"Handled," I say. The word feels different in my mouth now. Heavier. "Catalina used that word. In Callum's office. 'The Bolingbrokes have handled grimoires for generations.'"
Callum's eyes close. Through the bond: a wave of something I don't have a name for. Not guilt. Not grief. Something between the two—the emotion of a person who has been carrying a word his whole life and just discovered that the word means a body count.
"So that's what we know," Brittany says. She's been listening without interruption—unusual for her—and her face is doing the thing where the deadpan flattens into something harder. More deliberate. The face she wears when she's processing something that scares her and refuses to show it. "Twenty-three people who could do what Everly does. All of them gone. No records. No explanation. And the current headmaster, who orchestrated the ceremony that just bonded five students together against theirwill, comes from the family that handled every single one of them."
"Yes," Callum says.
"And she has plans for Everly. Plans she won't share. Plans that involve the wordhandled."
"Yes."
Brittany picks up Herbert. Holds him in her palm. He sits there, patient, legs folded, and she looks at him the way she looks at him when she needs to think—like the spider is a fixed point in a world that won't stop moving.
"Then we need to leave," she says.
"We can't just—" Atlas starts.
"We can. We have legs and a car and a tank of gas. The bond means you have to stay together, fine. Stay together somewhere that isn't here."
"She's the Headmaster. She has resources. If we run—"
"If we stay, we find out whathandledmeans." Brittany's voice is sharp enough to draw blood. "I don't want to find out what it means. Do you?"
The room is silent. Six people. One spider. The early light turning the walls gold.
I think about the pentagon in the grass. The foundation stones of a building that was torn down so completely that the campus maps don't show it. The women who lived there—twenty-three of them, over fifty years, each one carrying the same magic I carry, each one identified and reported and managed and handled. Gone. Not even a memorial. Not even a name on a wall.
"No," I say. "I don't want to find out what it means."
Four heartbeats in my chest. Four men who spent months hurting me because a woman told them to. Four men who arenow bound to me by a magic none of us chose, sitting in a dorm room with bad coffee and a stolen French press and the slow, terrible understanding that the institution they trusted has been disappearing people like me for five generations.
Through the bond, I feel them arrive at the same conclusion. Not in words—in sensation. A tightening. A settling. The feeling of five people looking at the same door and deciding, together, to walk through it.
"Then we leave," Callum says. Quiet. Final. The voice of a man who has just chosen a side and is terrified of what it costs. "Tonight."
Chapter 29: Everly
The day passes in a strange, pressurized silence.
We can't leave immediately—Callum points out that the campus security wards track all exits during daylight, and Catalina will have doubled monitoring after the amphitheater. We need to wait for dark. We need a plan. We need somewhere to go.
Atlas paces. The room is too small for it—four steps, turn, four steps—but his body won't stop moving, his conductor sparking at the tips, the bond broadcasting his agitation in hot pulses that make my skin prickle. Through the connection I feel him like weather building—pressure and charge and the desperate need for a release valve that doesn't exist in a ten-by-twelve dorm room.
"Stop pacing," Brittany says, for the fourth time.
"I can't."
"You're making the lamp flicker."
"Ican't stop."
Callum sits rigid on the edge of my desk. He came in an hour ago without speaking, took the corner position like a soldier reporting to a post, and started making lists on his phone. What to take. What to leave. Which exits have the weakest coverage. His thumbs move with mechanical precision, and through the bond his emotions are locked so tight I can barely feel them—just a faint cold pulse, the machinery of a mind running full speed behind walls he's rebuilt out of sheer survival instinct.
He came from his mother's office. I felt him arrive through the bond before he knocked—the cold presence slotting into the cluster, heavier than before. Heavier and different. Something changed in that office. He won't say what.
Felix has laid his cards on the floor in a grid. Probability mapping—a physical representation of possible outcomes. He's been shifting cards for two hours, muttering numbers, his green eyes tracking patterns I can't see. The look on his face is the look of someone running the same equation on a loop and not liking where it lands.
Ren sits in the desk chair with his eyes closed. He hasn't spoken since we decided. The bandage on his palm needs changing. He hasn't asked. His heartbeat in the bond is the steadiest of the four—the one fixed point, the metronome the rest of us orbit.
