Page 93 of The Truths We Hold

The doors at the far end boom once, hard, and hold.

Constantine’s fire arrives in my chest like a hand closing.

Students in the east wing. The words don’t come as words; they come as the shape of words, pressed down the bond, in a voice so tired and so absolutely certain that I have to close my eyes for a second to receive it. I’m holding the corridor. The fire is for them, not me.

Underneath the words is everything he isn’t saying, because bonds are stupid and honest and they carry what a man would never volunteer. The ache in his forearms. The forty-eight hours since the sanctuary that his body has not been given permission to spend recovering. The precise, professional, cold-water awareness of exactly how much fire he has left and exactly how long it will last against what is coming up that corridor.

I push back everything I have. Warmth, weight, the crimson wrapped around the fire the way I would wrap my arms around him if the geography of this morning allowed it. He takes it. He does not send anything else, because he is busy, and busy for Constantine Vale means standing in a hallway with thirty percent of a fire in his hands.

“Bael’s in the stone,” I say out loud. “Constantine’s holding the east wing. Raziel⁠—”

“Is here,” Raziel says. He has a councilor by the elbow and is steering her, with enormous impatience, toward the only door that isn’t compromised. “And the Judge would like the subject to explain to him why the military branch has committed to a full assault on an academy containing six hundred students, when a full assault is the single most expensive and least deniable action available to it.”

And there it is. The thing my head has been assembling underneath the noise.

“They haven’t,” I say.

He turns.

“They haven’t committed to an assault.” I’m up on my knees now, one hand flat on the floor, and I can feel it through the granite — the pattern of it, the shape of the pressure, the way the impacts are distributed across the campus like fingers spread on a table. “Look at where the explosions are. North gate, west stair, the arcade. Those are entrances. Nobody’s hitting the dormitory towers. Nobody’s hitting the library, or the refectory, or anywhere with a concentration of people in it. If the Hunter command wanted this academy destroyed, this academy would be on fire from the inside out and it isn’t. It’s on fire around the edges.”

“Corridors,” Raziel says slowly.

“They’re building a route.” My throat has gone tight. “They’re blowing open the doors they want and collapsing the ones they don’t, and they’re funneling everything toward this chamber. They’re not attacking the academy. They’re attacking the hearing. The Hunter command is trying to stop the vote before the vote can happen.”

“By taking you.”

“By taking me. Alive, probably — a body’s a martyr, a disappearance is an administrative matter.” My own voice sounds very far away and very steady. “If I’m gone before the council votes, there’s no subject. No subject, no finding. The whole thing dissolves back into paperwork and in six weeks it’s a footnote about an unstable student who fled during a security incident.”

Aldric has stopped shouting. He is standing ten feet away with his hand still raised and his face gone the color of his chair, and he has heard every word, and he is a man watching his own institution’s military arm invalidate two hundred years of his life’s work in front of fifty-one witnesses.

“Then we make sure the vote happens,” Sora says.

Everyone looks at her.

She is standing in the middle of the floor with her chin up, five foot two, holding my wrist. “That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? They only win if the vote doesn’t happen. So it happens. Here, in this room, in the dark, with the doors shut. Let them come. Let them stand outside and listen to twelve people vote.”

Vey rises from the obsidian chair.

“The girl is correct,” she says. Her voice is dry and unhurried and it carries better than Aldric’s shouting did. “This body has never once been prevented from sitting by force. Not in the schism, not in 1911. I am disinclined to be the council that establishes the precedent.” She looks at the scattered gallery, at the jammed doorway, at the fifty-one. “Sit down. All of you. Sit down and be governed.”

About half of them sit.

It’s not enough, but it’s something, and it’s the first thing all morning that has felt like the institution being what it claims to be.

Then the doors on the west side stop holding.

Not breached — pressed. A weight comes against them from the far side and the wood bows visibly and the ward-line across the threshold lights up hot white, and through the gap underneath I see boots. Field gray. Six pairs, then more.

And I feel the interference before I see the equipment. A high, thin, wrong frequency crawling in under the door and into my shadow, the same signature that hit me in the sanctuary — shadow-binding gear, calibrated, tuned to the exact density that living shadow produces. It gets into my back teeth. It gets into the bones behind my ears.

Except this time there are thirty students in the room with me.

Their shadows react before mine does. The binding frequency hits thirty panicking dark-wielders who have never been trained for it and their shadows do the worst possible thing, which is spike — up and out, flaring wide, every one of them lighting themselves up like a signal fire for equipment that is specifically designed to find exactly that. The boy with the bleeding hand makes a sound I will hear for the rest of my life. Two rows of Light students flinch back from him and then, visibly, hate themselves for flinching.

“Ashley,” Raziel says.

I’m already moving.