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My hands close on it, cool and heavier than I remember. I reach into it with my magic the way I reached into Nell on the common room floor, and there's the rune, a line pulled tight inside the glass. I get hold of it and pull. A little of it gives and comes loose into my hands.
The wardens stand up all at once along the front row, and they aren't all Mors. I see styluses, but I also see a conductor come up in a Fulmen warden's fist, a ritual knife in a woman's hand, and a heavyset Tumult warden shaking a pair of dice in his loose fist.
"Hands off the sphere!" one of them shouts.
The Mors wardens raise their styluses together and say the same word, and Callum's shadows shred off us like wet paper. The screaming starts up in the benches. Every first-year and every parent in Nexus Courtyard can see us now—a girl with both hands on the testing sphere, beside a boy who's supposed to be severed and dying somewhere far away.
"Ev, get out!" Felix is shouting from the top of the east aisle. "They're coming down the west side, all of them—I can see it! Get out now!"
"Ren!" That's Atlas, right behind him. "Get her the fuck off that platform!"
A Mors warden grabs my arm, his fingers digging in above my elbow. He hauls me backward. "Let go of me!" I hang on to the sphere with my other hand.
Ren lunges for him and reaches for the warden's heart to slow it down, the way he's always been able to slow one heart across a room. His magic comes up out of the lines much too big, the way it does now, and instead of one heart he catches the whole front row.
The warden's grip goes slack on my arm, and so does every first-year on the bench behind him: a girl folds over with her hand pressed flat to her chest, a boy grabs the edge of the bench with both hands, and somewhere above us a mother starts screaming that her son can't breathe. Ren lets go so fast that I feel his shock through the bond.
"I didn't—shit, Ev, I didn't mean all of them—"
The kids on the bench gasp and sit up, and the warden's fingers dig back in above my elbow. Under my other hand, the piece of the rune I pulled loose starts winding itself tight again.
The air pressure drops so fast that my ears pop, and I brace for lightning.
It doesn't come. Wind comes instead, down the east aisle from the rim, where Atlas is standing with both arms flung out, and it's much too big, the way all his storms are now. It rips the welcome booklets out of people's hands all over the benches and sends them flapping up into the air, tears the sun hat off the toddler, and hits the platform flat and hard, full of grit and cut grass.
The warden goes off the edge into the front row with his robe blown up over his head. My hand tears off the sphere, the stand goes over, and the sphere hits the stone with a crack I can hear over the screaming. It rolls away across the platform, right to Catalina's feet, and it doesn't break.
Ren grabs my other arm and pulls me towards the east aisle. I fight him, digging my heels into the polished stone, because the sphere is right there and I had it in my hands. He doesn't let go, though. He gets an arm around my waist, lifts me clean off my feet, and starts up the steps. I kick and twist, but he just takes it and keeps climbing.
"Put me down! Ren, put me down, I had it!"
"I know you did." He's breathing hard against my hair. "I know. I'm still not putting you down."
A warden cuts across the row below us to head us off. It's the heavyset Tumult one, with his dice in his fist. At the top of the aisle Felix has a card out, and I see him flick it with a little snap of his wrist to turn the warden's luck. The warden's foot comes down on one of the welcome booklets Atlas's wind scattered over the steps. It slides out from under him, and he goes down flat on his back, his dice bouncing away down the stone, and the two wardens behind him trip right over him.
"Mind the litter!" Felix yells, high and wild. "Terrible odds on those steps! I'd have told you if you'd asked!"
Below us Callum shouts, "Go! I'll hold the aisle! Ren, go!"
He's on the step under us with his arms spread, and when the next warden points her stylus at us and says the word, his shadows rear up and swallow the spell whole. Through the bond I feel what it costs him: he feels every spell his shadows catch, and they keep tearing and re-forming.
And I feel Felix at the top of the aisle, so frightened that it comes down the thread into me in jolts. He's shouting what he sees, because there's no time to do anything else. "Door! A hand! Rain!" None of it makes sense to me yet.
At the top of the benches, Ren sets me down, and I turn around.
A warden walks across the platform and picks the sphere up off the stone. He rights the stand, sets the sphere back on it, then takes out a handkerchief and dusts it off. Catalina leans over to say something to the professor at the table beside her, and the professor taps the microphone, looks down at his clipboard, and calls the first name on his list.
A girl with a ponytail gets up from the front row, white-faced, and walks to the platform with the whole amphitheater watching her. She looks once at the stand, bent where it hit the stone, and at the grit Atlas's wind left across the platform, before she puts her hand on the sphere.
It flickers red.
I feel the rune go into her, the line pulling tight inside her and settling, and I'm too far away to do anything at all. She'll walk out of here happy, and it will start draining her today.
Down at the front, a warden calls the trust-fund row up together, out of turn. They put their hands on the sphere one after another, bored, and I watch the rune reach for each of them and let go, because their families' blood is in the spell. Then they leave through the west arch in a line, chatting. When I look back at the far side of the platform, Catalina isn't there anymore.
"Ev." Ren tugs at my arm. "They're coming."
The professor calls the next name, and a boy gets up from the second row and walks down to the platform.
