Felix's eyes find mine across the office for half a second. Whatever the odds on this are, he isn't sharing them, which means they aren't good.
"No unsanctioned gathering of any of you together until we understand better what this strange... phenomenon between you has done to your magics. You are all on academic probation for the foreseeable future, and will report only to classes, your dorm rooms, and the cafeteria, where you will be watched closely to ensure no unapproved fraternization occurs." She lets it settle over us like dust drifting down through the sunlight."You must understand, what's happened to you has been very... unprecedented. So you'll be on a very tight academic schedule from here on out. I do hope the summer was restful."
I keep my face very still.Restful.We slept in shifts. We paid cash for everything. Felix flinched at headlights for a month, and Atlas woke most nights with the air crackling off his hands.
The worst part—the part I keep choking on when I sit with it too long—is that we built this cage ourselves. Callum made the call from a pay phone outside Phoenix while I stood close enough to watch his knuckles whiten around the receiver, his mother's voice coming down the line like ice wrapped in silk. Whatever he traded her for these terms, whatever piece of himself he signed over to buy them, this was the best deal that was ever going to exist. Best isn't the same as good. But the other option was more running, and we ran all summer, until somewhere outside Flagstaff the road just gave out underneath us.
One hour a day in the same room is better than nothing.
I've made optimism my own personal brand. I'm not about to stop now.
Then her office empties us out onto the front steps, and they begin to go in different directions from me, which is so much worse than I expected. I thought I was ready for this, that I'd braced for it. But there is no bracing for being torn apart from four people you'd burn the world down to save. No preparing for each of them walking away in a different direction, when so recently the only direction they walked was towards you. The threads pull tight in my chest, all four at once, like they already know.
Callum goes first. He stops at the base of the steps—which I don't expect, because Callum isn't the sentimental type—and doesn't turn around.
"Miss Grey."
His formality is armor. I know what lives underneath it now. "Callum."
A beat. The thread of the bond between us feels cold and even, with this morning's rage still glowing somewhere at the bottom of it. Then he's moving, the Frost King rebuilding himself one shadow at a time.
Atlas is next, and he looks at me with heat in his eyes, something he started doing somewhere around Oklahoma. His thread flares warm in my chest half a second before he opens his mouth.
"Tomorrow," he says. "Don't—" His jaw works. He tries again, lower. "Just be there."
"I'll be there."
He walks east with his shoulders squared like he's bracing for the weather, though usually he is the weather, and the warmth goes out of the day all at once.
Ren doesn't look back. I used to think that he was cold and uncaring. But the truth is, he doesn't need to look back: he can feel exactly where I am without turning around, the same way he can feel my heartbeat across a room. Him not looking at me is its own kind of promise:you aren't going anywhere I can't find.My chest tightens anyway. Somewhere down the thread between us, something tightens back, there and gone before the distance smooths it flat.
Felix goes last, because he has a flair for the dramatic. He stops where the others didn't quite, tips his head back at me, and produces a card from somewhere it wasn't.
"Nine AM tomorrow. Don't be late."
"I'm never late."
"You're always a little late." He's already turning. "It's one of the things that makes you predictably unpredictable."
The card flicks once between his fingers, a last bright piece of motion, and then he rounds the corner, and then he's gone.
I make myself move. Down the office steps and across the green, the long way to Callister House because Nyxhaven doesn't believe in short ones—Catalina's building at one end of the quad and my new dorm at the other, all that manicured distance strung out between them like she measured it personally. Maybe she did.
The threads pay out behind me as I walk, four lines unspooling toward four sets of footsteps already gone in four directions. I keep to the side of the path where the afternoon light doesn't catch the windows, the habit the summer drilled into me. There's no mark on the back of my hand to burn if I wander. Just the eyes I can't see, and the certainty that they're watching anyway.
Then I'm standing on the steps of Callister House by myself.
The bond pulls taut. It doesn't hurt the way distance used to hurt, before Cyrus and his magic helped us reforge the bond. It just aches, low and steady.
Ten seconds. I give myself exactly ten.
Then I pick up my bag and turn around, and the front door swings open before my key has finished turning.
The cold reaches me before the door is all the way open—a stone cold, older than weather, the kind that's been in these walls so long it stopped being temperature and started being the house's state of being. Then the smell finds me: wood polish laid over something underneath that quit being a smell a century ago and became the plaster itself. Three stories of dark wood and aged plaster climb away from me, a staircase curving right?—
—and at the top of the first landing, on a brass stand, head cocked three degrees past anywhere a living bird would hold it: a taxidermied raven.
Glass eyes. Already turned toward the door. Already on my face, like somebody gave it my arrival time.
