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On the second floor, students are crowding the hallway—some pushing past me into the stairwell or hurrying toward the other flights of stairs, some milling about in confusion. I weave through them as deftly as I can, grateful that my destination isn’t too far along.
A skinny, harried-looking guy is just emerging from the dorm, stumbling when the floor abruptly shakes. I catch his arm to help him keep his balance, and he shoots a tight but grateful smile at me. “Thank you. It’s madness around here.”
I give a half-hearted chuckle of agreement and raise my chin toward the room he was coming out of. “You’re one of Wendos’s dormmates. Is he still in there?”
The guy makes a face. “He headed out a little while ago, like he had somewhere important to be—lucky for him. Tossed off a remark that he was going to high places, whatever that was supposed to mean.”
High places. The ballroom? Was he up in the tower that just collapsed?
We should be so fortunate.
“You’d better get out of here too,” I suggest, and the guy doesn’t hesitate to brush past me, doing just that. He never glances back, so he doesn’t see me slip past the door into the common room he just vacated.
Itisvacant—he must have been the last to leave. The bedroom doors are all closed or slightly ajar, but no sounds of movement reach me from any of them.
Are you sure about this?Julita asks as I dart to the nearest bedroom.If the ceilingdoescollapse…
“This is our best chance of making sure the disaster doesn’t get to that point,” I murmur, and yank open the first door.
My conviction is rattled by a more emphatic hitch of the floor—and the sight of a crack opening in the plaster of the far wall. Gritting my teeth, I peer into the room.
Heaps of discarded clothes, a tipped over goblet on a stained rug, rumpled bedcovers—obviously someone used to household servants picking up after him.
“See anything that looks like it’s Wendos’s?” I ask Julita.
No. This wouldn’t be him. He was always careful with his things.
“Good, that’ll help narrow it down.”
The next two rooms aren’t quite as messy but still nothing close to “careful.” The fourth looks tidy, but Julita points out the godlen sigil marked on a wall-hanging over the desk.This must be a Creaden dedicat. Wendos went with Prospira.Her tone turns acidic.He wanted his own abundance of sorts.
The floorboards rock with my steps as I sprint to the next doorway. A distant rumble suggests more stones have fallen.
I throw open the door with an unsteady hand—and see a neatly tucked bed, closed wardrobe, and shelves organized into books, scrolls, and various wooden contraptions. But what convinces me is the glass tank at the back of the desk where a couple of bright orange beetles are crawling across strips of mossy bark.
I stride into the room. “He really does like bugs, huh?”
Julita makes a disgusted sound.Either that or it’s just to keep up the front. But I wouldn’t be surprised, given how low he stoops.
I jerk open the drawers on the desk and quickly uncover definitive proof of whose bedroom this is: a set of papers—a report Wendos has been working on in a cramped scrawl—with his name already written at the top.
I dig further, displacing quills and stoppered inkpots, sheafs of paper and spare candles. “This all looks like schoolwork.”
It does seem unlikely he’d have left any obvious evidence of his magical experiments lying around, even in his private chamber.
“We just need some kind of hint, anything… What are they doing to rile up the daimon now? Where are they working their magic? No one can be perfectly careful.”
I crouch down to sweep my hand under his bed, but Wendos keeps the floor not only clear but regularly swept. I don’t even reach a dust bunny.
Lifting up the mattress reveals a few sketches of naked women sprawled in provocative positions, but nothing I can’t imagine half the other male students—and some of the women too—have secreted away.
Maybe the books?Julita suggests.
Through another tremor, I turn toward the bookcase. Heedless of the mess I’m making, I yank text after text off the shelves. I shake their pages over the floor to check for anything stuck inside and then toss them away.
An ominous creaking sound resonates through the walls. Julita squirms in the back of my skull.Ivy, we’re not getting anywhere. The whole school could fall apart.
“No. I’m not leaving yet. Not until I’ve tried everything. You obsessed over Wendos for months even when the men started to doubt you, and you were right. So let’s see this fucking through.”
