Not because anyone planned it—because nobody slept. Atlas dozed in fits against the wall, his conductor crackling with stray sparks every time his dreams went bad, which was roughly every twenty minutes. Felix stopped pretending to rest around four AM and started laying cards on the floor in patterns that Brittany stepped over without comment on her way to the bathroom. Ren sat in the desk chair with his eyes closed and his hands open on his knees and his heartbeat so deliberately even that I knew he was awake by how hard he was working to fake sleep.
Callum stood in his corner all night. Six hours. Same position. I know because I checked every time I surfaced from whatever shallow half-sleep the bond allowed, and every time he was there—arms crossed, eyes open, staring at the dark window with an expression I couldn't read even through the bond.
At six AM Brittany makes coffee. This involves a contraband hot plate, a French press she stole from the faculty lounge, and a bag of grounds that she keeps in her desk drawer behind the first aid kit. The room fills with the smell of burnt coffee and stale air and the collective body odor of four men who spent the night on a dorm room floor, and it's the most depressing sunrise I've ever experienced.
"Okay." Brittany hands me a mug—the skull one, mine—and sits on her bed with Herbert on her knee. She doesn't make coffee for anyone else. "What do we know?"
I take a sip. It tastes like battery acid and desperation. "I'm a grimoire."
"Established."
"Grimoires were outlawed after the Schism of 1926."
"Established."
"The Administration—Catalina—has been watching me since before I arrived. The scholarship. The testing sphere. Everything was set up to see what I could do."
"Established." Brittany looks at the four men occupying her floor. "What else?"
Silence. Atlas is sitting with his back to the wall, conductor in his lap, staring at the floor. Callum hasn't moved from the window. Felix is sitting in a nest of scattered cards, his legs crossed, his face the particular shade of grey that comes from pulling an all-nighter without the benefit of youth or optimism.
Ren speaks first.
"The grimoire bloodline was systematically eliminated after the Schism." His voice is quiet. Hoarse—the aftermath of nearly dying, probably, combined with six hours of pretending to sleep. "I've read everything the restricted section has. It's not much. After 1926, the records mention twenty-three individuals who showed grimoire tendencies—the ability to absorb more than one discipline. Twenty-three names."
"And?"
"They all disappeared." He meets my eyes. Brown, gold-flecked, tired in a way that has nothing to do with last night. "No death certificates. No transfer records. No expulsion paperwork. They appear in the enrollment logs, and then they don't. Usually within a semester of identification."
The room is very quiet. Herbert's web catches the early light from the window.
"That's not—" I start. "People don't just disappear. There has to be documentation. Families would have—"
"The families were told their students withdrew voluntarily." Callum's voice, from the window. He hasn't turned around. "The Bolingbroke archives contain correspondence. Form letters. The same template used repeatedly, with minor variations. 'Your son has chosen to pursue other interests.' 'Your daughter has decided to leave Nyxhaven for personal reasons.' The families accepted it because the letters came from the Headmaster's office, and no one questions the Headmaster."
His voice is flat. Factual. The same voice he uses for reports—precise, stripped of opinion. But through the bond I feel what's underneath: a slow, grinding horror. He's known about the letters. He's read them in the family archives. He just never let himself connect them to what they meant until now.
"How long have you known?" Atlas asks. Low. Dangerous.
"I've had access to the family archives since I was sixteen." A pause. "I didn't understand what I was reading."
"Bullshit."
"I understood the words. I didn't understand what theymeant." He turns from the window, and his face is the worst thing I've seen on him—not the mask, not the crack in the mask, but the face of a person looking at the shape of something he's spent years refusing to see and finally seeing it. "There's a difference between reading a phrase in a document and understanding that the phrase means people were killed."
The word lands in the room like a stone in still water.
"We don't know they were killed," Felix says. But his cards have gone still, and his voice lacks conviction.
"Twenty-three people disappeared without records," Ren says. "In a community that documents everything. Over a span of fifty years. And the only notation in the official archive is a single repeated phrase." He looks at Felix. "What phrase?"
Felix is quiet for a moment. Then he sets down his cards—lays them on the floor, face-down, in a neat stack. The first time I've ever seen him put them away.
"My grandmother," he says. "She was at Nyxhaven in the seventies. She had a friend—a Tumult student. Smart, powerful, could absorb both chaos and storm magic. My grandmother asked the administration what happened to her friend after she disappeared." His jaw works. "The response was a single line. 'The matter has been handled.'"
The matter has been handled.
The same phrase Callum found in eleven documents in the restricted section. The same phrase carved into the Bolingbroke archives like a stamp. Not an explanation. A door closing. A file marked complete. A person reduced to a matter, and the matter reduced to a past tense.
