Page 99 of The Truths We Hold

“You’re gray.” Sora is in front of me. She’s got both my forearms. “Ashley, look at me. You’ve gone gray.”

“They lose me if I stop. If the color goes, the lines go, and they’re⁠—”

“I know. I can hear you.” Her chin comes up, and there’s an expression on her face I have never seen there in four years. “I can hear you, Ashley. You’re carrying it on light. That’s a light frequency you’re pushing that voice through, and I’m a light-wielder, and you’re bonded to me.”

The chamber goes very quiet in my head.

“Sora—”

“I can carry it.” She’s already turning, already opening, her white flaring up her arms in a way that has nothing careful about it. “The Command — my light can carry your voice to the light-wielders. The bond between us is the channel. You push and I’ll spread it. You do the dark and I’ll do the light.”

“That’s a hundred and forty students. You’ve never⁠—”

“Neither have you.”

She’s right, and there’s no time, and my knees are going again.

“Okay,” I say.

She takes my hand.

And the fourth bond — the one that has no doctrinal name, the one the council doesn’t know exists, the one that came into being for no reason except that a Light Nephilim girl walked across a battlefield in October to take my hand — opens all the way, and my voice goes into her light and comes out the other side across half a campus.

The load halves. That’s the only way I can describe it. Eleven minutes of accumulating weight simply shares, and the gray goes out of the edges of my vision, and a hundred and forty light-wielders who were fraying at the end of a fading crimson line pick up the signal again — clean, bright, carried on their own frequency by one of their own.

“Oh,” Sora says. She sounds absolutely amazed. “Oh, I can feel them.”

“I know.”

“They’re all so scared⁠—”

“I know. Tell them where to stand.”

She tells them.

And for a moment I get to stand on the judgment platform of the highest governing body in the world and watch my best friend become the second voice of a thing the institution wrote nine centuries of doctrine to prevent, and I think: they will never be able to put this back. Whatever happens in the next hour, whatever the sixty men in that arcade do, there are three hundred students in this building who have now personally felt what it is like when the division is off. You can’t unteach that. You can expel every one of them and it will still be true in their bodies forty years from now.

“The channel was always there,” I tell her. “We just called it friendship.”

The west doors give completely.

Three hundred students holding. Dark and light together. The division dissolving in the corridors of the academy that taught the division because the harbinger’s voice told the shadows and the lights to hold together and the holding is the bridge and the bridge is working — not in a governing chamber, not on a judgment platform, in the corridors where the division actually lives, in the spaces where the students actually learn, in the dark paranormal academy that is discovering, in the middle of a war, that the darkness and the light were never meant to be enemies.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

constantine

The east wing corridor smells like burnt stone and fear and the specific, acrid, consecrated-silver-on-granite scent that institutional weapons produce when the weapons are deployed inside the institution they were designed to protect.

I know that smell better than I know most things. I carried the equipment that makes it for eleven years. There is a training module — module nine, second year, four hours in a sealed room — in which cadets are made to stand in that smell until they stop reacting to it, and I passed that module, and I have used it since in places where I told myself the smell was justified.

A farmhouse outside Split. A tenement stairwell in Lyon with a woman on the third landing who was not what the briefing said she was. I have an entire filing system for those, built carefully over a decade, each drawer labeled with a reason.

It is a different smell in a hallway with a water fountain and a bulletin board.

The bulletin board is still up. That’s the thing my eye keeps going back to, between one wave and the next. Somebody’s sign-up sheet for the winter recital. Three columns of names in three colors of ink, and a corner of it curling where the heat has got to it, and under that a hand-lettered notice about a lost scarf.

“Sir.” Marisol Reyes has my sleeve. She is fourteen. “Sir, they’re coming back.”