Page 8 of The Witch They Fear

Balcour's pen stops. For the first time since I walked in, he looks at me. His eyes are grey and unimpressed.

"For security purposes, yes."

"How am I supposed to trust someone I'm not even allowed to understand?"

"Trust," Balcour says, returning to his notes, "is not a requirement of your enrollment. Compliance is."

The silence that follows has weight. Leyonna watches me with an open expression. Balcour's pen resumes its scratching.

Aamon says nothing. His arms are still crossed. His face is still unreadable. But his fingers tighten against his bicep—a brief flex, so quick I almost miss it. Then his hand relaxes.

"Which brings us," Balcour says, "to the matter of the fail-safe device."

My hand goes to the back of my neck. Involuntary. I drop it.

"The device was implanted prior to Miss Dellaby's departure from the Briarwood facility and is currently dormant." He pulls something from the interior pocket of his jacket—a thin black remote, the size of a pen, with a single recessed button and a biometric scanner along one side. It looks like nothing. It looks like a stylus for a tablet.

It's the thing that can shut me down from across a room.

"The fail-safe must be keyed to its designated operator before Miss Dellaby's enrollment is considered active."

He holds the remote out toward Aamon.

Something in my chest tightens. I watch Aamon uncross his arms—a fluid, unhurried motion—and step away from the window. Three strides and he's standing beside Balcour, and even that is information: the way he moves, the way the room rearranges itself around him without him asking it to. Leyonna shifts in her chair. Balcour angles his body slightly away. They're giving him space the way you give space to something heavy.

Aamon takes the remote. Presses his thumb against the biometric strip. The device emits a soft chime—a sound I feel more than hear, because the fail-safe in my neck answers. A cold pulse that runs from the base of my skull down through my spine and wraps around the thing behind my sternum, and I understand with sudden, nauseating clarity that the fist I felt during implantation just found its owner.

He's holding the leash now. He could squeeze.

"Standard procedure requires a brief activation to confirm the link is functional," Balcour says. He's already making a note. "Professor, whenever you're ready. Miss Dellaby—" He looks at me, and I swear I see something like courtesy in his expression, thin and professional and utterly insufficient. "I'll count you in. On three. One—"

Aamon presses the button.

The world ends.

Not gradually. Not building. One second I'm sitting in a leather chair with my hands on the armrests and my jaw clenched and my eyes on Balcour's mouth forming the word one, and the next—

White.

Not the white of the facility walls. A deeper white. The white of nothing, of absence, of every sensation being ripped out by the root. My magic doesn't fade—it's severed. The warm, constant hum behind my sternum that has been there for as long as I can remember, even through the dampeners, even through twelve years of chemical suppression—gone. Cut clean. Like a hand plunged into my chest and ripped out the thing that makes me me.

My body goes rigid. Every muscle locked, every joint frozen, my spine a steel rod jammed into the back of the chair. My fingers claw into the armrests. I can feel that—barely. Distantly. Like feeling something through ten feet of water.

Sound cuts out. Then smell. Then the details of the room—the bookshelves smearing sideways, the window light blurring, Leyonna's face dissolving into a pale shape.

My mouth tastes like metal. The facility. The facility is here, it found me, the flatness and the nothing and the years of lying still while the world happened without me—

I'm sliding. The rigid lock of my muscles gives way to something worse—a total, boneless collapse, my body folding forward, hips sliding toward the edge of the chair. I can't stop it. I can't catch myself. I can't feel my hands enough to grip.

Then it stops.

Everything slams back. Sound first—Balcour's voice, mid-sentence, "—confirm the link is functional and responsive, noting a point-four-second activation for the record—" and the scratch of his pen and the crackle of the fire and my own breathing, which is too fast, too ragged, too loud in a room where no one else seems to be breathing at all.

I'm half off the chair. My fingers are white on the armrests. There's a taste in my mouth like copper and battery acid, and my vision is still resolving—the bookshelves reassembling, the window light solidifying, Leyonna's face coming back into focus with an expression of polite neutrality that makes me want to scream.

Balcour is writing.

He's writing. I just had my magic excruciatingly ripped out of my body and he's documenting the response time.