I pull the folded paper from my inner pocket. The seal signature Ryder sketched for me last night. I hold it up against the active wards on the archive door, comparing the patterns, looking for the overlay between the tracking seal and the original warding construction.
Behind me, something crashes. Thane hits the wall. The two reaper students move in to buy him time, pulling the professor's attention with a joint working that floods the corridor with cold silver light.
There. The tracking seal is woven into the second layer of the archive's ward matrix, sitting underneath the containment wards like a parasite. Which means if I break the containment first, the tracking seal activates and broadcasts. I need to take the tracking seal out without touching the containment layer.
Surgical. I've done worse under worse conditions. I press my palm flat against the ward surface, close my eyes, and reach the way I've been learning to reach, not drawing power in but pushing my null nature out against the specific frequency of the tracking seal.
The seal resists. It's designed to resist. Someone built this to withstand exactly this kind of interference.
Thane hits the wall again, harder, and this time he makes a sound that tells me he's hurt. I hear the reaper students scrambling, the maintenance worker has gotten themselves out of the passage somehow, and the wraith-thing is speaking again in that layered water-voice, but I have no attention to spare for words.
I push harder against the tracking seal. The null absorption isn't working cleanly because the seal is anchored to the stone itself, not to ambient magic, but there's a seam in the anchoring, a point where the architect of this trap ran out of care or ran out of time. I find it with my fingertips and I pull.
The tracking seal collapses inward with a sound like glass breaking in a register too high to fully hear. The containment wards on the archive door shift, destabilized by the removal of what was threaded through them, and then they fail too, sequentially, like a row of dominoes accepting the inevitable.
The door opens.
"Move," I say, and the reaper students move, pulling back through the archive door with the training of people who know what retreat looks like when it's correct. I go through after them.
Thane doesn't come through.
I turn around. He's still in the corridor, between me and the possessed professor, and the professor has him by the collar with both hands and Thane's feet are six inches off the floor and the fire running along his arms is stuttering, fighting the wraith's hold on the host body, not winning.
"Thane." My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. "Let it go. Come through the door."
"If it follows us into the archive, it accesses the Veil mapping in the sealed cases," he says, strained. "Every breach point the academy has charted for the last decade."
"If you die in this corridor, none of that matters."
The thing wearing Aldric's face smiles with his mouth, and it's the worst expression in the room. "The dragon prince," it says, through Aldric's teeth. "Your father sends his regards."
Whatever that does to Thane, it does it fast. The fire along his arms stops stuttering and goes full and violent, a controlled burn that the wraith's possession can't override because it's not ambient heat anymore, it's direct, focused, and the host body is a human body that does feel this even if the wraith doesn't.
Professor Aldric drops him. The wraith recalculates.
Thane hits the floor on his feet, barely, grabs the archive door frame, and throws himself through.
I slam the door behind him.
The new wards Fenn throws up on this side of the door are rough and fast and probably won't hold more than a few minutes, but a few minutes is all we need because the alarm cycling through the lower levels has changed pitch, and the new pitch means the faculty response team has reached the corridor on the other side.
Thane is leaning against the archive shelving, one hand pressed to his ribs. The fire is gone. He's breathing through his nose in the deliberate pattern of someone managing pain rather than reacting to it.
"Let me see," I say.
"I'm fine."
"You're breathing like someone's sitting on your chest. Let me see."
He gives me a look that probably works on most people. I hold out my hand and wait. He moves his hand from his ribs, and I press carefully along the left side, feeling for the give of broken bone versus the tighter resistance of bruising.
Bruising. Two ribs, maybe three. Not broken, but not comfortable either.
"You should have come through the door," I say.
"The Veil maps in those cases—"
"Are replaceable. You're not." The words come out before I've decided to say them, and they sit in the air between us with more weight than I intended. Thane goes very still under my hands. "Or at least," I add, "you're considerably harder to replace than charted breach data."
