Chapter 30 – — Professor Clementine, Endurance of Pain
Chapter Thirty
“Power is not measured in what one can do. It is measured in what one does when the doing costs something.”
— Professor Clementine, Endurance of Pain
I jerk back so hard the blanket slides off my shoulders.
Noctis is on his feet before I’ve registered the movement, a low, dangerous growl rolling out of his chest, vibrating through the floorboards beneath me.
My pulse is still in my throat. My lips are still warm where Draven’s thumb was.
Whatever was about to happen between us a second ago has been ripped out of the room.
“Miss Rose, Mister Alucard.”
The voice on the other side of the door is muffled, but I’d know it anywhere.
“If the two of you are alive in there, I would prefer to find out before I freeze to death looking for you.”
It’s Emil.
Draven’s eyes find mine, and gods help me, they’re still gold. Still on me in a way that makes the air in the blind feel two degrees warmer than it is.
“Rose.”
“Yes?”
“We are going to talk about that.”
My breath catches.
“Are we?”
I turn away before he sees something on my face that I’m not ready to put words to, and I push myself up off the wall and pull the door open before this conversation can go anywhere, I’m not ready to take it.
Because gods, I don’t even know what we were about to do.
The wind comes in first, and Emil ducks under the lintel after it, his cloak weighted with snow, his silver hair gone stiff with frost where it has come out of his hood.
“Ah. Miss Rose, Mister Alucard, you are alive.”
His face is a shade paler than the last time I saw him. The skin around his eyes looks bruised, like a body that has been giving more than it has and knows it.
“What’s happened?” Draven asks, his eyes narrowing.
“There’s been an incident in the Shorelands. A large fissure opened this morning, not cycle sized but close.”
He shakes his head, his eyes dropping to the floor.
A chill that has nothing to do with the wind flits up my spine.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “Is everyone alright?”
“The fissure was long, and there have been many casualties. Many more injured. You’re the last pair I’ve come to thread back to campus. Your help will be needed.”
My stomach drops out from under me.
“Is Jace alright?”
My hand is on Emil’s shoulder before I know I’ve reached for him, and my fingers have closed around the wet wool of his cloak hard enough that I see his pale eyes flick down to where I am gripping him.
“Did you bring Jace back okay?”
He doesn’t meet my stare.
“Emil, tell me.”
Something is off. I can’t lose Jace before we mend things. The last time I saw him…The look he gave me… If something has happened to him…
“Take us now, Emil,” Draven insists.
I turn to look at him.
Whatever he saw in my face has changed his. The gold has gone out of his eyes. His jaw has gone tight. The man who was leaning over me a minute ago with his thumb at my mouth is gone, and in his place is the version of Draven I met at Ashwell.
Emil steps between us before I can find my voice, one hand settling on my shoulder, the other on Draven’s. The pressure of his grip is firm, and I close my eyes.
I’m not ready for any of this.
I don’t have time to register the threading. I don’t have time to brace for the cold that pours through my bones the way it did the night Emil came for me in my father’s office. I don’t have time to do anything but feel my own heartbeat slamming against my ribs while the world drops out beneath me.
All I can think about are my friends.
All I can think about is Jace.
The world reassembles around me too fast, and my knees buckle. Draven’s arm tightens at my back before I’ve registered I’m falling.
The cold of threading is still moving through my bones in pulses when the noise hits.
Oh gods, the noise.
I blink rapidly, stepping away from Draven and Emil.
We touched down in the entry hall of the patient wards.
I have been in the wards a hundred times this year, and I’ve heard the soft shuffle of menders in corridors, the low murmur of healers conferring at desks, the occasional cry or scream of a patient that gets absorbed into the stone walls before it reaches the next floor.
The screaming reaches my ears first. Then the shouting of someone giving orders. There’s a metallic clatter of instruments being thrown into trays too fast, and the sound of something being mopped up. Someone is sobbing.
The smell hits me next. Blood.
There’s so much blood and antiseptic I almost gag.
“Rose—” Draven starts, but I can’t talk to him right now. We’re not out there anymore. We’re back in the real world, and I need to find out what’s happening.
The main level has been turned into triage for the injured. It looks like Emil brought back students and some non-students as well. I see three bodies on the ground with a drape pulled up over them, and I swallow the lump forming in my throat.
“Maelis.”
The voice is wrecked.
I spin around to see Lux across the hall, her pink hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck.
