17. Tobin
Tobin
Asha is a vibrating wire, sharp and jagged, cutting through the bored hum of Practical Invocation. She’s staring at the professor, but she isn’t seeing him. Her focus is internal, locked on whatever she found in the library.
I tap my fingers against the desk, a rhythmic distraction she pointedly ignores. She’s clutching that book bag like it contains the heart of a god. Maybe it does.
“You’re going to burn a hole in that leather if you grip it any harder,” I murmur, pitching my voice low enough to stay under the professor’s drone.
She doesn’t blink. “Mind your own business, prodigy.”
“Hard to do when your business smells like desperation and old paper.”
“Shut up.”
“Leith is waiting,” I lie, just to see the flicker in her eyes.
It works. She stiffens, her gaze sliding toward me with a dangerous, electric blue spark. “Waiting for what?”
“For you to realise you can’t do this alone.”
She scoffs, turning back to the front. “I’ve done plenty alone.”
“Not here.” I lean closer, and the scent of her frustration hits me. “In SilverGate, the walls have ears, and the shadows have claws. If you go looking without us, you won’t come back.”
“Is that a threat, Tobin?”
“It’s a forecast. Don’t be an idiot.”
Asha clenches her jaw. The professor strikes the silver rod against a stone pedestal, and a surge of white light pulses through the air. Everyone flinches except her. The magic is a window she wants to smash.
“I’m not an idiot,” she says, her voice sharp. “I’m in a cage.”
“A cage you don’t have the key for,” I counter. “Leith walks where you can’t. Hale tears down what you can’t. I hide you from things that should’ve caught you already.”
Her blue eyes are dark with a hunger that requires a spark. It is the look of someone who wants to burn the world. She finally seems to realise that my help is not an insult but a necessity.
“What do you want, Tobin?”
“I already told you. Blood, truth, maybe some other things.”
“Mr Tobin,” Professor Rez clips out. “Care to show us how to invoke the redirection of intent?”
I stand. The room goes quiet because they know what I can do. Rez watches me with that hungry look teachers get when they think they’ve found a weapon. He’s wrong.
I extend my palm. I don’t chant, not needing to waste breath on useless incantations.
I reach into the current beneath the floorboards and pull.
The silver rod leaps from the pedestal, hovering in the air between us.
It glows with a violent, steady radiance.
I don’t let it flicker. I hold the magic in a tight grip, feeling the pulse of it against my skin.
Asha’s eyes track the light. She looks at the power with a desire that would terrify a lesser male.
“Impressive, Mr Tobin,” Rez says, his voice tight.
I drop my hand. The rod clatters back into place. I sit and catch her fingers digging into the leather of her bag. She wants that power. She needs it to get home.
“Tonight we meet; we plan,” I whisper. “Shade Garden.”
She doesn’t promise anything. She looks away and focuses on Rez. She’s going to be trouble, but she’s the only thing in this academy worth the effort.
The lecture drags on for another twenty minutes of theoretical drivel.
I keep my attention on the periphery, watching the way students shift in their seats.
Rez continues his lecture on energetic anchors, but his voice is just background noise.
Beside me, Asha remains perfectly still.
She doesn’t take a single note. Her mind is already miles away, probably picturing the best way to flay everyone in this room.
The bell finally signals our release and the end of the academic day, which means the fun begins after dinner. The sound rings out across the hall. Asha is up before the noise dies, her bag slung over her shoulder. I stand, following her into the crowded aisle.
“After dinner,” I say, moving close enough to ensure she hears me over the din. “Shade Garden.”
“You keep saying that like I’m going to show.”
“Don’t you want to plan?”
“I want to find.”
“You can’t find jack shit in SilverGate without a plan. And even then, you are pushing it. I would suggest caution over bulldozing your way into anything.”
“Bulldozing is so much more fun, though.”
“Of course it is,” I agree. “But humour me and do this the right way or we all end up dead, expelled or in cages.”
That gets to her. She swallows and looks me in the eye. “Blackridge is already skirting around me.”
“He’s testing you.”
“For what?” Her genuine question catches me off-guard. She has a habit of doing that, losing the attitude when you least expect it.
Professor Rez is glaring at us as we linger, so I place my hand on her lower back and move her forward. “It’s what he does. Whatever he thinks you are, or aren’t, he wants to study you, your reactions, your magic or lack thereof.”
“He can study my arse,” she mutters, though she doesn’t pull away from my touch.
The heat of her skin through the thin fabric of her top is a distraction I don’t need. I steer her out of the lecture hall and into the corridor, where the evening rush is reaching a frantic peak. The air is thick with the scent of ozone and stale magic.
“He’ll do more than study you if you keep drawing attention to yourself,” I say. “Leith isn’t the only one who can read a room. You were practically vibrating with recognition when Draeven pulled up those maps.”
She stops abruptly, forcing a group of first years to swerve around us with indignant squeaks. “I wasn’t vibrating. I was observing.”
“You were salivating over a battlefield, Asha. It’s a bad look for a low-level witch.”
She tilts her chin, her blue eyes icy. “Maybe I just like a bit of gore.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you’ve stood on ground like that before.” I lean in, lowering my voice as a faculty member glides past. “Don’t go to the dining hall alone. Find Hale. Let him play the brute while you eat. It keeps the idiots at bay.”
I release her and walk away before she can argue. I don’t look back. Her gaze is on my spine like a brand. She’s dangerous and arrogant.
Now I just have to make sure she doesn’t get us all killed before I find out what she really looks like without the mask.
Leith falls into step beside me. “She’s looking for a way out tonight.”
