"I'm aware of the situation," Callum says. His voice is flat. Controlled. The voice of a man who has been to his mother's office and come back with something sitting in his stomach like a stone.
"Good. Rule three. Herbert has full run of the room. Anyone who disturbs his webs sleeps in the hallway. That's non-negotiable."
Felix stops shuffling. "Is the spider actually—"
"Non. Negotiable."
Silence. The bond hums between us—five heartbeats in the same small room, close enough that the pain has faded to nothing and what's left is a kind of pressure. An awareness. Each of them at the edge of my mind, their emotions leaking through in currents I can't filter.
Atlas's guilt, banked hot behind his ribs. Callum's terror, sealed and locked but leaking at the seams. Felix's manic processing—the feeling of a brain running every possible scenario and finding no good outcomes. Ren's careful, steady calm, which up close feels less like peace and more like a man standing very still because any movement might break something.
And mine. My exhaustion and my fear and the dizzy, overwhelming strangeness of having four people living inside my chest, each of them a person I was afraid of six hours ago.
Felix starts shuffling again. The snap of cards fills the silence.
"So," he says. His voice has the brittle brightness of someone who is either about to laugh or about to break. "We're bound to someone we spent months trying to destroy. We can't leave her side without collapsing. The headmaster of this school has plans for her that involve the wordhandled,which historically means people disappear." He flips a card between his fingers—the Fracture, branching paths, all of them bad. "And none of us know what happens next."
The words hang in the room. Small room. Too many people. Herbert's webs catching the lamplight like silver thread.
"What does she want?" I ask. My voice sounds far away. Thin. "Catalina. What does she want with a grimoire at full capacity?"
They look at each other. Through the bond I feel the spike—all four of them, simultaneously, a jolt of fear so sharp and unified that for a second I can't tell whose it is.
None of them know.
But they're all terrified.
"We're going to figure this out," Brittany says. She says it the way she says everything—flat, certain, like a statement of fact rather than a hope. "Tomorrow. Tonight, nobody leaves this room, nobody does anything stupid, and nobody has an emotional crisis until I've had at least four hours of sleep." She looks at me. "You okay?"
I'm not okay. I'm bonded to four men who spent months tormenting me, crammed into a dorm room with a magic spider and a best friend who communicates exclusively through sarcasm, and the most powerful woman on campus has plans for me that involve a word that meansdisappear.
"I'll live," I say.
"Good enough." She turns off the overhead light. The lamp stays on—Herbert's territory, she won't touch it. "Everyone shut up. We start tomorrow."
Atlas shifts against the wall. Callum doesn't move. Felix's cards go quiet. Ren's eyes close.
Four heartbeats in my chest. The bond settling into something that almost feels like a rhythm—not comfortable, not yet, maybe not ever, but present. Real. Five people in a room the size of acloset, held together by magic and fear and the slowly dawning understanding that whatever's coming, they can't face it apart.
Brittany's breathing evens out first. Then Ren's. Then Atlas's—fitful, interrupted by twitches that I feel through the bond like small electrical shocks.
Felix shuffles once more. Twice. Stops.
Callum doesn't sleep. I know because I can feel him—the cold, rigid awareness, the mind that won't turn off, the thoughts running in patterns I can almost trace through the bond. He's calculating. Always calculating.
I don't sleep either. I lie on Brittany's bed with Herbert beside my head and four new heartbeats in my chest and I stare at the ceiling and I think about a woman who looked at a cracked amphitheater and a bleeding student and five broken kids and checked her phone.
The sphere is gone. Shattered. The four colors that lived inside it live inside me now, and the crack that ran through the glass runs through me too—invisible, untouchable, a fault line that nobody knows how to fix.
Your responsibility. Figure out how to fix it.
I'm working on it, Professor Warrick.
I'm working on it.
Chapter 28: Everly
We start at dawn.
