Page 98 of The Truths We Hold

And up the lines, from the arcade and the stair and the long gallery, the same thing. Over and over. Light and dark folding together in clusters of ten and twenty across an entire campus, because the harbinger’s voice told their shadows to cooperate and their shadows, which were never told any of the rules, said yes, obviously.

“It’s working,” Sora breathes. “It’s actually⁠—”

Then the west doors give.

Not all the way. The upper hinge tears out of the frame and the ward-line across the threshold flares white and holds, barely, and through the wedge of open space I see the arcade beyond it packed with field gray. Twenty men. More behind them.

And I stop being a girl on a platform and start being something else.

East wing, second-year corridor. Vale is holding it alone at thirty percent and he has fourteen students behind him. Everyone in the long gallery — go to him. Ground your shadow at the corridor mouth and make it thick. You are not fighting. You are being a wall. Walls don’t have to win.

They move. I feel them move — thirty, forty of them peeling off the gallery and down the service stair, and I feel the exact moment their grounded shadows hit the corridor mouth and pile up like snow, and forty seconds later Constantine’s fire comes up the bond so hard and so hot with astonishment that I nearly lose my footing.

What did you do?

I sent you the fourth years.

Ashley, there are children stacking shadow in my corridor.

I know. Use it.

Refectory group — Bael has forty of you under the west wall. Stay with him. Do exactly what the dark tells you. It is not going to hurt you.

Cloister — do not go through the north gate. It’s mined. Go up. Second floor, across the bridge span, down into the library. The library has a warded core and the core is still holding.

And then something Bael pushes up the bond at me, wordless, urgent, a single compressed piece of understanding from a man standing in an arcade eighty feet away: their instruments cannot find one shadow inside forty. The panic is jamming them.

It takes me two full seconds to work out what he’s warning me about, and when I do, my stomach drops.

I have just organized three hundred shadows. I have taken a screaming, chaotic, useless mess of interference — the exact interference that has been blinding sixty men’s equipment for twenty minutes — and I have made it coherent. Grounded. Steady. Legible.

Findable.

I have handed the Hunter command a clean signal.

Everyone, I say, and I make myself say it evenly, because three hundred frightened people can hear the shake in a voice even through a carrier frequency. New instruction. Ground your shadow — and move it. Slowly. Keep it wide and keep it drifting. Don’t hold still. If you feel something reach for you and try to close its hand, let it slip and come back.

It’s an ugly compromise and I know it while I’m saying it. Organized enough to work. Loose enough not to be lockable. Down the lines I feel three hundred shadows start to breathe, in and out, wide and slow, and somewhere in the arcade a Hunter strikes his own harness with the heel of his hand.

The living intelligence carries it all. That’s the part I could never explain to Raziel in any of his assessments, the part that isn’t in a single doctrinal text — my shadow isn’t a substance, it’s a network, and right now it is running through two hundred yards of burning academy carrying signal the way a nervous system carries signal, and I am sitting at the middle of it feeling three hundred separate positions at once and moving them like pieces.

I have never been a general. I’m twenty. Six months ago the largest group of people I had ever been responsible for was a study cohort of four.

I am terribly, horribly good at this.

That should frighten me more than it does. I file it. I’ll be frightened later.

Then the strain arrives.

It comes on the way exhaustion comes on in deep water — not a signal, just a widening awareness that the shore is further away than it was. The lines start costing. Each one is nothing, a thread, and there are three hundred of them, and the dawn color has been at full expression for eleven minutes now and full expression is a thing I have previously sustained for four.

My knees go loose. I lock them. There’s a taste in the back of my mouth like a struck coin, and my hands have gone cold to the second knuckle, and every heartbeat is arriving slightly later than the one before it promised.

The crimson at the edges of the chamber thins — I can see it thinning, the reach pulling back from the far arcade, the long gallery going faint. And as it thins, the lines out there start to fray, and I feel a cluster of students in the cloister lose me mid-instruction and stumble, and their shadows spike again immediately, and the spike is a signal fire and there is a Hunter team ninety feet from them.

“No,” I say. “No, no⁠—”

I push. It’s like pushing on a wall with a hand that’s gone numb.