Aldric's expression finally cracks, slightly. "Miss Fairmont, non-compliance is not..."
"A choice I'm making, yes. Write it down." I look at each Council member in turn, taking my time. "And when the Veil breaches continue after you've locked me up, write that down too."
The vote happens anyway. Six to three, exactly as Sage said. Containment, pending investigation, effective at midnight.
I walk out of Council Hall with my back straight and my hands steady, and I don't run until I'm in the corridor and the doors have closed behind me.
Sage is waiting at the junction thirty feet down the hall. Malik is beside her, hands in his pockets, the shadow magic he carries running low and quiet around his shoulders like a second coat.
"Six to three," I say.
"I know." Sage is already moving, angling toward the east corridor. "Malik has the route mapped. There's a gap in the ward perimeter at the old groundskeeper's gate, the one they stopped maintaining after the east wing renovation. It's been running on a thirty-minute cycle since the lockdown started drawing power away from perimeter maintenance." She glances at me. "We have a window in about forty minutes."
"The Veil breach sites," I say. "You have the locations?"
"Charted and cross-referenced against the wraith attack reports." She pulls a folded paper from her jacket. "Three clusters. The closest one is six miles east of campus, in the old quarry district."
Malik checks the corridor behind us. "We need to move before the midnight order gets to the campus security team. Once they have written authorization, the ward gap won't matter."
We move.
The academy's east wing at this hour is quiet in the aftermath way, the post-crisis stillness of a building that has been throughtoo much recently and hasn't finished processing it. Lights at half strength. Faculty moving in pairs. The smell of ward compound still lingering near the lower stairwells where the response team worked through the night.
I follow Sage and Malik through the maintenance corridor behind the old groundskeeper's station, and I don't let myself think about what I'm leaving behind. Not Ryder standing at the Council bench, not the look on his face when Aldric read the vote. Not Thane's small nod, which cost him everything, I know it did, standing in that chamber when his father's name was in the air. Not Caspian's red cheek and his blank, unreadable eyes.
Especially not Caspian's eyes.
The groundskeeper's gate is exactly what Sage described: old iron, worn hinges, a ward anchor that flickers on its cycle like a candle in a draft. Malik watches it for two full minutes, tracking the pattern, and then he holds up his hand and we go through in the gap between pulses.
The air on the other side of the gate is colder. Open air instead of the academy's climate-controlled corridors, and the night is clear and very dark, and the campus wards hum behind us as we put distance between ourselves and the perimeter.
Sage pulls out the map. "East," she says. "Follow the road until the junction, then cut through the fields. The quarry district is past the tree line."
We walk. The three of us, through the dark, with a folded map and six miles between us and the nearest documented Veil breach, and the Council's vote sitting in my chest like a coal I haven't decided what to do with yet.
"He's going to know you're gone within the hour," Sage says. She means Ryder. She doesn't need to specify.
"Yes."
"Are you going to think about what he did in there?"
"No."
"Angelic..."
"He broke his engagement," I say. "In a Council session. In front of witnesses. I'm aware. I'm not thinking about it right now." I keep walking. "I'll think about it when we're not six miles from a Veil breach with a containment order running behind us."
Sage lets it go. She knows when to let things go. It's what I value most about her.
Malik drops back slightly, keeping a few feet of distance, his shadow magic spreading quietly around our path in a way that diffuses our tracks. I watch him do it without asking. He does it without explaining. That's the working relationship we've built over the past weeks, the three of us, and it functions.
The road runs east through open farmland that has gone winter-bare, stubble fields stretching to the tree line, the sky overhead enormous and dark and salted with stars. I've been so deep inside the academy's walls for so long that I forgot what open sky looks like. It's almost disorienting, the sheer size of it.
"Tell me what the breach reports say about the quarry site," I say to Sage.
She unfolds the map again, reading as she walks. "First incident was five weeks ago. A patrol team reported Veil thinning at the eastern quarry wall, rated a level two at the time. Two weeks later, a second team reported a level four in the same location, plus residual wraith signatures. The most recent report is eight days old." She pauses. "Rated level six, with notation that the anchor point appears to be artificial."
"Artificial," Malik says. "Someone built it."
