headmaster of Nyxhaven University is walking away from the worst thing that's ever happened to me, checking her phone, irritated about an earring, already scheduling next week.
That's when I understand.
This wasn't a crisis. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't even an experiment.
It was an agenda item. And she's already moved on to the next one.
Chapter 25: Everly
Brittany reaches me before anyone else.
I don't see her coming—my vision is doing something wrong, flickering between normal sight and something else, something layered and too-bright that I think might be the bond trying to show me what four other people are seeing simultaneously. But I feel her. Not through magic. Through the specific, deliberate weight of a hand grabbing the back of my jacket and hauling me upright with the no-nonsense efficiency of someone who has been waiting for everything to go to shit and prepared accordingly.
"Up. On your feet. Now."
"I can't—"
"You can and you will, because I am not carrying you up those stairs and I refuse to have a dramatic moment on a stage." She gets her shoulder under my arm. She's shorter than me by three inches but built like she was designed for load-bearing, and she takes my weight without stumbling. "Can you walk?"
"I don't know."
"Then we're going to find out."
The amphitheater is emptying. Students pouring up the stone steps in a mass of fraternity colors and panicked voices, pushed along by faculty who are trying to maintain order and mostly failing. I catch fragments—did you see that, what the hell was that, is Ashford dead—and each one lands like a pebble thrown at glass. The security wards around the platform have dropped. Warrick is on the steps, arguing with someone I can't see, her voice sharp enough to cut.
The four heartbeats in my chest are loud. Louder than the crowd, louder than Brittany's voice, louder than the ringing inmy ears. Four presences pressing against the edges of my mind—confused, hurt, afraid—and I don't know how to close the door on them. I don't know if there is a door anymore.
"Everly." Brittany's voice, close to my ear. Steady. "Focus on me. Just me. Can you do that?"