There’s blood on her sleeves and smeared across her forehead where she must have wiped it without thinking.
She’s still wearing the midterm gear she was issued for her own assignment, but the sleeves are pushed up to her elbows like she’s been working.
Her face crumples the moment she sees me, and she crosses the room at a run.
“Maelis.”
She slams into me hard enough that I stumble back, her arms going around me, and she’s shaking. She has her face in my hair and her hands clutching the back of my coat.
Lux is crying.
“You’re alive. I didn’t know where you were assigned and—”
“I’m alive. I’m here. Are you hurt?” I pull back and look her up and down.
“No, I’m alright, it’s bad. It’s so bad. My father has been helping thread people into the academy all day. Miles is dead, Maelis.”
I didn’t care for Miles, but fuck I didn’t want him to die.
I shake my head and pull her into me again.
“Sera, Tobin, and eight others are dead so far. The Shorelands had sixteen pairs—”
I pull back and look at her.
“Jace?”
I’m scared to say his name, afraid of what the answer will be.
“My father brought him back. Ellavee too.”
Something inside me loosens.
“But he’s in bad shape, Maelis. Professor Nestor took him upstairs a few minutes ago for surgery. You can probably go see him from the gallery.”
I nod, peeling off toward the stairs, ignoring my ankle completely.
I make it to the eighth floor in record time, panting as I reach the first operating room and peek inside through the window in the door.
Fuck.
They’re removing corruption from someone, and all I see is oozing black flesh being held up and tossed onto a scale. Once the healer shifts to the side, I see the patient. It’s not him. I don’t recognize them, and I go to the next window.
I see the large bone saw before I see anything else, moving across a leg above the knee, and my heart lurches into my throat.
Oh gods.
I look up to see who the patient is, and it’s a girl I recognize from Fracture and Form, but I don’t recall her name. She’s sedated, but my heart breaks for her, because they may save her life, but she’s never going to be a Veilguard now without a leg.
I jog to the next room and see a flash of a silvery-white wing.
That’s him.
My angel.
I push the door open, running to the bedside to get a better look.
“Miss Rose.” Professor Nestor sounds shocked and annoyed.
Then I see him.
“Jace,” I whisper as I come up beside him.
He’s still awake, coherent, and shockingly calm for the state of him.
I swallow as I take in his face. His left eye, still attached to the muscles, is hanging out on his cheek.
Someone is there on the other side of him, fully suited up with a mask, gown, and gloves, keeping the eye moist with a syringe of clear fluid.
Jace’s good eye finds mine. I place my hand on his shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay. Professor Nestor is a mad genius, remember? He’ll put it back in. You’ll still see out of it.”
I’m nodding more for myself than for Jace but trying to reassure him.
“Miss Rose, do not make false promises. This boy’s eyeball has a twisted creature’s nail stuck in it. It may be beyond saving.”
I suck in a breath, my eyes going wide as I look back down at Jace, who still hasn’t spoken.
“Is he hurt anywhere else?” I ask, looking across the room at Nestor, where he’s arranging a tray of tools he’ll need for the procedure.
“He took a bad hit to the head, but he’ll survive.” He looks up at me.
“I want to scrub in. I need to make sure he’s okay.”
Professor Nestor shakes his head. “You’re too attached to this. Go be useful somewhere else. I need to sedate him now and get started. Out with you.” He waves a gloved hand at me toward the door.
I take a step closer to Jace and place my hand gently atop his head, brushing a strand of his light-blond hair from his temple.
“I’ll be watching the whole time. You’re going to get through this.”
His good eye narrows on me.
“Leave. I don’t want your face to be the last thing I see if I don’t make it.”
I almost choke. What he says feels like a stab right through my chest.
I take my hand off his head like he burned me and stare down at him for a moment longer.
“Don’t worry, Red. I’ll take good care of him.”
I look up for the first time to the person across the table with the syringe, and Malric winks at me above his mask.
Malric is assisting, of all people.
I reach across the table, shoving his shoulder without thinking. “Get the fuck off him.”
Someone grabs me around the waist from behind.
“Remove her from my operating room,” Nestor barks, and I’m shoved out the door before I can do anything else.
I hurry around the corner and sprint up the few tiny steps to the observation room, pressing my hands to the window and looking down over Jace.
He’s sedated now, his good eye taped shut.
I can’t hear anything.
I glance around until I see a placard like the one in the lift and hold my hand to it.
Come on, Ashwell. Please give me this.