Chapter 18 #2
"The wraith attacks," I say, moving on because dwelling in this particular moment isn't going to help either of us. "Three students gone. Caspian thinks someone is using the breach points as traps. Do you have the same read?"
His shoulders drop a fraction. The shift back to operational is visible, and I recognize it because I do the same thing, find the problem that needs solving and climb inside it until the other things quiet down.
"Yes," he says. "The pattern is too deliberate.
The attacks are concentrated around specific structural weaknesses in the Veil, and those weaknesses have been appearing in sequence rather than at random.
" He moves away from the window, toward his desk.
"Someone with intimate knowledge of the Veil's architecture is choosing where it fails. "
"That's a short list of people," I say.
"A very short list." He pulls a chair out from behind the desk but doesn't sit, just rests his hands on the back of it. "The students who disappeared. They were all documenting the breach patterns. Mapping them."
"So whoever is directing the attacks is cleaning up the people who might figure out the pattern." I work through it. "Which means the pattern would tell us something they don't want known."
"That's my current theory, yes."
"And Thane's father choosing this moment to threaten war," I say. "That's connected somehow."
Ryder's expression doesn't change, but the bond gives me something careful and watchful underneath his stillness. "Why do you say that?"
"Because nothing that's been happening here is isolated.
The wraith frequency, the disappearances, the political pressure on Thane, Caspian suddenly being called home.
" I sit on the edge of a student desk, not because I'm tired but because standing feels like it requires energy I'm redistributing toward thinking.
"Someone is moving pieces. All at once."
He studies me for a moment. "Yes. That's what I think as well."
"You were going to tell me this tonight."
"In a structured briefing," he says again, and there's something dry underneath it this time. "With documentation."
"Ryder. I found a severance ritual in the restricted wing and performed it on myself in a corridor. Documentation is not my primary love language."
His mouth does something brief and involuntary. "No. I've noticed that about you."
The room settles into something slightly less charged than it was when I walked in.
The bond is still running loud, still carrying the residue of what he felt through it when Caspian kissed me, that cold controlled fury wrapped around something that isn't fury at its core.
But it's quieter now. More like weather after a storm has decided not to fully break.
"What do I do about the breach points?" I ask. "Caspian told me to stay away. You're going to tell me the same thing."
"I'm going to tell you the same thing," he confirms.
"And if I think the pattern in the breach points is something I need to see directly? If the documentation everyone else has been keeping is now gone because the people keeping it disappeared?"
"Then you bring that argument to me before you go anywhere near the east wing.
" His voice goes flat again, but differently than before.
Firm. "You don't go alone. You don't go without telling someone where you are.
And you don't go without ward-breaking tools, because those breach points are being modified and the wards around them are not the original academy construction. "
"You've already looked at them," I say.
"This morning. While you were in your first class." He pulls out the chair and finally sits, like the admission has released something that was keeping him upright. "The east wing breach has three overlapping wards that weren't there last week. Two are standard containment. One is a tracking seal."
"Tracking who goes near it."
"Tracking who goes near it." He opens a drawer, takes out a folded piece of paper, and slides it across the desk toward me. "That's the seal's signature. If you see that pattern anywhere else in the academy, you walk away from it and you tell me immediately."
I take the paper. The sigil sketched on it is precise, sharp-edged, drawn with the economy of someone who has been doing this long enough that accuracy is automatic. I fold it and put it in my inside pocket.
"Someone is setting traps," I say.
"Someone has been setting traps." He leans back in the chair. "The question is whether they're trapping for information or for something else."
"Or for someone specific."
He doesn't answer that. He doesn't have to. The bond answers for him, a low heavy pull at the base of my chest that carries the weight of a conclusion he's already reached and hasn't said out loud.
Outside, the academy grounds have gone grey under a sky that can't decide between overcast and dark. Somewhere in the east wing, three students are absent from their rooms and the wraith frequency is climbing and someone with knowledge of the Veil's architecture is choosing where it breaks.
Caspian is leaving tonight. Thane is being pressured home. Ryder is sitting across from me with a controlled expression and an open bond that tells me more than his face does, and I have a folded piece of paper in my pocket with a tracking seal's signature on it.
The game is changing. I can feel it in the way the academy sits differently around me today, heavier, like a building that knows something its occupants don't yet.
"Go to your evening classes," Ryder says. "Don't take any route through the east wing. Come find me afterward."
"Come find you," I repeat. "Not a structured briefing?"
"Come find me," he says again, and his voice is quieter this time. "The bond running open like this in a building where someone is actively hunting makes me a better option than a briefing schedule."
I pick up my bag. Pause at the door. "For what it's worth," I say, not turning around. "What Caspian said. What he did. I wasn't expecting it."
Silence behind me. Then: "I know."
"Does knowing that help?"
A pause long enough that the question sits in the air between us and takes on weight.
"Ask me again when three students haven't just vanished and someone isn't leaving tracking seals on breach points," he says. "Right now I'm operating on a fairly narrow bandwidth."
Fair enough. I open the door.
"Angelic." My name. Not Fairmont. It stops me the way it always does, because he only uses it when he means something that the surname won't carry. "Be careful."
I don't look back. "I'm always careful."
"You performed a severance ritual on yourself in a public corridor," he says. "You are many things. Careful is not consistently one of them."
I leave before he can see me almost smile.
The corridor outside is empty. The academy presses in around me, cold stone and old magic and the particular silence of a building holding its breath.
Somewhere overhead, the clouds finish their decision and the sky goes fully dark at four in the afternoon, and the torches along the corridor walls flare brighter in response, throwing long shadows that move like they're thinking about it.
I walk. I keep to the main passages, away from the east wing, the tracking seal's shape sitting folded against my ribs. The bond runs steady behind my sternum, Ryder's watchfulness moving through it like a current that doesn't know how to stop.
Three students gone. Caspian leaving. Thane's father threatening war. Someone with Veil knowledge setting traps in the breach points.
The game is changing, all right. I just haven't figured out yet who's playing it, or what they think winning looks like.
But I'm going to find out. That's not bravery. That's just the only option I've ever really had.