"No. I didn't."
He looks at me then, direct, without the performance of either cruelty or indifference that he usually layers over everything. "Good," he says, and starts up the stairs.
I follow him up into the main levels, where the academy is cold and still under its lockdown, and the walls hold the weightof what just happened in the floors below. Professor Aldric is somewhere in the response team's custody, and a wraith knew where we'd be, and someone built a tracking seal into an archive door that was meant to catch anyone looking at the breach maps.
The game is not just changing anymore. Someone is playing it openly now, and they want us to know they are.
I keep walking. My hand is steady around the weapon Thane gave me, and I don't put it down yet. Not until I'm somewhere with a door I can lock and a wall at my back.
Not yet.
Chapter 20
"You're still carrying it," Thane says.
We're two corridors above the lower archive, moving through the academy's main east wing, and he means the weapon he gave me. I'm still holding it. I realize this and don't put it down.
"So are you," I say.
He glances at his own hand, which is also still armed, and doesn't respond to that.
The lockdown has thinned the hallways to almost nothing. A few faculty members moving in pairs. A maintenance crew sweeping ash from a doorframe near the east stairwell. The overhead lights run cooler than usual, the magic that feeds them drawn down into the lower levels where the response team is still working through whatever the wraith left behind. The corridor is long and pale and quiet.
Thane's breathing has evened out. His ribs are still bothering him. I can tell from how he favors his right side when he thinks I'm not watching. He's not going to say so, and I'm not going to point it out again.
"The tracking seal was placed within the last forty-eight hours," I say. "The compound hadn't fully cured. Someone put it there after the lockdown was announced."
"Which means they knew the lockdown was coming before the announcement." Thane stops at the corridor junction, checking the east branch before we take it. "Or they caused it."
Neither option is comfortable to sit with. I don't try to make it comfortable.
We turn east. The hallway here is older, the stone a different shade, the ceiling a few inches lower. I know this section. It connects the training annexes to the main academic wing, a route I've taken enough times that my feet know the turns without input from my brain. Usually I make this walk alone.
Thane is beside me at a distance that isn't quite deliberate. Close enough that I'm aware of it.
"Your father's regards," I say. "You didn't explain that."
"There's nothing to explain."
"Thane."
"There's nothing useful to explain," he corrects. "My father has resources. He's used them before to communicate through channels I'd rather not think about." He pauses. "Using a wraith-possessed faculty member to deliver a message is a new approach."
"That's not a message. That's a threat."
"Yes." He doesn't elaborate. The word lands and stays there, and I let it.
We're halfway down the east corridor when it happens.
It starts as heat. Directed, concentrated, running along the left side of my chest like a wire pulled taut. I know what it is. I've felt similar currents before, threading under my skin when I've been in contact with power that my null nature decides to pull toward itself. This is different in degree. The wraith fight left channels activated in me, and now I'm standing in a narrow corridor witha dragon shifter whose fire I've been absorbing secondhand for the last two hours, and my body has decided this is an excellent moment to try to close a circuit.
I stop walking.
Thane stops half a step later, turning to look back at me.
"What?" he asks.
He's got a bruise forming along his jaw from where the possessed professor got a hand to him. His shirt is torn at the left shoulder. His eyes are still carrying the residual gold of combat-heightened fire, and the air around him is several degrees warmer than the corridor air, and I can feel the heat of it against my skin like standing too close to a hearth.
