Chapter 4 Everly
I've never been someone who hides. In the sixth grade, when Maura Bishop went around telling the other kids that I ate my own boogers and smelled like a skunk, I went up to her and asked her if she needed to see the doctor since clearly she was seeing and smelling things.
When the other freshmen in high school started to bully Maura, I stepped in and told them to cut it out.
I turned in my boss at my part-time job for wage theft, and even though it didn't go anywhere, my parents told me they were proud. That’s how I was raised.
Basically, I stick up for myself. Which is why it feels so unnatural to try to lay low after the storm.
It's not that I don't want to confront Atlas and Callum—on the contrary, it's the only thing I want.
The next day in class, I almost burn up at the feeling of Callum Bolingbroke's grey eyes on me.
But I make myself keep my head down, dressed in my most boring and unassuming clothes, and try not to make too much eye contact or stare too long.
I last three days.
Three miserable, invisible, suffocating days of eating lunch in my room and walking the long way around every building and sitting in the back of lecture halls like I'm trying to disappear.
It goes against every instinct I have. When you've spent your whole life being the person who walks into a room and makes it warmer, choosing to be invisible feels like holding your breath underwater and hoping no one notices the bubbles.
On the fourth day, I crack. March into the dining hall, sit down at a table near the windows, and dare anyone to say something about it.
That's when Felix finds me again.
"You're back." He drops into the seat across from me, that easy grin already in place. "I was starting to think you'd transferred."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"Never." He steals a fry off my plate—of course he does—and pops it in his mouth. "Hiding doesn't suit you, by the way. Even dressed like a funeral director, you still walk around like someone who expects people to like her."
He's not wrong.
And he's easy to be around, which is the dangerous part.
Felix doesn't bring up the sphere, or the storm, or the word dangerous.
He tells me about the time someone in Tumult enchanted the dining hall silverware to rearrange itself into obscene gestures whenever a professor walked by, and I laugh so hard water comes out my nose, and for fifteen minutes I feel like a normal college student having a normal conversation.
"I should go," I say, gathering my tray. "I've got Theory in ten."
"I'll walk you."
"You don't have to—"
"I know." He's already standing. "See, that's the difference between me and the other three. I don't do anything because I have to."
He says it like it's charming. It is charming. That's the problem.
It becomes a thing.
Felix at lunch, stealing my fries. Felix in the library, shuffling cards while I study, making quiet commentary that's just distracting enough to be fun. Felix between classes, falling into step beside me like we planned it.
"You know what your problem is?" he says one afternoon, walking me across the quad. His cards flicker through his fingers—shuffle, cut, shuffle—and I've stopped flinching at the motion. It's just what he does.
"I have so many problems, Felix. You'll have to be specific."
"You're too honest. This place runs on secrets and leverage and you just... say what you think." He grins. "It's deeply impractical. I love it."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation."
He shows me card tricks that can't possibly be just sleight of hand—a card I'm thinking of appears in my jacket pocket, another one changes suits three times while I'm holding it.
He teaches me the names of the symbols on his deck, which are Tumult sigils for different kinds of probability. The Fracture. The Fork. The Spiral.
"What's that one?" I point to a card with a circle eating its own tail.
"The Ouroboros. It means an outcome that causes itself." He tucks it away before I can look closer. "Bad luck card. You don't want to pull that one."
I don't think much of it at the time.
He asks me questions, too. Not pointed ones—casual, friendly stuff. Where I grew up. What my family's like. How I ended up at Nyxhaven without knowing magic existed.
"My parents can't even hear the word," I tell him. "Their eyes just... glaze over. Like someone hit the skip button in their brains."
"Mundane block. It's a defense mechanism—non-magical people literally can't perceive magic. Their minds just edit it out." He shuffles the deck one-handed. "Must be lonely. Knowing something about yourself that the people closest to you can't understand."
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
And I mean it. And he looks at me like he means it too, and for a second I think maybe I've actually made a friend here. A real one.
My luck goes to shit.
Not in a dramatic, life-threatening way. Just—everything starts going wrong, all the time, in small stupid ways that pile up until I want to scream.
Coffee tips over on my notes. I trip on flat ground and skin my knees.
My laptop freezes during a timed exam and I lose twenty minutes.
The book I need is always just checked out, five minutes ago, so sorry.
A bookshelf collapses on me in the campus store.
The dining hall runs out of food the second I reach the front of the line—three days running.
"Wow," Felix says, watching me stare at the empty trays. "That's brutal."
"This place hates me."
"Nah. You've just got shit luck." He flips a card between his fingers. "Happens to everyone."
"Does it, though? Does everyone's coffee spontaneously launch itself at their homework?"
He laughs. "Fair point. Maybe you're cursed."
"That's not funny."
"Little bit funny."
And it is, the way he says it, all warmth and mischief, and I laugh despite myself. Which is what Felix does—makes terrible things feel survivable. I'm starting to rely on it, and that probably should have been my first warning.
I notice the cards.
Not all at once. It's more like a pattern that assembles itself in the back of my mind over the course of a week, until one afternoon it clicks into focus and I can't unsee it.
Felix fans the cards across the library table. Thirty seconds later, my coffee tips over.
Felix does the one-handed cut—the flashy one, the one he's proud of—and I trip on the stairs.
Felix pulls a card, glances at it, tucks it away. My laptop screen goes black.
Three more days of watching. I keep a mental tally because I'm paranoid now and I can't help it. Every time something goes wrong, I track two things: what happened, and where Felix's hands were right before.
The coffee. He was fanning the deck.
The tripped exam. He'd just done a bridge shuffle at the next table over.
The bookshelf. I didn't see him, but I heard it—that soft thwick thwick thwick of cards being riffled, somewhere behind the stacks.
