“Oh, well, in that case, it’s definitely not a problem.” Akari throws both arms up in frustration. “I’m sure he didn’t go straight to Professor Lyons the second we left!”
“Erm . . . is that really the most important thing?” I ask, cutting into their inane argument. Because given what we watched the Meridian do,to her, only an hour ago, their standing at the Academy should be skirting the bottom of the list.
“No, you’re right.” Akari rounds on me with a vengeance. “The most important thing is why she’s working with ahalf breed.”
“We prefer Hues, if you don’t mind.” I bristle.Or, you know, just about anything else.
“I do mind, actually—since just getting caught in this room with you would be enough to end our futures.”
“Hey, I’ve been offering to leave since the last bell,” I remind her. But every time I tried, a flash of Orange would pin me to the chair, or seal the door shut, or take another bite of my air, and she can shimmer where I can’t so there was absolutely no point in phasing.
“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Kiri,” Raya says, stepping between us like a shield. “Our future is already at risk—that’s what the open vision showed me.”
“You have no idea what that vision showed you!” Akari’s temper is growing thin. “You said it yourself, Ray: it was too abstract and it didn’t make any sense. It isn’t possible.”
“Except it is possible,” Raya insists. “Ezzo lived through something similar last year. Go ahead, ask him.”
I’m pretty sure I’d die of shock if she did.
“I don’t need to ask the half breed anything!”
Yup, there it is.
“If there was a threat to all magic, someone—your parents, for example, or . . . I don’t know, the entire seers’ guild—would have seen it!”
“Unless they didn’t,” Raya tells her, the words laden with plea. “I think the open question allowed me to see a future they can’t. And I know how crazy that sounds, okay? But what if the guild has accidentally shut out our ability to see this kind of risk?”
“Colors help me, you’re as bad as he is,” Akari mutters, shooting me a scathing look. “We would havefeltthe effects of a Gray-wide catastrophe. Seeing isn’t the only way to see.”
“No, you wouldn’t have, actually.” The way she’s railing at Raya—like she’s right and we’re a couple of stupid kids—irks me enough to wade back in. Raya just saved her life, for fuck’s sake. She took on a man of unknown power without blinking; she could havedieddoing it—hells, I was starting to worry shehaddied, and not just because of what that would have meant for me. In distracting the DivineMeridian, Raya did something braver than most passive Shades ever will—the very least Akari could do is shut up for a second and listen.
“The power drain started in Isitar, and for months, the effects were localized,” I say, spelling the point clear. “They didn’t reach you because we stopped the shadows from collapsing. You’d have only felt something if we’d allowed the Church to win.”
“Well, isn’t that convenient? You have zero proof and we’re supposed to just believe you.”
What is impossible, on the other hand, is arguing with someone who refuses to hear.
“What you believe doesn’t change what happened.” I sigh, lacing my voice with indifference. “And after what the Meridian did to you and that typic, I think we can all agree that somethingishappening here.”
“Come on, Kiri, you saw what he’s doing with the blood,” Raya adds, chipping away at her friend’s resolve bit by bit. “You were there, on that awful table, and I know it scared you just as much as it scared me.”
Judging by the violent shiver that rakes Akari, I’d venture it scared her more than she’s willing to admit. That she’d prefer to keep masking the nightmare with fury, bury the fear.
“But that’s the part that makes even less sense than the rest of it.”
With a long exhale, the fight in her finally yields. “Doesn’t he realize the typics have already tried messing with our blood in every conceivable way? Eating it, drinking it, transfusing it . . . none of it works. You can’t assume a Shade’s color.”
On that, she is right; this is hardly the first time someone’s had this bright idea. The typics have spent their entire history trying to get at our magics; it was one of their favorite pastimes for hundreds of years. The only reason it doesn’t happen anymore is because it always,alwaysfails—and there’s so much literature attesting to that fact that they simply resolved to hate us, instead, chose to align themselves with religion. So the Meridian is either laughably oblivious, or after something else.
“What if it’s not about assuming your color . . .” I come at the problem a different way. “What Raya and I saw wasn’t a typic using magic, it was a typic in the Gray—and then after she’d shattered, the Meridian said, ‘how long did this one last?’, like keeping her there was the point.”
“And the room of shards we found suggests he’s done this before,” Raya adds, catching up to my thinking. “To a whole bunch of typics—probably at least as many as the kids that have gone missing.”
“That’s far more than the Shades he’s killed.” Akari’s arms cross with a challenge. “There were dozens of missing kids on those flyers, but so far, he’s only bled about ten Shades.”
Ten Shades?That number is so much higher than I expected. How has the Council turned a blind eye to so many deaths? Why are they just standing idly by while the Meridian gives the typics exactly what they’ve always craved: public displays of violence against magic?
“He could be spreading the blood around . . . transfusing multiple typics from one Shade?” I counter Akari’s objection. Which would make the girl we saw the last in a long line of tests, a casualty of trial and error.
