She looks like what she is.
The binding team surrounds her.
Four grey coats in a semicircle, consecrated silver drawn, the professional formation of people who have been trained to contain exactly this kind of target.
Behind them: six additional Hunters. Harlan. Voss, brought back from her recall, standing at the edge of the courtyard with her equipment bag and her glasses and the expression of a woman who has just seen the thing she’s been looking for and doesn’t look triumphant.
She looks terrified.
Ashley sees me.
Across the courtyard — thirty feet of stone between us, blocked by the binding team’s formation.
Her eyes find mine with the specific intensity of a woman who is standing in the open for the first time since her power woke up and who is looking for the one person she trusts to tell her whether what she’s doing is courage or suicide.
I walk toward her.
The thirty feet between us is the longest distance I’ve ever crossed.
Not because of the binding team — though they are four trained killers with consecrated silver who are watching me approach their containment formation with the specific attention of professionals assessing whether they need to add a second target to their operation.
Because of what the crossing means.
Every step is a choice.
Every foot of courtyard stone I cover takes me further from the institution and closer to the woman and there is a line somewhere in those thirty feet — invisible, unmarked, the kind of line that only exists in the mind of the person crossing it — where the crossing becomes irreversible.
I crossed that line months ago.
But the body needs to catch up with the decision, and the body is doing it now — walking across a courtyard in shirtsleeves with fire on my arms and no coat and no rank and no institutional identity to fall back on if this goes wrong.
“Professor Ashworth.” Harlan’s voice. Carrying the formal authority of a director addressing a subordinate. “Stand down. This situation is under ADU jurisdiction. You are ordered to withdraw to the faculty safe zone immediately.”
I keep walking.
“Constantine.” Harlan again. Sharper.
The formal address replaced by the personal — the specific escalation of a superior who knows the subordinate well enough to use his first name and is using it as a warning.
“This is a direct order. Stand down.”
I reach the binding team’s formation.
The operative on the left — a woman with short dark hair and consecrated silver blades in both hands — shifts her stance to block my path.
Her eyes read the fire on my arms and I see the calculation behind them: threat assessment, force evaluation, the trained instinct of someone deciding whether the man in front of her is an obstacle or a target.
“Move,” I say.
She doesn’t move.
The fire erupts.
Not at her — past her.
A wall of flame that rises from the courtyard stone in a line between the binding team and Ashley, eight feet tall and burning with an intensity that makes the air shimmer and the consecrated silver glow in the operatives’ hands.
The wall isn’t a weapon.
