I tapped the page. Their magic integrates with the master’s. The corruption weaves through them like gold thread in silk. You can’t pull one without unraveling both.
He went still. Ember flared.
So what? She’s beyond saving?
Not beyond. But extraction requires more than brute force, I said. And even if we caught her somewhere solid, it would take all four of us to break her free. And maybe not even then. She’s not like Keane. She’s… inhabited.
Cyrus looked like he wanted to punch something. Possibly me.
I waited.
He turned away instead, stalking to the window. He’s not holding her. He’s using her.
She’s not bait, I said quietly. She’s a lens. He’s watching how we react. What we do. What we leave behind.
I let the illusion sharpen, zeroing in on the compound. Three figures moved in formation in the courtyard with Raven at the center, and two more stood at the perimeter, not moving. Observing. Taking notes.
I knew their posture before I knew their faces.
My mother always stood with her weight slightly back, like she was preparing to exit a room she’d already assessed. My father held his hands clasped behind him, the posture of a man who’d learned to look patient while cataloguing everything he saw. They hadn’t changed. That was the thing that landed strangely. They looked exactly the same, standing twenty meters from a girl they’d helped corrupt, watching her move through drills like she was data.
Echo went very still on my shoulder.
I closed the illusion back to its wider angle, steadied my breathing and filed it.
He’s not corrupting them for chaos, I said. He’s organizing them.
Cyrus stepped forward, his eyes narrowed. Tactical units.
I nodded.
Training. Coordinated responses. Movement drills.
He swore under his breath.
I opened another folder—thinner but no less important. My mother had written in a narrow, looping hand, detailing intelligence diagrams and compound layouts.
The same hand. The same precise, slanted letters she’d used for birthday cards and performance critiques and the notes she’d leave when she traveled, which was often. I’d spent years learning to read her handwriting before I’d learned to read her.
I set that thought down somewhere I wouldn’t look at it.
This was one of the council’s training compounds before, I said. My parents helped design its magical infrastructure, and now it’s been repurposed.
He was quiet for a long moment.
So we learned something.
I looked at him. Yes.
He crossed his arms. But we don’t have her.
Not yet.
He turned on me. So what now? We go home? Tail tucked?
I felt it then—that old pull, the desire to shape this, to soften the edges, edit the truth, and craft something he could absorb more easily.
The script wrote itself in my head. We wait for a better moment. She’ll be fine until then. Pretty lies would keep him moving forward without the weight of hard choices.
