Page 20 of The Truths We Hold

“Agreed.”

“They’re making us do it. All Light Nephilim students — mandatory participation in the ceremonial preparation. Two hours every evening this week, pouring light into corridors that don’t need cleaning because there’s nothing dirty about shadow.”

“Can you refuse?”

“I tried. Professor Eames said participation is required for all Light Nephilim students and that refusal would be noted in my assessment file.” She pauses. “My assessment file. The one that Raziel will review when he arrives.”

The pressure is elegant. Participate in the purification or have your resistance flagged for the being whose judgment determines your future. The system doesn’t need to threaten Sora directly. It just needs to make the cost of resistance visible enough that most people choose compliance.

“Do it,” I say. “Participate. Pour light into the corridors and smile and be the good Light Nephilim student the system wants you to be.”

“Ashley — “

“The purification doesn’t hurt me. My defenses hold. What hurts me is you being flagged before Raziel arrives. If he reviews your file and sees a note about resistance to purification rituals, he’ll watch you more closely. And if he watches you closely, he might see the connection between us.”

The warmth at the base of my chest — the connection the white light left behind in the courtyard. If Raziel detects it, he sees the geometry. The harbinger’s fingerprint.

“Fine,” Sora says. “I’ll purify. But I’m doing it at minimum power and I’m thinking about how stupid it is the entire time.”

“That’s the spirit.”

The smile we share is small and defiant and carries the warmth of two women navigating a hostile system by choosing their battles and saving their strength for the ones that matter.

Constantine finds me at lunch. Not in the courtyard — the courtyard is being decorated for the welcoming ceremony. Scaffolding and light fixtures and the Hunter operatives redeployed to ceremonial positions that are technically honor guards and practically surveillance posts. He finds me in the library stacks, the narrow corridors between bookshelves where the purification hasn’t reached because the books absorb light energy and the librarian — a dark Nephilim woman named Dr. Mora who has been quietly shelving banned texts in the restricted section for twenty years — has made it clear that no purification will be performed in her domain.

The stacks smell like old paper and binding glue and the faint, comforting mustiness of knowledge that has been sitting on shelves long enough to become part of the building’s atmosphere.

“There’s a mandatory inspection,” Constantine says. No preamble. His voice carrying the flat quality that means he’s delivering bad news and wants to get through it before the emotions catch up. “During the welcoming ceremony. Raziel performs a surface scan of the entire student body. Not individual assessments — a group reading. He opens his light in the great hall and reads every shadow in the room simultaneously.”

The floor drops out of my stomach.

My shadows contract so sharply that three books on the shelf behind me rattle — the living darkness pulling inward with the panic response I’ve been training myself to control for months. The response that still breaks through when the fear is sudden enough to bypass the training.

“Simultaneously,” I say. My voice steady. My shadows are not.

“Every shadow. Every student. The group scan is ceremonial — how the Judge establishes his awareness of the shadow population before individual assessments begin. He reads the broad picture. Gets a sense of the community’s shadow health. Identifies any signatures that warrant closer examination.”

“And my signature will warrant closer examination because my shadows are alive and my wings are bound and the crimson is hiding beneath a vampire skin and a fire blend that have never been tested against his actual light.”

“Yes.”

I lean against the bookshelf. The wood pressing against my back. The wing harness a ridge of pressure between my shoulder blades — the constant reminder that even my body’s natural state has been locked down for this.

“When?” I ask.

“Friday evening. Three days from now.”

Three days. Seventy-two hours between this moment and the moment Raziel’s light enters the great hall and washes over three hundred students’ shadows and finds, somewhere in the tide of ordinary darkness, my signature. Every defense layered. Every secret compressed. The entire elaborate structure of protection that three people spent weeks building about to face the one test it was built for.

I think about Thessalonica. Three hundred shadows opening in an hour. The wanting. The genuine, instinctive love shadows felt for Raziel’s light — the invitation Bael described with the raw pain of a man reliving the worst day of his existence. His own ancient shadows trying to open. His students’ shadows confessing every secret he had given them in trust. Mareth with her shadow-weave. Daran with his shadow-walk. Eleven people he taught personally, destroyed by knowledge their own darkness volunteered.

My shadows are more powerful than those three hundred wielders’. More intelligent. More alive. Which means the wanting will be worse. My living darkness will not just feel the invitation to open — it will understand it. Will evaluate it with the independent intelligence that makes my shadows what they are. Will make a choice about whether to comply.

And I have to trust that the choice will be mine and not the shadows’.

“The group scan is less penetrating than the individual assessment,” Constantine says. Reading my fear accurately and offering the most useful information first — the researcher’s instinct, even now. “He’s reading three hundred shadows at once. The resolution is lower. He gets the broad picture, not the fine detail. Your defenses — all of them, layered — should reduce your signature to background noise in a room full of shadows.”

“Should.”