Page 87 of The Truths We Hold

She reads it. I watch her read it. She holds it the way she holds an exam sheet, both hands, elbows in, her thumb worrying the bottom corner, and I have known her long enough to see the moment she stops reading like a student and starts reading like a witness. Her shoulders come up. Her breathing changes. I watch her eyes move down the page and stop, and move again, and stop, and I feel the exact moment the words land because her light does something I have never felt it do.

It goes hot.

Not bright. Hot — the way a stove ring goes from cold iron to something that will take the skin off your palm, and the white-light bond between us carries the heat directly into my shadow, and my shadow, which has spent this entire semester learning that light means purification and purification means pain, does not recoil from it at all. It leans in.

“Permanent neutralization,” Sora says.

“Yes.”

“Of all crimson shadows.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a subclause.” Her voice has gone flat and careful, which is what her voice does instead of shaking. “Section four. It says associated bonds and supporting personnel.”

“I know.”

“That’s Bael. That’s Constantine. That’s the Judge. That’s—” She stops. Her fingers tighten on the page. “That’s a list of people they’re allowed to kill for standing next to you, and they wrote it on letterhead. They typed it. Somebody sat at a desk and formatted this.”

“Sora—”

“No.” She stands up. She is five foot two and she is standing in my dormitory holding a genocide order in her fist, and her light has climbed to a frequency that is making the ward glass in my window sing. “No, I’m allowed to be angry about this. I have been quiet about this since September. I sat in Comparative Doctrine and listened to a lecturer explain that Dark Nephilim shadow-response is a containment problem and I wrote it down in my notes because it was going to be on the exam. I wrote it down.”

“You were fourteen.”

“I was fifteen and I knew it was wrong and I wrote it down anyway.” Her hand comes up to her mouth and then drops again, and the fury underneath it is so clean and so unfamiliar on her face that for a moment I do not recognize my best friend. “The division is stupid. I’ve been saying it since September. Now I get to say it to the people who built it.”

The room goes very quiet.

I feel the shape of what she has just offered before either of us says it out loud, and the shape is enormous, and the shape is dangerous, and the shape is the exact thing I came back here to ask her for and have spent eleven hours failing to figure out how to say.

“Sora.”

“Say it.”

“The hearing is in thirty-six hours.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “Raziel filed under the founding statute, which means the gallery is open, which means there are going to be fifty institutional representatives in that chamber on top of the twelve council seats. Every branch. Every faction. Everyone who has ever signed off on a purification order is going to be sitting in that room.”

“Good.”

“They’re going to hear the files. They’re going to hear Kai. They’re going to feel the dawn color.” I make myself finish it. “And they need to see the fourth bond.”

She does not move.

“You’ve been hidden,” I say. “Since the blood circle, since before it — Bael kept your name out of every report, Raziel scrubbed you from the assessment record, and the council does not know you exist inside this. That was on purpose. That was protection. If you testify, that protection is gone the second you open your mouth. The final solution covers supporting personnel. You’d be a target.”

I make myself hold her eyes while I say it, because the coward’s version of this conversation is the one where I let her volunteer without ever naming the price. I have watched what the institution does to people it decides are adjacent to a problem. I watched it happen to a mortal man who is currently sitting on a granite floor three hundred feet below us, sorting nine centuries of paperwork with a pencil behind his ear, because loving me cost him a career and half his blood.

“Then I’m a target who tells the truth.” She says it immediately, without a breath in front of it, the way you say something you decided a long time ago and have only been waiting to be asked. “That’s better than a bystander who stays safe.”

“I need you to actually think about⁠—”

“Ashley.” She crosses the room. She takes both of my hands, and her light floods the contact, and the bond between us goes so bright that my shadow throws itself up the wall in a shape with wings. “I walked through a battlefield to take your hand. You think a letter is going to stop me?”

There is nothing to say to that.

There has never been anything to say to that.

We go down to the sanctuary together at half past eleven, because none of us are going to sleep and pretending otherwise is a waste of the last night.