I try. It's like trying to hear one conversation in a stadium. But Brittany's hand is on my arm and her shoulder is solid under mine and Herbert is on her collar, all eight legs braced, and if I narrow my focus to just this—just the physical reality of my roommate holding me up—the four heartbeats recede to a background hum.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. I'm here."
"Good." She doesn't let go. "Now tell me what just happened, in short words, because from where I was sitting it looked like you exploded and then everyone fell down and the headmaster checked her phone and left."
"I think that's... basically what happened."
"Great. Wonderful. I love it here."
A sound from behind us. I turn—too fast, my vision lurching—and see Atlas getting to his feet.
He rises the way a building rises after an earthquake—slowly, uncertainly, testing whether the structure can hold. His conductor is somewhere on the cracked stone. He doesn't look for it. His blue eyes find mine and through the bond I feel the collision of what's happening inside him: confusion and fury and a grief that's so old it has its own gravity, and underneath all of it, cutting through like a wire through clay—
Guilt.
Not the vague, general guilt of a person who knows they've done wrong. Specific guilt. Targeted. The guilt of a man who calledlightning down on me, who grabbed my wrist hard enough to bruise, who stood in the quad and told me to leave before I hurt someone—and who is now feeling, through a bond he didn't ask for, exactly what those things felt like from the inside.
He felt it. When the bond formed. He felt every storm, every bruise, every moment of cruelty—from my side.
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks like he's going to be sick.
"Grey—"
"Don't." I don't know where the word comes from. Some exhausted, stripped-bare place that has no patience left for apologies or explanations. "Not now."
Felix is sitting where he landed, cards scattered in a wide radius around him like the blast pattern of a very specific bomb. He's staring at them. Not picking them up—just staring, his green eyes moving from card to card with the unfocused look of a person running calculations that aren't coming back with answers he understands.
"We were the battery," he says. His voice is strange. Flat. The charisma stripped out of it, leaving just the raw machinery of a very fast mind processing a very bad conclusion. "Not her. Us."
Atlas turns. "What?"
"Every time we went after her." Felix picks up a card—the Fracture, the one with the branching paths. Turns it in his fingers. His hands aren't shuffling. They're shaking. "Every confrontation. Every test. Every time we channeled magic at her—the storms, the shadows, the probability manipulation." He looks up. "We were feeding her. Building her capacity. She absorbed a little more each time, and each absorption made her stronger, made her able to hold more, and the next time we pushed her she took more and it made her stronger still. An escalating loop. And we had no idea."
The words settle on the cracked stone like dust.
"Callum did."
Atlas's voice. Low. Dangerous. Not the theatrical thunder of the quad—something quieter and worse. The sound of a man who has just felt, through a magical bond, the shape of a betrayal that goes deeper than anything he'd let himself suspect.
Everyone looks at Callum.
He's standing at the edge of the platform. He got to his feet at some point—I didn't see when—and he's put himself back together with the speed and precision of someone who has been reassembling his mask after damage his entire life. Blazer straightened. Cuffs checked. Posture correct. The only evidence that anything happened is the pallor of his face and a fine tremor in his left hand that he's holding behind his back where he thinks no one can see it.
The bond means I can feel it. The tremor. And everything underneath.
Callum Bolingbroke is terrified.
Not of us. Not of the bond. Not of the cracked amphitheater or the shattered sphere or the four heartbeats that are now threaded through his consciousness the same way they're threaded through mine. He's terrified of the thing he's been terrified of his entire life—the woman who just walked up those stairs checking her phone, the woman whose instructions he has been following since he was twelve years old, the woman who told him to push and test and build up the scholarship girl and he did it, he did all of it, and he is only now letting himself understand what it was for.
"You knew." Atlas crosses the platform in three strides. The static in the air surges—not a storm, not yet, but close. His body is drained, his magic guttering, but the rage is doing the work hislightning can't. "You were reporting to her. From day one. Every time Grey absorbed something, you told her, and she told you to push harder."
Callum doesn't step back. Doesn't flinch. The mask holds. But through the bond I feel the impact of each word—not on the surface but underneath, in the place where the real Callum lives, the one I saw for three seconds in a dark classroom before his phone buzzed and the shutters closed.
"I reported what I observed," he says. "That's what I was instructed to do."
"Instructed." Atlas's voice shakes. "She told you to use us and you just—you just fuckingdidit—"
"Yes." No excuse. No justification. Just the word, delivered with the flat precision of a person who has stopped pretending the thing he did was anything other than what it was. "I did."
