Her lips parted like she wanted to argue, like she couldn’t stand the idea of stopping.
I tightened my fingers around hers—one firm pulse of contact, both an anchor and a boundary. For a moment, I thought she’d fight me.
But then her shoulders sagged, exhaustion finally dragging her down.
Okay, she said.
Ember shifted on my shoulder, his flames banking low with the relief I refused to show.
I guided her to a chair in the corner and sat beside her. I kept my hand on her back, grounding and steadying.
She didn’t thank me, just leaned into me like she’d meant to all along, like I’d always been the one she’d look for when things broke open.
Keane appeared after the immediate crisis passed, looking tired but satisfied. All three students are stable. They’ll recover fully.
Good, Marigold breathed.
You saved them, Keane said. If you’d been thirty seconds slower…
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
Elio joined us, Echo’s scales shifting to relieved greens. The wellspring’s contained. Early-stage re-corruption, same pattern as Vienna and Prague. We’ll cleanse it properly tomorrow when everyone’s rested.
Re-corruption, Marigold said quietly. Our wellspring. It came back.
Which meant Tokyo and Vienna hadn’t been exceptions. Whatever we were cleaning, it was being fed from somewhere deeper.
And students tried to handle it because we weren’t here, I added. Not accusation. Just fact.
We couldn’t be everywhere. That was the whole point of the regional teams, the detection network, and the training protocols.
But clearly it wasn’t enough.
My phone buzzed before anyone could respond.
Parker: Tokyo again. Third site this week. Ten days since we last cleansed it.
Ten days.
Shorter than it should have been. Shorter than cleansing should have allowed.
I looked at the exhausted faces around me—Marigold barely upright, Keane swaying on his feet, Elio’s illusions flickering from magical exhaustion.
Tomorrow, I said. We deal with Tokyo tomorrow.
If we had anything left to give.
A second-year student—Garcia, one of the three we’d pulled back from corruption—appeared in the doorway. Her eyes found me.
Lord Raynoff. Formal. Uncertain. Can I…
Just Cyrus. I stood, moving away from the others to give them space. What do you need?
She glanced at Marigold before looking back to me. I wanted to apologize. We thought… the detection alarm was screaming, you were off campus, and we figured someone needed to act.
You did what any capable witch would do, I said. You saw a threat and responded.
But we made it worse.
