Chapter 29 Everly
The day passes in a strange, pressurized silence.
We can't leave immediately—Callum points out that the campus security wards track all exits during daylight, and Catalina will have doubled monitoring after the amphitheater. We need to wait for dark. We need a plan. We need somewhere to go.
Atlas paces. The room is too small for it—four steps, turn, four steps—but his body won't stop moving, his conductor sparking at the tips, the bond broadcasting his agitation in hot pulses that make my skin prickle.
Through the connection I feel him like weather building—pressure and charge and the desperate need for a release valve that doesn't exist in a ten-by-twelve dorm room.
"Stop pacing," Brittany says, for the fourth time.
"I can't."
"You're making the lamp flicker."
"I can't stop."
Callum sits rigid on the edge of my desk.
He came in an hour ago without speaking, took the corner position like a soldier reporting to a post, and started making lists on his phone.
What to take. What to leave. Which exits have the weakest coverage.
His thumbs move with mechanical precision, and through the bond his emotions are locked so tight I can barely feel them—just a faint cold pulse, the machinery of a mind running full speed behind walls he's rebuilt out of sheer survival instinct.
He came from his mother's office. I felt him arrive through the bond before he knocked—the cold presence slotting into the cluster, heavier than before. Heavier and different. Something changed in that office. He won't say what.
Felix has laid his cards on the floor in a grid.
Probability mapping—a physical representation of possible outcomes.
He's been shifting cards for two hours, muttering numbers, his green eyes tracking patterns I can't see.
The look on his face is the look of someone running the same equation on a loop and not liking where it lands.
Ren sits in the desk chair with his eyes closed. He hasn't spoken since we decided. The bandage on his palm needs changing. He hasn't asked. His heartbeat in the bond is the steadiest of the four—the one fixed point, the metronome the rest of us orbit.
At noon, Brittany goes to class.
She actually goes—walks out the door with her backpack and Herbert, the flat expression of a woman who refuses to let a magical crisis disrupt her attendance record. She returns at one with notes from Magical Theory, a sandwich she stole from the faculty lounge, and intelligence.
"Security's doubled at the main gates. Ward sweep scheduled for nine PM—they're checking every building for concentrated magical signatures." She drops the sandwich on the desk. "The east gate has the lightest coverage. One guard. One ward. Twelve-minute reset cycle."
"How do you know the ward cycle?" Callum asks.
"Because I've been mapping the security systems since September.
" She pulls a folded paper from her jacket—hand-drawn, meticulous.
The campus in detail, exits marked in red, security positions in blue, ward patterns in green.
Refresh cycles noted in her small, precise handwriting.
"I'm a mundane-born student at a school that treats mundane-borns like disposable labor.
I plan exit strategies the way other people plan outfits. "
She hands the map to Callum. He studies it. Through the bond I feel something shift in him—a grudging recognition that he's holding a document more thorough than anything his mother's security team has produced.
"This is good work," he says.
"I know."
"Where do we go?" Atlas has stopped pacing.
He's at the window, looking out at the campus—the oaks, the spires, the Gothic buildings catching the last of the afternoon light.
Through the bond I feel what leaving costs him.
This place is the only stable ground he's had since a kitchen on a Tuesday.
His father brought him here after his mother died.
These buildings, these storms, this sky—it's the closest thing to home he's got left, and he's about to walk away from it.
"Not a random direction," Callum says. "We need somewhere specific. Warded. Off-grid."
"I know someone." Felix collects his cards from the grid in one smooth motion.
His face has settled into something I haven't seen before: decision.
Not calculation. A choice made without enough data, based on something other than math.
"Professor Wheeler. Former Tumult faculty—left Nyxhaven eight years ago.
Publicly a sabbatical. Actually fired for researching grimoire history outside approved channels. "
"A disgraced professor," Callum says.
"A disgraced professor with a warded house in the Vermont mountains that doesn't appear on any magical registry, who has spent eight years studying what the Administration does to grimoires, and who contacted me three years ago through a probability channel because she's been waiting for one to surface.
