Not metaphor. Not the dull ache of magic settling or the background hum doing its thing. Fire—actual, searing, white-hot fire that erupts behind my sternum and drops me to my knees on the flagstones. The sound that comes out of me might be a scream. Might just be the noise a body makes when it's being torn in four directions at once.
The four heartbeats spike into a frequency I feel in my teeth, my eye sockets, the roots of my hair. Each one pulling towardits source—behind me, all of them behind me, I walked too far ahead—
"Everly!" Brittany's hands on my shoulders. She was keeping pace with me, not them. "What's happening?"
"Too far—" The fire pulses. Tightens. I curl forward, forehead against cold stone. "Got too far ahead."
Footsteps. Fast. The fire eases as the distance closes—Atlas first, breathing hard, one hand on his own ribs. Then Felix, pale, leaning on his knees. Callum, rigid. Ren, last, grey-faced with the effort of hurrying.
"Hundred yards," Felix gasps. "Give or take. That's our range." He straightens, does something that might be a smile if his face weren't the color of old milk. "I ran the numbers on the way over. Hundred yards is the wall. Past hundred and fifty we'd probably black out. Past two hundred—" He shrugs. "Didn't run those numbers. Didn't want to."
Brittany looks at the group. Five people and a spider, standing in a wet quad in the dark because I walked too fast.
"So none of you can be more than a hundred yards from Everly."
"That's about right."
"And Everly can't be more than a hundred yards from any of them."
"Correct."
"Seven beings. Maximum range of a football field." She pauses. Herbert adjusts on her collar. "Wonderful. Everyone walk together this time. Slowly. We're going to my room because it's closest and because I refuse to manage this crisis in a courtyard."
"Your room is a double," Atlas says.
"Yes it is."
"There are six of us."
"I'm aware." She doesn't slow down. "Everyone who made Everly cry gets the floor."
Room 217 was not designed for six people.
It was barely designed for two. Brittany and I have spent the semester in a space roughly the size of a prison cell—two beds, two desks, one window, a closet that doesn't close properly, and a bathroom so narrow you have to choose between closing the door and using the toilet. We've made it work through territorial boundaries, mutual respect for silence, and Herbert's web installations, which function as a kind of organic room divider.
Now there are four additional bodies in it, and the room has the approximate comfort level of a packed subway car at rush hour.
Atlas is on the floor against the far wall, legs drawn up, conductor across his knees—someone retrieved it from the amphitheater. He takes up roughly the same amount of space as a piece of furniture. His shoulders are wider than the gap between Brittany's desk and my bed, and every time he shifts his weight something falls off a shelf.
Callum is standing. Because of course he is—Callum Bolingbroke would rather stand for six hours than sit on a floor that hasn't been vacuumed. He's in the corner by the window, arms crossed, spine against the wall, his face reassembled into something that almost looks like the old mask. Almost. The cuffs are still wrinkled. He hasn't fixed them.
Felix is sitting cross-legged on the end of my bed without asking, shuffling his cards at a speed that's edging toward manic. The sound—snap, snap, snap—fills the small room like a second clock, and Brittany has already looked at him twice with the expression that precedes violence.
Ren is in the desk chair. He lowered himself into it the moment we arrived and hasn't moved. Still pale—the color of someone who lost too much blood and got most of it back through magical intervention—his brown eyes quiet and focused and aimed at the floor. His heartbeat in the bond is the steadiest of the four. Slow, measured, the rhythm of someone who nearly died and has already filed it away and moved on to the next problem.
I'm on Brittany's bed, because she told me to sit down and I was too tired to argue. Herbert is on the pillow beside me, motionless, his web stretching between the headboard and the lamp in a pattern that looks deliberately protective.
Brittany is standing in the center of the room—the only remaining floorspace—with her arms crossed and her face set to its default expression of aggressive pragmatism.
"Right," she says. "Let's establish some ground rules, since apparently we all live here now."
"We don't all live—" Atlas starts.
"You can't leave. You literally, physically, magically cannot leave this room without her." She points at me. "Which means you live here until the situation changes. So. Rules."
"Brittany—"
"Rule one. Nobody touches Everly without asking. I've watched four men grab her, shove her, corner her, and drag her across campus for the last three months, and that's done. You want to touch her, you ask. She says no, you back off. I don't care if the bond is pulling, I don't care if your magic is acting up. You ask." She looks at each of them in turn. Atlas drops his eyes first. Callum last. "Rule two. Nobody reports anything to the administration. Nothing. Not a word, not a text, not a carrier pigeon." Her eyes land on Callum and stay. "Especially you."
