"Someone who's been planning this for a very long time," he says. "And who knows enough about chaos magic to blind it."
We walk the rest of the way in silence. The campus is bright and cold and ordinary around us—students on paths, leaves on stone, the clock tower chiming four. A normal Friday afternoon at Nyxhaven University, if you don't count the cracked amphitheater and the unconscious Sanguis president beingcarried to the infirmary and the five people walking through the quad with a bond between them that hums like a live wire.
I feel four heartbeats. None of them are mine. All of them are mine now.
Brittany walks beside me, solid and real, Herbert on her shoulder.
"So," she says. "This is bad."
"Yeah."
"Scale of one to ten?"
I think about the amphitheater. The gold light. Catalina's phone. Ren's body on the stone. Four presences in my mind that I can't turn off, each one carrying a lifetime of damage that I can now feel as clearly as my own.
"Eleven," I say.
"Cool." She adjusts Herbert's position on her collar. "Then let's go figure out how to make it a ten."
Chapter 26: Callum
I don't check my cuffs.
I can't. My hands won't stop shaking.
The bond is a living thing inside my chest—four heartbeats that aren't mine jammed behind my ribs like animals in a cage, each one pulsing with someone else's feelings. Knox's fury is hot. It sits in my left lung like an ember, flaring every time he moves, and he's pacing somewhere behind me—I can feel the rhythm of his steps through the connection like I'm walking them myself. Ferrix is scattered. His presence in the bond feels like static, like a radio caught between stations, fragments of probability bleeding through in bursts that make my vision stutter. Ashford is faint. A thread. A candle in a draft. They took him to the infirmary and I felt the distance open up like a wound, a pulling in my chest that got worse with every step until someone—a nurse, a healer, I don't know—did something that stabilized him and the pulling eased to an ache.
And Grey.
Grey's heartbeat is the loudest. I don't know why—something about the bond, some hierarchy I don't understand—but her pulse sits at the center of the tangle and everything else orbits it. Her fear tastes like pennies. I can feel it on my tongue, metallic and sharp, every time she breathes. Her confusion is a pressure behind my eyes, a headache that isn't mine, and underneath both of those—
Every time I hurt her. Played back from her side. The grip on her arm outside Ossium Hall, the bruises she hid under long sleeves. The clinical voice I used when I told herdon't mistake practicality for kindness.The dark classroom, my hand reaching for her face before the phone buzzed. All of it—every calculated cruelty, every report I filed, every time I watched hercry on Brittany's shoulder through the security feeds and wrote it down in my mother's preferred format—looping through the bond like a recording I can't pause.
I cross the campus with my shirt untucked. My Stylus Mortis is gone—somewhere on the amphitheater stone, probably cracked, definitely not something I can think about right now. My shadows are dragging behind me like something that's been beaten. They keep trying to reach southeast. Toward Bellamy Hall. Toward her.
I yank them back. They come reluctantly. Everything in my body is pulling toward Grey and away from where I'm going, and the dissonance makes me nauseous—my legs moving north toward the Administration building while every other part of me screams south.
Margaret's desk is empty. The whole floor is dark except for the light under Mother's door. The hallway smells like floor polish and the lilies she keeps on the credenza outside her office, and the smell makes my stomach clench because it's the smell of every meeting, every report, everyyes, MotherI've delivered since I was old enough to understand that obedience is the rent I pay for existing in her world.
I open the door without knocking.
She's at the window. Phone to her ear. The cream suit has dust on the left shoulder from the shockwave—a faint grey smudge, barely visible, and the fact that she hasn't brushed it off is more alarming than anything else I've seen today. Mother doesn't tolerate imperfection. Mother notices a crooked painting from across a room. The dust on her shoulder means she's either too focused to care or too satisfied to notice.
"—I don't care about the banners, have someone collect them before the rain. And get Warrick to stop calling my assistant. Ifshe has concerns, she can put them in writing." She sees me. One finger.Wait."The courtyard assessment can happen Monday. I want the area roped off by tonight. No students, no faculty, nobody with a camera." A pause. "Yes, I'll approve the overtime. Just get it done."
She hangs up. Sets the phone on the desk beside the laptop, beside the pen, beside the notepad where she's already made a list. I can see the handwriting from here—small, precise, each item numbered. She's made a list. Amphitheater cracked, Sanguis president in the infirmary, five students bonded by magic that hasn't been seen in a century, and she's made a numbered list.
"Sit down, Callum."
"What did you do?"
"Sit down."
"What did you do."
She turns from the window. Studies me the way she studies everything—the untucked shirt, the missing Stylus, the shaking hands. I watch her catalogue the damage. Watch her file it underacceptable losses.
"You're upset," she says. "Understandable. Sit down and we'll talk."
