"What?"
"I'm not bonded to you." Her voice is flat. Practical. The voice she uses for engineering problems and security assessments and every other situation where emotion is a liability she can't afford. "The bond means you five can't separate. I can. Which means someone needs to stay behind and cover for you."
"Brittany—"
"If all six of us disappear, Catalina knows immediately. If five disappear and one stays, that's different. I can buy you time. Create confusion. Report that I saw you heading south when you're going north. File a missing persons report with campus security that sends them in the wrong direction." She uncrossesher arms. Takes the car keys from the hook on the closet door. Holds them in her palm. "Someone has to make sure you have something to come back to."
"You'll be alone. With her. With Catalina."
"I've been alone at this school since I got here. One more semester won't kill me." She says it dry, dismissive, the Brittany deadpan that deflects everything. But her hand is closed tight around the keys. Her knuckles are white.
"I'm not leaving you here."
"You don't have a choice." She steps forward and takes my hand and opens my fingers and puts the keys in my palm, and her fingers are cold and her grip is firm and she holds on for three seconds longer than she needs to. "You're a grimoire. They're bonded to you. Catalina wants tohandleyou. If you stay here, you disappear like the other twenty-three. I'm not watching that happen."
"And if she comes after you?"
"She won't. I'm nothing. Failing Sanguis student, mundane-born, academic probation. I'm not worth the paperwork." The deadpan holds. Herbert shifts on her shoulder—a small adjustment, legs bracing. "Besides. Someone has to feed Herbert. He has a very specific diet."
It's the Herbert line that breaks me.
My eyes burn. My throat closes. I'm standing in the middle of my dorm room holding car keys and looking at my best friend, who is telling me to leave her behind in a school run by a woman who makes people disappear, and she's making jokes about her spider's dietary requirements because that's how Brittany Leigh saysI love you—sideways, through sarcasm, disguised as something smaller than it is.
"Brittany." My voice cracks.
"Don't." She holds up one hand. "Don't make this a thing. I hate things."
"You're my best friend."
"I know. That's why I'm staying." She drops the hand. Picks up the map—the security map, the one she's been building since September—and puts it on the desk beside the car keys. "East gate. Midnight. The ward resets every twelve minutes. You have a three-minute window after each reset where the coverage drops to sixty percent. Felix can handle the rest."
She's given us everything. The keys, the map, the plan, the cover story. Everything she has, laid out on a desk in a dorm room that's too small for two people and impossibly too small for the goodbye that needs to happen in it.
I pull her into a hug. She's stiff at first—Brittany doesn't do hugs, Brittany does arm's-length and sarcasm and the occasional shared bag of stale gummy worms—but after a second her arms come up and she holds on. Tight. Her face pressed against my shoulder, Herbert scuttling out of the way to perch on the headboard.
"Don't die," she says into my jacket. "I just got used to you."
"Don't let her win."
"Please. She wears cream suits and pearl earrings. I've hated her since orientation."
We hold on. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Long enough that I memorize the feeling—her arms, her sharp shoulders, the smell of her black nail polish and her doom metal t-shirts and the particular Brittany-ness of a person who has been my anchor since the day I arrived in pink shoes and she told me I looked like a Lisa Frank explosion.
She lets go first. Steps back. Wipes her face with the back of her hand—fast, angry, like the tears are a betrayal she's going to deal with later.
"Go pack," she says. "All of you. Take what matters. Leave what doesn't." She looks at the four men who have been silent through all of this—four men who spent months tormenting me and are now watching my best friend sacrifice her safety for mine, and I can feel through the bond what each of them is feeling. Atlas's gut-punch of respect. Felix's sharp, surprised admiration. Ren's quiet ache. And Callum—Callum, who understands what it means to stay behind in a building that belongs to your enemy, is looking at Brittany Leigh with something that might be the first genuine emotion he's felt for another person in years.
"Rule four," Brittany says, looking at each of them. "Take care of her. Or I will find you. And I will bring the spider."
At nine PM I pack. Two bags. Clothes, phone charger, the first aid kit Brittany assembled, the books from the restricted section that I smuggled out over the past weeks. The testing sphere is gone—shattered on the amphitheater stone—but I wrap the sock it lived in around my phone anyway, because the mundanity of it feels like a talisman.
Brittany packs too—not for herself, for me. She adds things I wouldn't think of. Granola bars. Cash from the emergency envelope in her desk. A flashlight with a skull sticker. A note, folded small, that she slips into the side pocket of my bag when she thinks I'm not looking.
At eleven-thirty, we kill the lights. At eleven-forty-five, we slip out the back door of Bellamy Hall into the cold October dark.
Atlas pulls clouds over the east side of campus—a slow, heavy overcast that eats the moonlight. Callum's shadows spread around us like a cloak, swallowing our footsteps. Felix walks with his cards in one hand, eyes half-closed, nudging coincidences—a guard turns left instead of right, a ward glitches for three seconds, a dog doesn't bark.
Ren walks beside me. His hand finds mine in the dark—not a gesture, just a blood mage anchoring to the heartbeat he can't stop hearing. His fingers are cool. The bandage on his palm rough against my skin.