The dining hall. He was sitting right there. Shuffled once, then stopped, and watched me walk up to the empty trays.
I also notice the little leather journal he keeps in the inside pocket of his purple blazer. Every time something goes wrong—every spill, every fall, every mysteriously empty serving tray—he takes it out. Scribbles something. Puts it back. Quick and casual, like he's jotting down a grocery list.
I used to think it was a diary. Or a sketchbook. Or just a chaos mage being eccentric.
Now I'm not so sure.
The number of accidents or mishaps I’ve been going through the past few days defies the odds. Felix is within earshot for every single one, and his cards are moving before each and every disaster.
Chaos magic, also called probability manipulation, or in layman’s terms, stacking the deck and fixing the odds. A gambler’s idea of paradise.
My nightmare.
I find him in the library on a Tuesday night, anger and confusion rushing through me, a bitter taste like bile in my mouth.
He's sitting in one of the alcoves on the second floor, feet propped on the table, cards spread out in front of him like he’s look at the future.
Or maybe creating the future—at this point, I’m starting to realize just how little I actually know.
He looks up when I approach and smiles like I'm exactly who he was hoping to see.
"Hey. Pull up a—"
"The coffee." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "My laptop. The dining hall. The bookshelf." I'm shaking, but I don't look away. "You shuffle right before things go wrong. Every time. You think I wouldn't notice?"
The smile slides off his face. Not all at once—in stages, like he's deciding how much of the mask to drop.
"Everly—"
"You've been fucking with probability. Stacking the deck—literally—against me and then sitting there eating my fries while I dealt with the fallout.
" My voice cracks and I hate it, hate him for making it crack.
"You made me laugh. You asked about my family.
And the whole time, you were—what? Fucking with me just for the hell of it? "
He doesn't deny it. That's the worst part. He doesn't even try.
"I wanted to see what you'd do," he says quietly. The charm is gone. What's underneath is sharper, almost careful. "When everything went wrong. Whether you'd crumble or adapt."
"And? What's your verdict?"
His cards have gone still. First time I've ever seen that.
"You're still here," he says, like it means something.
"Most people would have crumbled. Transferred.
Crawled to a fraternity begging for protection.
You just keep getting back up." He looks at me, really looks, and there's something in his green eyes I can't name.
"You get knocked down and you keep going, and I—"
He stops himself.
"Anyway. I got what I needed."
"Great." The word tastes like ash. "Happy to be your fucking science project."
"That's not—"
"Three presidents." I back away from the table. "Three different flavors of cruelty. Callum threatens me in a hallway. Atlas tries to fry me with lightning. And you—you pretend to be my friend so you could study how much I could take before I broke."
His jaw tightens. "I wasn't pretending—"
"Weren't you?"
He opens his mouth. Closes it. For the first time since I've met him, Felix Ferrix doesn't have anything to say.
"You got what you wanted. Whatever sick reaction you’ve been looking for, whoever you’re reporting to—Callum or Atlas or someone I don’t know because I just got here, and as we established, I have no idea what’s going on.
” The injustice of it is a lump of pain in my throat.
“So from now on, just stay away from me. "
I turn before the tears can fall. Walk out with my spine straight, my chin up, because that's what I do.
I make it all the way back to Bellamy Hall before I fall apart.
Brittany finds me sitting in the stairwell between the second and third floors, crying so hard I've given myself the hiccups.
She doesn't say anything at first. Just sits down on the step beside me and waits.
"Felix," I manage. "The bad luck—all of it was him. The whole time he was fucking with me, using his chaos magic to give me bad luck."
"I know."
I lift my head. "You knew?"
"I suspected. Tumult doesn't do anything without a reason, and he was spending way too much time with you for it to be some kind of genuine offer of friendship.
" She pulls a pack of tissues from her jacket—black, with little skulls on them—and holds them out.
"I figured you'd put it together yourself. You're not stupid."
"Then why didn't you warn me?"
"Because if I told you, you'd think I was paranoid. Now you've seen it with your own eyes." Her voice is matter-of-fact, but not unkind. "Now you know what they are. All of them."
I blow my nose. It's ugly and loud and I don't care.
"He asked about my family, Brittany. He asked me what it was like being the only one with magic, and he looked at me like he actually—" I can't finish.
"Yeah." She's quiet for a second. "Felix is so charming that you can’t even tell when he’s being mean. That part is the shittiest."
We sit there for a while. The stairwell smells like old stone and someone's burnt coffee, and the fluorescent light flickers in a way that's either a wiring problem or a ghost. At Nyxhaven, it could be either. As far as I know ghosts are real, after all.
"Brittany?"
"What."
"You're the only person here who's been honest with me."
She wrinkles her nose. "Don't make it weird."
"I'm serious."
"And I'm seriously telling you not to make it weird." She stands, brushes off her black jeans. "Come on. You look like shit and I have leftover pizza."
I follow her back to our room, shaking off my hurt. Feet bare on the mattress and legs crossed, I eat cold pepperoni on my bed while doom metal rattles the windows. Herbert peeks out from under Brittany's bed, his beady eyes fixed on me.
"Your spider is staring at me."
"He's concerned."
"About what?"
"The crying into pizza. It's undignified."
I laugh. Soggy and broken, but real. Herbert retreats under the bed, apparently satisfied.
Three presidents. Three tests. Three different methods: intimidation, violence, manipulation.
I don't know yet what Ren Ashford has in store. But I'm done being surprised.
I finish my pizza, pull out my homework, and start studying. Because that's what I do. I get knocked down, I cry about it, and then I get back up to face the day.
They're all so focused on what I am that none of them have stopped to think about who I am.
That's going to be their mistake.