I glance at him. “That wasn’t difficult to work out.”
“No.” His blue eyes stay ahead. “It was difficult to stop myself from letting her try.”
That interests me. “You’re getting attached.”
“I’m getting practical.”
“Liar.”
He cuts me a cool look. “You’re one to talk.”
We take the left stairwell instead of the central one. Fewer students. Less noise. The wards hum in the walls, restless with evening traffic. SilverGate always feels more alert once lectures end. During the day, it pretends to be a university. At night, it remembers what it was built for.
“You told her Blackridge is testing her,” Leith says.
“He is.”
“For what?”
I give a short laugh. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
We turn into the long hallway that leads towards the tower, where the overhead lights have always flickered slightly out of sync with the rest of the building, and the floor shifts from polished composite to something older underneath—stone worn concave by centuries of foot traffic, grooved at the centre like a riverbed.
“I think he’s checking whether she knows what she is,” I say.
“He’s checking for amnesia?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, we know she remembers everything about who she is and where she came from.”
“Or do we? Is she playing us?”
“I think she’s playing herself as much as us,” Leith says.
That lands harder than I expect because I’ve been circling the same thought since she arrived.
A creature can lie about origin, age, power and motive.
It’s much harder to fake that moment where instinct outruns thought.
Asha has had too many of those. The lecture hall. The courtyard. Blackridge. Hale.
“No,” I say after a beat. “Not about the important parts.”
Leith says nothing.
I glance at him as we reach the landing. “She’s aware of the power, the cage, the wrongness of the skin she’s wearing. None of that is the question. The question is what survived the fall—and whether she’d even recognise it if she found it.”
“That’s generous.”
“It’s accurate.”
We head down the next hallway, quieter here, the windows black with the dead light outside.
Students are already peeling off towards dinner, voices echoing ahead, but this stretch belongs to the wards and whoever built them to unsettle.
Every third stone in the wall carries a silver seam. It pulses when we pass.
Leith notices me watching it. “You’re thinking too hard.”
“And this is new?”
A rumble under our feet stops him from answering my question. Instead, he asks, “What. Was. That?”
“Good question,” I mutter as the entire building decides to join in. Another jolt rolls through the floor, sharper this time, and the silver seams in the wall flare bright enough to sting my eyes.
Leith stops dead. “That’s not structural.”
“No shit.”
A bell starts tolling somewhere below us. It’s lower, older than the class bell, and built to make your spine pay attention.
Students ahead of us falter. The corridor chatter cuts off in ugly little snatches. Then the wards kick.
Silver light races along the walls, spills across the ceiling, and drops in bars over the windows. Lockdown.
My stomach drops. “Fuck.”
Leith is already moving.
I can feel its wrongness in the ward current. A breach from outside. Something has pressed where it shouldn’t, and SilverGate has noticed.
We break into a run.
The hallway fills with bodies at once, students spilling out of side passages, all of them trying to work out whether to panic or enjoy themselves. I shove through them with a pulse of silver magic that clears my path.
A third tremor hits, harder than the first two. Dust shakes from the ceiling. One of the silver bars cracks clean through the middle with a sound like a snapped spine.
Students decide to get serious. That decides the mood for everyone.
“Move,” I bark, and throw a shield over the nearest cluster before the broken ward-light lashes across the corridor and scorches black into the opposite wall.
Leith doesn’t slow down. I keep pace beside him, my magic already spread thin through the stones, trying to read the current. The academy feels furious. Something is forcing its way in, and SilverGate is clamping down hard enough to crush whatever is caught inside.
My first thought is to protect Asha.
The second thought is that Hale already has her. I don’t know how I know; I just know.
A fourth bell toll rolls through the lower levels. Not a warning now. A command.
“All students, to your rooms,” a voice booms across the grounds, amplified by the wards. Blackridge. Cold. Controlled. Everywhere at once. “Staff to breach points. This is not a drill. Lockdown protocol is in place until further notice.”
“Well,” I mutter, blasting a panicking third-year out of our path with a flick of my wrist as we turn and head back. “That’s deeply inconvenient.”
“We could—”
“If you were about to suggest we go against the lockdown and get ourselves caged for the effort, I’ll pass. We are no good to Asha, or anyone locked up for being dicks.”
“Fair point,” he says as we head back up the stairs, which are behaving themselves for once.
We run into Asha and Hale outside her room.
Her expression is curiosity rather than fear. “What’s going on?”
“Inside,” I say and shove her door open. We all pile in, and I close the door.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in your own rooms?” she says, arms crossed.
“No,” I say. “We’re supposed to survive the next five minutes.”
Hale plants himself in front of the door like he intends to fight the entire academy if it comes to that. Given him, that’s not an empty thought.
Asha drops her bag onto the desk with a heavy thud. Her eyes flash to it, then to me. “What are breach points?”
“Something hit the outer wards,” I say, already moving to her window. Silver bars have dropped over the glass outside, bright and vicious. The ward current is still shrieking under the stone. “Hard enough to trigger full lockdown.”
Leith goes still by the centre of the room, head tilted slightly, listening to something I can’t hear. “Not one point. Several.”
“That’s worse,” Hale mutters.
Asha looks between us, rattled. It’s the first honest emotion I’ve seen pass her face since she got here. It doesn’t last more than two seconds before she catches me noticing.
I press my palm to the wall beside the window and send a thread of magic into the nearest seam. SilverGate bites immediately, ward-current hot and overworked, pushing back static and command-signals. Blackridge is routing staff through the lower halls.
“Any ideas?” Asha asks quietly.
“Not yet,” I say, “but I will.”