" Felix meets Callum's stare. "Unless you've got a better option.
Which you don't. Because your mother owns every option on this campus. "
Silence. The clock tower chimes three outside. A normal afternoon. Normal students going to normal classes. Not five people in a dorm room planning to flee a university that's been disappearing people for fifty years.
"Vermont," I say. "How far?"
"Six hours. Maybe seven." Felix pockets his cards. "I can nudge probabilities to get us through the gate. Past that, we improvise."
"I can mask our biological signatures," Ren says. Eyes open now. Voice rough but present. "Blood magic. It won't hold forever—a few days—but it'll keep them from tracking us through standard channels."
"I'll shadow the car." Callum, quiet. "Mother's monitoring network relies on light-based wards. Shadows block light."
"Storm cover for the exit," Atlas says. "I can pull clouds over the east side. Kill the visibility."
"My car," I say. "It's in the east lot. I can—"
"No." Brittany's voice, from the closet door.
Flat. "I checked on my way back from class.
Your car has a ward on it. Administrative lockdown—they put them on any vehicle registered to a student under investigation.
Your engine won't turn over. You try to force it and the ward triggers an alert to campus security. "
My stomach drops. Catalina thought of that.
Of course she thought of that—she had hours between the amphitheater and now, and one of the first things she did was make sure I couldn't drive away from whatever she's planning.
The woman who checked her phone and scheduled a follow-up appointment also disabled my car.
I look at them. Four men, each offering the magic that's theirs. Twenty-four hours ago they were channeling that magic into me because a woman told them to. Now they're planning to use it to run from her.
"Midnight," I say. "The east gate."
"Midnight," Callum confirms.
Brittany has been leaning against the closet door through all of this, arms crossed, Herbert on her shoulder.
She's been listening with the particular focus she brings to problems she's already solved—the look of someone who figured out the answer ten minutes ago and is waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"You'll need my car," she says.
"You're coming with us," I say. Obviously. Of course she's coming. She has the car, the map, the exit strategy. She's Brittany. She's my—
"I'm not."
The words hit the room like a slap. Everyone goes still. Felix's cards stop. Atlas turns from the window. Through the bond I feel four spikes of confusion that aren't mine, but they're nothing compared to what's happening in my own chest.
"What?"
"I'm not bonded to you." Her voice is flat.
Practical. The voice she uses for engineering problems and security assessments and every other situation where emotion is a liability she can't afford.
"The bond means you five can't separate.
I can. Which means someone needs to stay behind and cover for you. "
"Brittany—"
"If all six of us disappear, Catalina knows immediately.
If five disappear and one stays, that's different.
I can buy you time. Create confusion. Report that I saw you heading south when you're going north.
File a missing persons report with campus security that sends them in the wrong direction.
" She uncrosses her arms. Takes the car keys from the hook on the closet door.
Holds them in her palm. "Someone has to make sure you have something to come back to. "
"You'll be alone. With her. With Catalina."
"I've been alone at this school since I got here. One more semester won't kill me." She says it dry, dismissive, the Brittany deadpan that deflects everything. But her hand is closed tight around the keys. Her knuckles are white.
"I'm not leaving you here."
"You don't have a choice." She steps forward and takes my hand and opens my fingers and puts the keys in my palm, and her fingers are cold and her grip is firm and she holds on for three seconds longer than she needs to.
"You're a grimoire. They're bonded to you.
Catalina wants to handle you. If you stay here, you disappear like the other twenty-three. I'm not watching that happen."
"And if she comes after you?"
"She won't. I'm nothing. Failing Sanguis student, mundane-born, academic probation. I'm not worth the paperwork." The deadpan holds. Herbert shifts on her shoulder—a small adjustment, legs bracing. "Besides. Someone has to feed Herbert. He has a very specific diet."
It's the Herbert line that breaks me.