Page 102 of Shadows of the Condemned

I look at Ryder's hand, still trembling. I look at Caspian, the stain gone from his skin but his eyes still carrying the weight of what he did to his uncle in this hall an hour ago. I look at Sage's empty place against the wall and the mess the wraiths left in the stone and the Headmaster unconscious on the floor with the Architect's fingerprints all over him.

"I need you to stay," I say. "For whatever comes next. All of it."

Thane nods once, and the gold settles in his eyes, and he doesn't move away from me again.

At the far side of the hall, near the main entrance, a student I don't recognize bends down and picks something up from the floor. A journal, its cover worn dark with handling, no title visible from where I stand. The student opens it, reads one page, closes it again. Then they look up and across the hall, and their eyes find mine, and they smile with a smile I have never seen on anyone's face at Nocturne Academy before. Patient. Certain. Old.

They slip out through the main entrance before I can cross the room.

The journal is gone with them.

Ryder's hand closes around mine, steadying or being steadied, I'm not sure anymore which one of us is doing which. Caspian stands at my back. Thane is a wall of warmth at my side.

Sage is in the infirmary. The Architect is retreating, not defeated. The bonds are fractured and the cascade is running and whoever just walked out with that journal knows something about the prophecy that none of us do.

The hall is quiet. Outside, through the high windows, the morning sky is the color of iron, cold and overcast and entirely indifferent to everything that just happened inside these walls. The academy stands. We are still in it.

For now, that will have to be enough.