Trey
Harrick steps forward and I already know how this ends.
Not because I’m smart. Because I know Harrick.
“You think this means something?” His voice carries across the road. He’s looking at us and his face isn’t afraid.
He’s not afraid.
He’s angry.
And anger makes you stupid.
“You think because you can do this, that makes you right?”
Nobody answers.
“You’re defective.” He says it like it’s just a fact. “All of you. A cluster that shouldn’t exist, shifts that shouldn’t be possible, built around something without a mark—”
“She has a mark, maybe your intel is out of date,” Brent yells from behind us.
I watch Nova’s mouth tip up.
“She is an anomaly.” Harrick’s jaw is set. “The system exists because things like this—” He gestures at all of us. “—are what happens when you don’t contain corruption early enough. When you tell people that broken marks are just different.”
He looks at me.
Right at me.
“You of all people should understand that.”
Except they do. The whole of the Hollow does, just not in the way that he expects.
I feel them, all of them.
They form a line on either side of our cluster.
Backing us.
Backing Nova.
And everything it means to be broken in a system that doesn’t tolerate it.
I hear Beckett growl.
My wrist burns, even shifted. The mark that isn’t deformed anymore — he doesn’t know that. He’s still seeing what I used to be. Dream and Memory fighting each other on my skin, proof I didn’t fit anywhere. That I was broken.
I almost say something.
I don’t.
The smoke shifts wrong. To my left. Low.
I’ve felt it twice before — outside the facility, on the road when the Hollow first fell — and I know it before I see it. The air changes around Beckett like weather. You don’t see it. You feel it.
My eyes snap left.
He’s already gone.
Not gone. Moving. Threading through the space between bodies like he was never solid to begin with. No sound. No warning.
He’s behind Harrick before Harrick finishes the sentence.
Fuck, yes.
I look at Harrick.
Harrick who believed every word he just said. Harrick who is Silas’s whole world, has been since before any of us arrived at the Academy. The guy who made cruelty feel like clarity because Silas needed someone to agree with him loudly and Harrick was more than willing.
He threw burning trash through her window and called it order.
Beckett looks at me. I nod, no hesitation.
It’s fast. That’s what I wasn’t ready for even knowing it was coming. One second Harrick is talking. Then the smoke closes in from behind and there’s a sound I’m not going to think about and then he’s not talking anymore.
The silence is total.
Beckett steps back. The smoke dissolves.
He’s looking at Nova.
I watch her nod and he turns to smoke, positioning himself right beside her, leaning in.
I look back at Harrick.
Silas crosses the distance in three steps and goes down on his knees in the road.
His hands find Harrick’s shoulders first. Like he’s trying to understand. Like if he’s fast enough it stops being true.
Then he just stops.
His hands are shaking.
I’ve spent two years watching Silas be untouchable. Composed. The boy groomed for authority who grew into it so completely you couldn’t find where he ended and the system began.
There’s none of that left.
He’s in the road with blood on his hands and grief on his face. Plain and ugly and real.
Harrick mattered to him.
He gave everything to the system.
Look what it gave him back.
He squeezes Harrick’s shoulders, and looks up.
At Nova.
“I am going to fucking kill you,” he says too calm, “and everything you care about.”
He can fucking try…
Nova doesn’t move.
Silas gets to his feet. Slowly. Eyes still on her. Whatever was ideology in them is gone.
It’s just hate now. Personal.
We all move closer to her.
He’s going to have to go through all of us first.
Every operative in the road is frozen. Watching him stand up with blood on his knees and nothing left of whatever authority he arrived with. Watching to see what happens next.
What happens next is going to be bad.
I know it. The cluster knows it. The Hollow behind us knows it and…
“You will do no such thing.”
From behind Silas. Flat. Absolute.
Everything stops.
Laith walks out of the tree line and I think we all stop breathing.
He takes it all in without expression.
His eyes land on Nova.
Then us.
And for just a moment something shifts in his expression.
Approval?
No. Impossible.
It’s gone before I can be sure and his eyes flick to Harrick on the ground. His son on his knees.
And Silas — still shaking, still with blood on his hands, still the most dangerous thing in this road sixty seconds ago —
Turns toward his father.
And looks afraid.