"The anchor needs to come down before the suppression does more damage," Caspian says.
"Then we split. You and Ryder find the anchor. Thane comes with me." I glance at Ryder. "Don't argue."
"I wasn't going to," he says, and the fact that he means it does something brief and sharp to my chest. "Find your friend. Stay out of the main corridor until we have the anchor down. If the alarm fires—"
"I'll hear it."
"If the alarm fires," he says again, and his voice carries something underneath it that he doesn't dress up with extra words, "don't wait for me."
"Ryder—"
"I'll find you." He holds my gaze for one beat. "I always do."
He turns and moves with Caspian toward the east tower, the two of them falling into a pace that suggests this is not the first time they've approached a hostile building together, whatever else they've been to each other.
Thane touches my shoulder briefly. "Dormitory?"
"Dormitory," I confirm.
We run.
Chapter 25
"Sage!" I hit the dormitory door hard enough that it bounces off the wall. The common room is empty, chairs scattered, a mug shattered on the floor, tea spread across the stone in a dark brown puddle that's already gone cold. Malik is crouched in the corner by the window with Sage's head in his lap, and he looks up when I come through, and the relief on his face lasts exactly two seconds before he shakes his head.
"She's breathing," he says. "But the suppression barrier hit her magic and it's like watching a fire with no oxygen. It's still burning, but it's eating through her from the inside."
I cross the room and drop to my knees beside them. Sage's skin is gray. Not pale, not washed out. Gray, the color of ash, the color of something running out of whatever it runs on. Her hands are shaking in small rhythmic tremors and her eyes are closed and her lips are moving on words that don't make sound.
"How long?" I ask.
"She started declining about an hour after the barrier went up." Malik brushes her hair back from her forehead with the kind of careful that takes practice. "I tried warding the room butthe suppression overrides localized casting. I can't even get a basic stabilizing charm to hold."
"Ryder and Caspian are finding the anchor," I say. "When it comes down—"
"When it comes down, her magic is going to spike back in all at once." He meets my eyes. "Unstable magic flooding back after forced suppression. You understand what that can do."
I understand. I've seen what happens when pressure builds behind a sealed door and then the door comes off its hinges. "Can you slow the rebound?"
"Not without active casting." He tightens his jaw. "There's nothing I can do right now that doesn't require the very thing the barrier is blocking."
A sound comes through the walls then, not an alarm, something older than an alarm, a low resonant crack that runs through the stone beneath my knees and up through the soles of my boots. The kind of sound a foundation makes when something large hits it wrong.
"Great Hall," Malik says.
I'm already standing. "Stay with her. Do not leave her, no matter what you hear."
"Angelic—"
"Stay with her, Malik." I pull the door open. "I mean it."
The corridor outside is wrong in ways that have nothing to do with the suppression barrier. The torches on the wall are flickering in a wind that shouldn't exist inside stone walls. Three students are pressed against the far side of the hallway with their backs to the stone and their eyes on the far end of the corridor, and what they're looking at makes my stomach drop directly out of my body.
Wraiths. Not one. Not two. Dozens, pouring through the Great Hall entrance like smoke finding a crack, moving with that particular sliding grace that means they're not fully manifestedyet, still in the threshold between the Veil and the world. They're coming through fast, and there are too many of them, and the barrier around the grounds means there's nowhere for anyone inside to run.
I run toward them instead.
The Great Hall is a disaster. Tables overturned, chairs blown back, students pressed against the walls in clusters. The wraiths are converging on the center of the room where the Headmaster is standing, and he's not cowering, he's not running, he's standing with his arms slightly out from his sides and his expression is one of controlled satisfaction, and that is the detail that makes everything slot into place with a nauseating click.
