Just Elio. Real and flawed and choosing this anyway.
There was something here still, an awareness we weren’t naming, a space not quite filled yet.
Cyrus’s absence felt deliberate, like the room was waiting for him to claim it. I didn’t chase the thought. Just let it exist—acknowledged but unexamined.
We should probably get dressed, Keane said eventually, though he made no move to actually do so. Still have work to do.
This was temporary. The next site was already waiting.
Five more minutes, Marigold said, burrowing closer. The world can wait five more minutes.
Five more minutes, I agreed, my arm tightening around her.
14
Keane
WEEKS OF PREPARATION HAD TAUGHT us the rhythm of crisis management. Wisp flicked her tail once and settled at my feet as I cataloged the new normal. The four of us fell into patterns.
Mornings: Campus defense protocols. Marigold’s detection systems spread further. My portal network connected international wellsprings. Cyrus held fire drills with students who didn’t want to need them. Marigold ran corruption checks on faculty and staff between cleanses.
Afternoons: Wellspring work. We’d started cleansing the known sites—the seventeen Keane had mapped—working through them between Wickem duties and intelligence analysis. We understood the geometry but not the full shape. Every corrupted site we cleared felt like pulling a thread from something we couldn’t yet see the whole of.
Evenings: Training. We were learning to move as one unit instead of four separate powers, finding the spaces where our magic overlapped, reinforced, completed each other’s gaps.
Nights: The careful dance of four people learning to exist in the same space. Cyrus still kept his distance—close enough to be present, far enough to maintain the walls he needed. But he was there, every night, choosing to stay.
The interim council had quietly exempted us from regular coursework—an unspoken acknowledgment that defending wellsprings and hunting the master’s network mattered more than attending lectures. We were still enrolled, still technically students. We just weren’t in class.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was progress.
And then, on April fourth, Captain Parker called.
Keane. Her voice was clipped. San Francisco wellspring—it’s on your predicted geometry sites, and it’s being actively hit right now. But something else is in the tunnels. Corruption signature that’s fighting itself. Someone’s down there who doesn’t want to be doing what they’re doing.
I looked up to find Marigold, Elio, and Cyrus watching me.
Corruption in San Francisco, I said. Unstable signature. Could be early-stage corruption—someone still fighting it.
If they’re still fighting, they might talk, Elio said immediately, understanding the opportunity.
When do we leave? Marigold asked.
Now. I was already calculating portal logistics. We’ll need combined strength if this goes sideways.
Cyrus was on his feet, Ember flaring on his shoulder. Finally, something we can chase instead of just defend.
Twenty minutes later, we stepped through my portal into San Francisco’s magical underground beneath Alcatraz. The old network of tunnels and chambers predated the human prison above. The wellspring pulsed with wrong energy—corruption threaded through its currents like oil in water.
Captain Parker met us at the entrance to the sealed chambers, a guard team flanking her. Signature’s been moving through the old tunnels for the past hour. Whoever it is knows the layout. We’ve been trying to corner them, but…
But they’re using portals, I finished, recognizing the pattern. Portal mage. That’s why you can’t pin them down.
Can you track them? Parker asked.
I closed my eyes, feeling for the resonance of another portal mage’s work in the area. There… faint traces of recently collapsed portals, the signature familiar in the way all portal magic shared common frequencies.
Northeast tunnel system, I said. He’s circling back toward the old holding cells.
