"I know." I watch the breach. "None of this is a small thing. That's the problem."
Malik finishes his circuit and comes back to us, the recording crystal tucked safely in his pocket. "Enough to take back. The sigil work on the anchor stones matches some of what I've seen in advanced ward theory texts, but modified. Someone who knew what they were doing built this." He looks at me. "Someone academic."
"The level six report went to a different administrator," I say. "Because by then whoever built this didn't want to sign off on it themselves. Too close to completion. Too dangerous to put their name on."
"Or they wanted someone else blamed for it," Sage says.
That possibility slots into place with a quiet, ugly certainty.
The Council voted to contain me tonight. The Veil breaches are getting worse. Someone on campus built the infrastructure to let wraiths in, and signed the early incident reports with their own name because at that stage, a level two breach looked like a natural occurrence that a concerned administrator was dutifully documenting. By level six, the documentation stopped being useful and started being evidence.
"We go back," I say. "With what Malik recorded. We don't go through the Council. We go directly to Ryder."
"You said you weren't thinking about him," Sage says.
"I changed my mind." I step back from the quarry edge. "He's not the Council. He's been investigating wraith attacksindependently. If anyone is going to look at this evidence without a political agenda, it's him." I pause. "And if I'm going to fight the containment order, I need someone who has standing to present evidence. I don't. He does."
Malik nods once. "Back through the tree line. Same route."
We go.
The academy's lights are visible through the trees before we reach the field, the upper towers lit against the sky. I keep my pace even and my mind on the quarry, on the anchor stones and the wrong light and the Headmaster's signatures on reports he should never have personally filed. On what it means that someone built a door for wraiths and then sat in a position of authority while students got hurt walking through the consequences.
My null current is still humming with what it picked up from the breach, a faint residual charge that will take an hour or two to clear. I don't reach for it. I let it sit.
We're fifty yards from the groundskeeper's gate when Sage grabs my arm.
"Someone's at the gate," she says.
I look. There's a figure at the iron gate, standing on the campus side, not moving. Tall. Still. The death magic registers before anything else, cold and precise, the specific frequency I could pick out of a crowd without trying.
Ryder.
He's standing at the gate with his arms at his sides and his eyes already on us, watching us approach for at least the last thirty seconds. His expression is controlled and therefore unreadable, and the bond is running flat and quiet, no fury, no ice, just present.
We stop in front of the gate. He looks at me through the iron bars for a moment, then he reaches over and pushes the gate open from his side.
"The breach site," he says. Not a question.
"Yes." I walk through the gate. "Malik has recordings. The anchor stones are artificial, Ryder. Someone built it. And the Headmaster signed the early patrol reports personally."
A pause. The gate swings closed behind Sage and Malik.
"I know," Ryder says.
I stare at him. "You know."
"I've been building that file for three weeks." His eyes stay on mine. "I was waiting for one more piece of evidence before I could take it to anyone above the Council. Malik's recording may be it." He glances at Malik. "I'll need it transferred to a formal documentation matrix tonight."
"Done," Malik says.
The four of us stand at the academy gate in the cold dark, and I look at Ryder, and the bond runs between us steady and undemanding, and I think about Council Hall and the bench and Eveline walking out of the gallery and his voice saying the dissolution on record like it was a fact he'd already decided before he walked in the door.
"The containment order," I say.
"Is not going to be executed." His voice is flat. "Not if the evidence holds."
"And if it doesn't?"
