The bond transmits Atlas's fury like an electrical surge—I feel it spike in my chest, hot and wild, and underneath it the specific anguish of a man who trusted Callum Bolingbroke enough to follow his lead and just discovered that the lead went off a cliff. Felix feels it too—I see him flinch, see his hand tighten on the card. We're all feeling each other now, a five-way collision of emotions that none of us can filter or control.
"Every time," Atlas says. His voice has gone quiet, which is worse than the shouting. "Every time you said 'the Grey situation is escalating, we need to push harder.' Every time you organized us. You were followingherinstructions."
"Yes."
"And the demonstration. She told you what it was. What it was really for."
A pause. The mask flickers. "She told me it was an assessment."
"Was it?"
Through the bond, I feel Callum's answer before he gives it. Not words—a sensation. The locked drawer in his room. The diagrams he copied. The five-pointed star with the human figure at its center. The word at each point that his shadows wouldn't touch.
"I don't know what it was," he says. And for the first time, his voice cracks. Not dramatically. A hairline fracture, barely audible. "She doesn't tell me what the plan is. She tells me what my part is. And I do it. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked."
"Then it stops working." Atlas is two feet from him now, close enough to hit, and the bond is screaming with the collision of their emotions—Atlas's rage and Callum's terror and underneath both, buried so deep I almost miss it, the thing neither of them will acknowledge: they trusted each other. For years. And that's over now.
"Hey."
Brittany's voice cuts through like a blade through silk. Everyone turns.
She's still holding me up. Herbert is still on her collar. Her face is the same dry, unimpressed expression she wears for everything from magical crises to bad cafeteria food, and she is looking at the four most powerful students on campus with the energy of a woman who is too tired for this shit.
"You can have your little betrayal reckoning later. Right now, Ren Ashford is unconscious on the ground and nobody's done anything about it, and if he dies because you were too busy having a feelings competition I will personally make every single one of your lives a living hell." She points at Atlas, then Callum. "You two. Carry him. Infirmary. Now."
The command cuts through the bond-static like a signal through noise. Atlas breaks away from Callum—the rage still there but redirected, given a task—and crosses to where Ren lies on the stone. Callum follows without a word.
They kneel beside him. Ren is breathing—I can feel it through the bond, the shallow rise and fall, his heartbeat thready but persistent—and when Atlas lifts him, one arm under his shoulders and one under his knees, the gentleness of it makes something twist in my chest. This is the same man who called lightning down on a student in the quad. The same man who told me to leave before I hurt someone. He's carrying Ren Ashford like he's made of glass, and his face is a ruin, and through the bond I feel his thought as clearly as if he'd spoken it aloud:
This is what I did to my mother. This is what it looks like when someone takes too much.
"I can walk," I tell Brittany.
"Prove it."
I step away from her. My legs hold. Barely—the four magics are settling into some new configuration inside me, the bond reshaping the landscape of my body, and everything feels slightly wrong, like wearing someone else's shoes. But I'm standing. I'm upright. I'm not the one being carried.
Felix falls into step beside us as we climb the amphitheater stairs. He's picked up his cards. They're back in his hands—shuffle, cut, shuffle—but the rhythm is off. Slower. Uncertain. The mechanical comfort of a habit that doesn't comfort anymore.
"Everly."
"What."
"The bond. When it formed." He's not looking at me. He's looking at his cards, and his voice has the particular qualityof someone delivering information they wish they didn't have. "I saw the probability branches. All of them. Every possible outcome of this moment, spreading out in every direction."
"And?"
"There was no branch where this didn't happen." He stops shuffling. Holds a single card up between two fingers—the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. "She didn't plan the bond. That was an accident—Atlas touching you, then Callum, then me. She didn't predict that. But everything else—the demonstration, the capacity test, the four of us channeling simultaneously—every probability branch led here. To you, at full capacity. To her knowing exactly what you can hold."
"Why?" My voice comes out small. Smaller than I want. "What does she want with a grimoire stuffed full of magic? What is she going to do to me?"
Felix puts the card back in the deck. Resumes shuffling. The rhythm is still wrong.
"That's the one branch I couldn't read," he says. "The future past this point is... dark. Not dark as in bad. Dark as inhidden.Like someone built a wall across the probability stream, and everything on the other side is blocked."
"Who could do that?"
He looks at me. Green eyes. Tired. Scared. The boy who sees how everything ends, staring at the one wall he can't see past.
