Ryder takes his hand off the pillar. "Don't look at me like that," he tells me.
"I'll look at you however I like when your life is currently fracturing." I turn to Caspian. "What's the solution? Complete the Thane bond?"
"Completing the Thane bond opens the sixty-second window. And during that sixty seconds, if the Architect reaches the integration point—"
"Then we don't complete it," I say. "We find another way to stabilize Ryder's bond."
"There isn't one."
Thane has been quiet at the back of our group. I turn to find him and he's already watching me, his dark eyes carrying the weight of someone who has been listening to a sentence he knewwas coming and has been bracing for it anyway. The gold hasn't flickered in his pupils. He's very still.
"Thane," I say.
"I heard." His voice is rough. He looks past me to where Ryder is standing with his hand back on the pillar, jaw clenched. Then back to me. "If we complete it and the Architect uses the window—"
"We stop them," I say.
"You don't know that."
"I know I'm not going to let Ryder die to avoid a risk." I take a step toward him. "And I know you're not either. Not anymore."
Something moves behind his eyes. He closes them briefly. When he opens them again, whatever he was going to say has changed into something else, and the something else is worse, and I see it land on his face like a verdict.
"You can't complete it," he says. His voice has gone to stone. "Not with me."
"Thane—"
"You are an abomination." He says it flat and loud and the words hit like a physical thing. Several nearby students turn to look. Thane's expression doesn't shift. "A null who has contaminated three houses. Whatever you think exists between us, it was proximity and crisis. That's all it was."
The hall has gone quiet around us in a way that has nothing to do with the wraith attack. It's the quiet of witnesses.
My face is very still. I'm good at still faces. I have been practicing still faces since I was old enough to understand that showing your hurt to people who want to cause it is the least useful thing you can do.
"Thane," Ryder says. His voice has an edge to it.
"Stay out of this, Ashford." Thane doesn't look at him. His eyes are on me and they're dark and flat and I'm looking for the gold and not finding it. "The dragon council has protocols for nullcontamination. If the bond completes, those protocols activate and they include execution." He takes a step back from me. "I am protecting this institution from a liability. That's all this is."
He sounds so certain. He sounds like the person he was when he burned my belongings, like the person he was in the early weeks when his cruelty had a specific practiced quality that I couldn't understand. He sounds like that person and I know, Iknow, that I saw something real in him this morning on that cold stone wall.
I know it. And it doesn't stop the crack from running straight through my chest.
"Right," I say. My voice comes out even. "Very clearly stated."
I turn and I walk away from him, and the students part to let me through because nobody in that hall wants to be between me and wherever I'm going, and I get to the far door and push through it and I'm in the corridor and I keep walking.
Behind me I hear Ryder say Thane's name again, sharp and furious, and I hear Caspian say something low and urgent, and I hear the hall door swing closed between us and all of it and I keep walking because if I stop moving I'm going to fall apart in a corridor at Nocturne Academy and I refuse to do that.
I make it to the stairwell. I press my back against the cold stone and I breathe. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. The way I learned when I was small and the world was already full of people who thought I was less than nothing and I had to survive it anyway.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the wall.
The door at the base of the stairwell opens.
Caspian comes through it. He's moving wrong, his right side slightly stiff, and the dark stain on his hand has crept up to his wrist. He stops when he sees me. He doesn't say anything immediately.
"He did it to protect you," Caspian says. "The dragon council's execution protocols are real. If the bond sealed in front of witnesses—"
"I know." My voice is steady. "I know that's why he did it."
