I move toward the door. He doesn't get up from the desk.
"Fairmont," he says when I reach for the latch.
I turn back.
"The bond being open like this," he says. "It changes things. Not just between us. The way magic moves through you, the way the other bonds will develop, how visible you are to people who track that kind of signature." He meets my eyes. "Be careful."
I nod. Open the door. Step into the corridor that's still dim with early morning shadows.
Behind me, I hear him close the book. Feel through the bond that he's watching the door I just walked through, and that some part of him wants to follow me and some part of him knows that would make everything more complicated than it already is.
I don't look back.
The corridor is cold and quiet and mine again, and I have classes in three hours and a bond that's fully open and the taste of honesty still sharp in my mouth.
Time to figure out what comes next.
Chapter 18
"Three students gone," Sage says, dropping onto the bench beside me with her breakfast tray and the particular urgency she reserves for information she's been sitting on all morning. "Three. Since Tuesday."
"Gone how?" I ask, though I already have a guess and I don't like it.
"Gone like Mira Solis gone. Like there one minute and then just not." She cuts around a cluster of second-years clogging the main corridor, and I follow. "Two reapers and a witch. All three had been near the east wing breach points."
The east wing. Where the Veil runs thinnest. Where the wraith attacks have been clustering for the past two weeks like something is herding them toward a specific spot.
"The faculty is calling it voluntary withdrawal," Sage continues. "Three students choosing to leave mid-semester, separately, without telling anyone." She gives me a flat look. "Voluntarily."
"Right. Very voluntary." I shift my bag higher on my shoulder. "Has Malik heard anything from the reaper division?"
"Malik hears everything and tells me roughly forty percent of it, which is still more than most people have." She lowers her voice as we pass a professor moving in the opposite direction. "What he did say is that Thane's father sent a formal declaration to the headmaster's office yesterday. Full diplomatic language. Very polite. Essentially amounting to: send my son home or I make the academy's political situation considerably worse."
I think about Thane. His gold-flecked eyes and the way he moves through rooms like they owe him something. His mother was a null. Executed in a purge before he was old enough to understand what that meant. He has spent every year since making sure no one looks at him and thinks weakness.
"Is he leaving?" I ask.
"He hasn't yet." Sage slows at the junction where our paths split toward different afternoon classes. "But the dragon house is on edge. Like they're waiting for something to break."
She peels off toward the west stair, and I take the long corridor toward the library annex, and the academy wraps around me with its usual weight of cold stone and old magic and the particular brand of tension that has been building here for weeks. It's not background noise anymore. It lives in the walls.
I'm two turns from the annex door when Caspian steps out of a side passage and falls into pace beside me as if he'd been waiting, which he absolutely was.
"Fairmont," he says.
"Thorne," I say back, not slowing. "If this is about the east wing study sessions, I already told you I'm not stopping them."
"It's about me leaving tonight." He keeps pace easily, which is irritating given that his legs are longer and he's not even trying. "Family emergency."
That stops me. I turn to look at him. His red hair is slightly disordered, which for Caspian counts as visible distress. His dark green eyes watch me too carefully, cataloguing.
"My father sent word this morning. I don't have details yet." He pauses. "I need you to stay away from the breach points while I'm gone."
"And you're telling me this because?"
He's quiet for a beat. Around us, the corridor is emptying as students filter toward afternoon commitments. The stone arches cast long shadows across the floor.
"Because I need you to stay away from the breach points while I'm gone." His voice has lost its usual smooth armor. "The east wing. The lower passages near the crypt. All of it."
