A voice comes from behind us, Liz standing at the edge of the courtyard with soot on her face and burns on her arms and fire steadily burning in her hands. I’m not sure when she left her room but it looks like she’s been through hell and back, though I don’t feel sorry for her. Not after everything she’s done.
"I've been fighting the corruption on the surface since you went below," she says. "My fire burns it. My blood connection to my father means the shadows can't hide from me. I can feel where they are."
I look at her and I see Dmitri's daughter offering to help fight the remnants of her father's power, and every instinct I have says to be careful, be wary, and remember what she was and what she did. But the fragments are cracking the barriers and students are screaming and I don't have the luxury of caution.
"Help hold back the shadows," I state, hoping and praying this isn’t one last trick she has up her sleeve.
Liz moves without hesitation. Her fire tears through the nearest cluster of fragments with a ferocity that makes several students flinch away from her as much as from the darkness. She burns a path across the courtyard toward the weakest barrier, and the shadows recoil from her in a way they don't recoil from anyone else. Her blood calls to them and they hesitate, confused, caught between the instinct to attack and the recognition of Dmitri's lineage.
She uses that hesitation to destroy them. Students watch her fight with expressions I recognize from the early days of the revolution: confusion, fear, the tentative beginning of something that isn't trust but might become tolerance if given enough time and enough proof.
With everyone’s help, we hold. Barely, desperately, with everything the sanctuary has left. Dante anchors the center. Liz covers the eastern approach. Students and faculty fill the gaps. My mates contribute what little they can, each moment costing us energy and essence we don’t have.
And then the fragments stop scattering. The individual pieces of Dmitri's darkness that have been racing across the courtyard slow, then reverse, pulling back toward the crack in the flagstones, reconvening into something larger.
"That's not residual," Harlow says, the fear in his voice sending ice through my bonds. "That's coordinated. Something is pulling them together."
The darkness gathers above the crack, his hunger pooling together, the pure essence of three centuries of consumption, the driving force that animated everything he built, coalescing into something that doesn't think butfeeds. A shadow of a shadow, mindless and vast and aimed at the largest concentration of essence it can find.
The students.
"We can't fight this separately," I scream out, and I feel the truth of it in my depleted bonds, in the exhaustion of every person standing in this courtyard. Individual efforts won't stop what's forming. Dante alone can't stop it. Liz's fire alone can't stop it. Even the six of us, if we had anything left, couldn't stop it as separate forces. "We have to work together. All of us. As one."
"We don't have the strength for the combination," Ambrose says.
"Not just us." I look at the courtyard full of people. "Everyone. The network, the students, everyone who can contribute. We channel it together. One push."
"That's never been done," Rumi says.
"Then we do it for the first and hopefully the last time."
I reach for the bonds. Not just the ones between my mates, not just the combination. I reach for every connection I can find, every thread in the network through Ambrose’s contracts, every bond between every person in this courtyard and every ally who pledged their power to our cause.
My aura stretches outward until I can feel the mountain valley community and the underground settlement and the coastal sanctuaries and the hundreds of small groups scattered across the territories who chose to believe that the world could be different.
"Help us," I send through the network, the request carrying with it everything we are and everything we've done and everything we're trying to protect. "One more time. Help us hold."
The response comes like a wave. Essence floods into the network from every direction. The barriers around the dormitories flare with renewed power. Dante's aura blazes so bright the courtyard fills with golden light. Students feel the collective strength pouring through them and stand straighter, their essences brightening, their fear receding. Even Stellan's fire sparks back to life in his palms, fed by the network's collective will.
The reconvened darkness surges toward the students but meets a wall of combined power that it cannot breach. Not six forces.Thousands. Every Magila who joined the network, every student who found their strength at Phoenix Sanctuary, every person who decided that protecting strangers was worth the cost.
The darkness smashes against it, ramming itself against the barrier, hitting the combined will of every person we've built connections with, because the thing Dmitri never understood is that power built from consumption will always lose to power built from choice.
Dmitri’s echoed voice, full of frustration surges forward, a voice meant only for the six of us. “You stupid fools," he snarls as the darkness surges forward again for another attack. "You think you've won? You've taken me into yourselves. Every shadow I ever cast, every life I ever consumed, every piece of darkness I built over three centuries, it lives in you now. You haven't destroyed me. You've become me."
I pray a little harder, tugging at the essence from everyone through the network, hoping it’ll be enough. Instead of just a wall, it pulses with the energy of our auras, pushing the darkness back. It pulses again and again and again until the last strike from the darkness seems to shatter, our aura striking through it rather than just against it.
My vision tunnels as something like electricity zips through the darkness, attacking it from the inside but it doesn’t erase Dmitri’s words.
You’ve become me.
That can’t be true, right? We fought hard and worked together just like that entity wanted us to. Just like Mother Nature pushed us toward. And now we’re just…
The last fragment of darkness evaporates and then the courtyard goes quiet.
I stand in the silence with my bonds stretched across thousands of people and I feel every single one of them breathing. Then my legs give out and Jade catches me before I hit the stone, the world narrowing to the sound of my own heartbeat and the warmth of arms holding me up.
"Is it over?" Stellan asks.
