Page 92 of The Truths We Hold

“North gate,” someone says in the gallery. “That was the north gate⁠—”

And the chamber comes apart.

Not the room. The room holds; it was built by beings who assumed the world would eventually try to get in. It’s the body that comes apart, the twelve seats and the fifty-one representatives and the clerk with his dead handset, two hundred years of procedural composure evaporating in about four seconds. A doctrine officer goes over the back of his own bench. Three of the purification service reach the side aisle at the same time and none of them will yield, and they jam there, shoulder to shoulder, a bottleneck of institutional dignity in a doorway.

The dawn color is still up. That’s the strange thing. I’m still holding it, warm and open across the well of the chamber, because nobody has told me to stop and my hands haven’t caught up with my head yet, and for a moment I’m standing on a platform pouring the softest thing I have ever made into a room full of people running away.

Then the bonds hit me all at once.

Constantine first, because Constantine is always first — the banked hearth flaring up hard and fast into something with edges, and behind the flare a rush of data that arrives in my chest as sensation instead of words. Heat. Motion. Stone under his palm. The specific sick jolt of a man going from sitting to sprinting in one movement, and under it, threaded through it, a direction. East. He’s going east. The east wing at this hour is second-year tutorials.

Bael second, and Bael is not a flare. Bael is a drop. The deep water going down and down, the ancient dark of him sinking into the foundation the way a hand sinks into loose earth, and I feel the academy’s stone answer him from underneath — a low geological groan that has nothing to do with the explosions, that runs from the sanctuary up through the footings and out along the buried spine of the campus, and I understand with absolute clarity that six hundred years of vampire is currently getting into the building’s bones.

It’s the coldest thing I have ever felt come down a bond. Not cruel. Just old. Whatever is happening on the surface of this campus, something underneath it has woken up and decided the campus belongs to him now, and I am married to it and it still raises the hair on my arms.

And Raziel third, and Raziel is close, because Raziel is ten feet away with his hand out to stop a councilor from running into a wall.

“Ashley.” His voice cuts. “Down. Off the platform. Now.”

“Wait—”

“There is a squad on the west stair. Get down.”

I get down. The platform is the highest point in the room and it has been advertising my exact position to the entire institution for two and a half hours, and I have been standing on it because a provision written in 1604 says that assessed subjects remain visible. I hit the floor and my shadow comes with me, and for the first time all morning my body remembers that it is not a piece of evidence.

Sora is already there.

She has come down the witness bench and across the open floor of a governing chamber in the middle of an attack, in her testimony clothes, with her hair tied back, and she gets her hand around my wrist the way she did last night in the corridor.

“I’m not leaving,” she says, before I can start.

“I didn’t⁠—”

“You were going to.”

She’s right. I was.

Above us the chamber’s ward-lamps flicker, catch, and settle at half strength. The screens are still dead. Aldric is standing in front of the granite chair shouting for order, and about a third of the room is actually listening to him, which is more than I would have expected, and Vey has not moved from the obsidian chair at all. She is sitting with her hands folded, watching the doorway, entirely calm — the calm of an old woman who has done this before and knows that the running is the dangerous part.

Then the west doors open, and it isn’t a squad.

It’s students.

Maybe thirty of them, spilling in from the connecting hall because the connecting hall was the only direction that wasn’t already on fire, and they are fourteen and fifteen and sixteen years old and they are terrified. Half of them are still holding books. One boy has a bleeding hand he doesn’t seem to know about. A girl at the back is crying without any sound at all, which is a thing I did not know children could do until this second. And every single shadow in that group is up — flared wide, spiking, uncontrolled, the involuntary defensive expansion that Dark Nephilim produce under threat and that the academy spends four years teaching them to suppress.

Behind them, the Light students come through the same door. And I watch it happen.

I watch the group split.

Not by choice. Nobody says anything. There’s no argument, no incident, no moment I could point at afterward and call a decision. The shadows go one way along the wall and the lights go the other way toward the dais, and a gap of about eight feet opens down the middle of thirty frightened children, and it opens because that is what they have been trained to do. Four years of separated dormitories and separated tutorials and frequency-compatibility concerns, and when something explodes, the conditioning does the sorting.

Two of them try not to. A dark boy near the front reaches back for someone, and the someone is a light girl, and their hands actually touch — and then the current of thirty bodies carries them apart and neither of them fights it, and the gap seals over the place where they were, and that, more than the explosions, is the thing that puts my heart in my throat.

“Oh,” Sora says quietly. “Oh, that’s what it looks like.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it’s always looked like. I just—” Her light flickers. “I’ve always been on one side of it.”