Chapter 7
FELIX
I've been holding a losing hand for three weeks, and it's time to show my cards.
We're in Texas. I hate Texas.
The heat here feels like a punishment—the kind of heat that makes your clothes stick to your skin and your thoughts go slow as molasses. Every motel pool is a lukewarm bath pretending to be refreshing.
We've been driving since Oklahoma, avoiding interstates, sticking to back roads that all look the same: flat, brown, endless, dotted with gas stations selling jerky and regret.
I'm at the wheel. Everyone else is asleep except Everly, who's riding shotgun with her bare feet on the dashboard and the window cracked, reading one of those gas station paperbacks she keeps collecting.
This one has a shirtless cowboy on the cover.
She's on page fifty and hasn't noticed me observing her.
I observe everything. It's not a choice—it's the way chaos magic works.
You see the cards. All of them. Every hand in play, every card still in the deck, every possible draw.
You can't unsee probability once you've learned to read it.
The world becomes a game you didn't ask to play, and every outcome is a card someone hasn't flipped yet.
Right now the cards are bad.
I've been running the odds since Oklahoma, and every way I shuffle the deck comes up the same. We can't keep this up. The Administration found us in two weeks. They'll find us again. Faster, next time, because they'll be angry, and angry people bet recklessly, and reckless bets land.
"You're thinking too loud," Everly says without looking up from her cowboy book.
"I'm driving."
"You're driving and thinking too loud. Your jaw does this thing, it's really obvious." She gestures at her own jaw, makes an exaggerated grinding motion. "Like you're chewing through a problem."
I stop clenching. Annoying. I didn't realize I had a tell.
"I know someone," I say.
She puts the book down. In the rearview mirror, Callum's eyes open—he wasn't asleep. Of course he wasn't. Callum Bolingbroke doesn't sleep in moving vehicles. Too vulnerable. Too much trust required.
"Someone who might help," I continue. "With the bond. The proximity issue, at least."
Ren stirs in the back. Atlas doesn't—he actually is asleep, which is rare enough that nobody wants to wake him. Let the man have two consecutive hours without lightning. It's a gift.
"Who?" Everly asks.
"His name is Cyrus Veck. Former Tumult professor at Nyxhaven. Taught there thirty-something years ago, quit, walked away, lives off-grid in the New Mexico desert."
"And you're telling us this now." Callum's voice is dry. Cold. He's been sitting back there with his eyes closed for three hundred miles, waiting for me to stop lying, and honestly, fair. "Three weeks of running, and you mention this now."
"I was waiting for the right moment."
"Were you."
"The right moment being: after we got attacked, after you tossed your phone in the dirt, after it became undeniably clear that wandering aimlessly across the Midwest was no longer a viable play.
" I adjust the mirror so I can see him. His face gives me nothing.
It never does—Callum's face is a closed hand, every card tucked away.
"I'm not careless, Bolingbroke. I'm strategic. "
"You're a liar is what you are."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Everly cuts in before it can escalate. She's good at that—reading the room, finding the gap between two people about to go for each other's throats and wedging herself in like a doorstop. "How do you know this guy, Felix?"
"I don't. Not personally." I take the next exit—the one heading south toward Dallas, which is the opposite of where we've been going, and I've been nudging our route this direction for two days without telling anyone.
Small adjustments. A missed turn here, a closed road there.
Manipulation is a gentle art when you want it to be.
"He taught my mentor's mentor. Chaos magic lineage—there aren't many of us, the bloodline runs thin.
Cyrus Veck was supposedly the best. Then he saw something at Nyxhaven that broke him, and he left. "
"Saw what?" Ren, awake now, sitting up, his healer's focus already sharpening on the word broke.
"I don't know. Nobody talks about it. That's the point—when a chaos mage doesn't want to be found, the world bends around them. You don't find them. You miss the turn. You get a flat tire. Your attention slides right past like they're a card someone palmed."
"So how do we find him?" Everly again.
"That's the part I'm less sure about."
Silence. The Texas highway shimmers with heat.
"You've been driving us toward a person you've never met," Callum says slowly, "in a location you can't pinpoint, based on a thirty-year-old rumor about a man who doesn't want to be found and has all the skill to make that happen."
"When you put it that way, it sounds worse than it is."
"It sounds like exactly what it is. A bluff."
I grin. Can't help it. Because he's right—it is a bluff. Every good play is. You don't win by holding the best hand. You win by making everyone believe that you do.
"Cyrus can fix the proximity problem," I say.
"The pain when we separate. He's the only person alive who might be able to.
And if we keep running without a destination, we're dead.
Every version of the hand comes up dead.
Those are the cards. I've looked at them from every angle and they don't change. "
Everly is quiet for a long time. Then: "New Mexico."
"New Mexico."
"And this Cyrus person. You think he'll help?"
I want to tell her yes. Want to lay down a confident card, the Felix Ferrix special, charm and certainty and a wink that says trust me, darling, I've got this.
But she's looking at me with those grey eyes, and the charm doesn't work on Everly Grey.
Never has. She sees right through the patter to the shaking hands underneath, and lying to her right now would be the kind of bet you don't recover from.
"I think he's the only play we've got," I say.
She nods. Puts her feet back on the dashboard. Picks up the cowboy book.
"Then drive south."
I drive south.
In the back seat, Callum says nothing, which is his version of agreement. Ren leans his head against the window and closes his eyes. Atlas sleeps through the whole thing, bless his destructive heart.
The Texas heat shimmers. The road stretches. I've shown my cards and the table hasn't flipped, and that's the best I could've hoped for.
I just didn't tell them the rest. The part I read between the lines of my mentor's stories, the thing about Cyrus Veck that made the old professor's eyes go careful and his voice go quiet. What the Administration does to grimoires. What handled means, in the Bolingbroke family's vocabulary.
Some cards you hold until the river.
I glance at Everly, barefoot, reading about cowboys, trusting me to drive her toward a man who might help or might be a ghost, and I read the table the way I always do—every hand showing, every bluff visible, every card in play whether people know they're holding them or not.
The hand for making it through the summer: a pair of twos at best. The hand for her ever looking at me without suspicion: worse. The hand I keep playing anyway—nudging our luck, stacking the deck in her favor whether she knows it or not:
All in. That bet's been placed since the first time I watched her get knocked down then get back up again. For better or worse, I'm betting against the house.