My heart rate doesn’t spike.
My hands don’t shake.
The Command sits in my chest with the warm, settled weight of a tool that fits perfectly in the hand and does exactly what it’s designed to do.
Eight months ago I would have thrown up after doing that to someone.
Six months ago I would have lain awake replaying it.
Three months ago I would have felt a twinge — small, manageable, the ghost of a conscience that used to be louder.
Tonight I check the corridor, confirm it’s clear, and keep walking.
The progression should scare me.
Some distant, academic part of my brain knows it should.
The part that remembers the first time I Commanded someone — the patrol guard, the sick horror of feeling someone else’s will bend under mine — and how I told myself I’d only do it when there was no other choice.
The part that watched “no other choice” gradually expand to include every situation where Command was easier than the alternative.
But the fear of what I’m becoming is a luxury and tonight I can’t afford luxuries because Petra was here for twenty minutes before I noticed her.
Twenty minutes of following shadow traces through the academy with a crystal that was recording everything it detected.
Twenty minutes of evidence gathered by a student who won’t remember gathering it but whose crystal doesn’t have a memory to erase.
I need to get to the sanctuary. I need to tell Bael. I need to —
My shadows scream.
Not literally.
The spy network — the web of living darkness threaded through the building — sends a burst of information so intense it feels like a shout inside my skull.
Multiple light signatures moving through the east wing.
Fast. Coordinated.
Not the casual movement of students heading to their rooms after curfew. Not the measured pace of faculty on evening rounds.
This is purposeful. This is a hunting party.
I press against the corridor wall and let the spy network feed me details.
Seven signatures.
The front three burn bright — Light Nephilim, their auras blazing with the aggressive brilliance of people using their abilities at full strength rather than banking them for daily life.
Behind them, two signatures that carry the mixed quality of faculty members with combat training.
And behind the faculty, two more figures.
One is Elara.
I recognize her signature the way you recognize a voice you’ve been listening for — the specific, brilliant certainty of her light aura carrying the focused intensity of a woman who has been waiting for this moment since September.
The other makes my shadows recoil.
