XVI
By lunchtime, the cafeteria had dissolved into its usual chaos—voices ricocheting off tile like marbles in a jar. I followed Penny toward our table near the windows, my tray balanced in my hands like an offering I had no appetite for.
Tess was mid-rant, punctuating her point with a French fry, while Nico hunched over his phone, thumbs scrolling at lightning speed.
Penny dropped her tray with a theatrical sigh.
“Clear some space, peasants.”
She snapped open a Tupperware container with a flourish, the scent of last night’s roast spilling across the table.
Nico reached for a piece.
She clicked the lid shut.
“Nuh-uh. This was meant for Julian.”
He paused, thumbs stilling on his phone.
“Roth? Haven’t seen him all day. Skipped first period, too.”
“Figures,” Penny muttered, popping a bite into her own mouth with exaggerated relish. “He ghosts me the one time I try to be nice. His loss.”
My tray sat untouched as I watched the cafeteria doors.
Every time they swung open, my pulse jumped. Every time it wasn’t Heaton, the anxiety in my chest grew.
“Wow.” Tess leaned across the table, aiming another fry at me. “You’re quieter than usual. Someone die or something?”
The joke hit too close.
I forced a smile. “I’m just tired.”
Penny poked at my tray with her fork, her grin softening into something uncomfortably like worry.
“You’ve been just tired for days, Maddie.”
I dropped my gaze, picking at the corner of my napkin until it tore.
“Seriously. I’m fine.”
She let it go with a shrug, but the weight of her stare remained—a quiet warning that I was running out of ways to stay silent.
I trudged across the gym floor, my head stuffed with cotton. Whistles sliced through the air, but my brain was still buffering, unable to process the game in real time.
“October, eyes up!”
The warning came too late.
The volleyball struck between my shoulder blades with a hollow thwump. Laughter rippled across the court as heat rushed up my neck.
I didn’t need to look to know Sasha and her pack were staring.
“What’s this? Target practice?”
Coach Nelson’s voice boomed, rattling the rafters. He strode toward us, retired-Army posture drawn in rigid, unforgiving lines. His gaze lingered on Sasha a beat too long.
“You want combat drills? Enlist. Until then—pass the ball, Hayes.”
A few laughs broke the tension, and the game lurched back into motion.
The rest of the period blurred into sweat, floor wax, and the faint tang of humiliation. Every sound was a needle in my eardrums. When Nelson finally called it, relief washed over me in a cold, clean wave.
“Pack it in!” he barked, ushering us toward the locker room. “Save the aggression for Friday. If you can keep the ball on the right side of the net, we might actually beat Springville.”
Sasha and her crew whooped, already feeding off a victory that hadn’t happened yet. I kept my head down, nursing the burn between my shoulders.
Outside, a vast, open sky stretched above, and a breeze tugged at my hair, chasing away the last echoes of the gym’s roar. Beyond the track, the greenhouse caught the light like a glass jewel, its panes flashing brilliant white against the stubborn, dying green of the fields.
Mrs. Ellwood stood ahead, sunhat tilted at a jaunty angle. She clapped her gloved hands as we approached.
“Surprise, adventurers!” she called, tapping a clipboard. “Five observations of the local ecosystem. Plants, bugs, clouds—if it’s alive, it counts. Make a list, sketch if you dare, but don’t come back without proof you’ve left the pavement.”
A chorus of groans followed, but the class shuffled into the grass anyway. I drifted toward the back, exhaustion clinging to me like a second sweater.
Every step felt heavy.
Then, like a cloud passing over the sun, something shifted.
Heaton leaned against the greenhouse wall, half-lost in shadow.
For one disorienting second, I thought he was a trick of the glass—some stress-born hallucination my nervous system had invented to make the day worse. Then he pushed off the wall and crossed the space between us without a sound.
“Miss me, October.”
Irritation flared hotter than the sting between my shoulders.
After second period? He had some nerve to sound amused. I hugged my notebook tighter and kept walking. Heaton fell into step beside me, his long stride easily matching mine.
“If looks could kill.”
“I must have missed the part where you kept your word.”
“I had to verify something first.”
He said it lightly, but his eyes stayed on me.
“Tell me. Did anyone else skip class today?”
The question snagged.
Penny’s leftovers.
Nico’s comment about first period.
Julian.
The realization tightened before I wanted it to. Heaton stooped, plucked a blade of grass from the edge of the field, and rolled it once between his fingers.
“I wasn’t the only empty chair this morning,” he said. “You should have noticed.”
“What does Julian have to do with anything?”
“He’s Lantern Society.”
I gave a short, dry laugh. “The wannabe Ghostbusters?”
“If that’s what helps you sleep at night.”
He stepped closer, not enough to touch, more than enough to crowd the air.
“They collect leverage, October. Secrets. Power. And when they don’t get what they want . . . ”
His gaze didn’t leave mine.
“People disappear.”
My voice thinned. “And Julian?”
“He’s closer to the center than most.”
“Center of what?”
“The part they don’t print on flyers.”
I stared at him.
“And right now,” he added, “he’s circling something he thinks doesn’t see him coming.”
Cold crept under my skin.
“Circling what?”
“You.”
His eyes narrowed.
“And whatever your father left behind.”
My grip tightened on the spiral notebook until the wire bit into my palm.
“You think Julian broke into my house?”
He looked at the dirt, then back to me.
“I think you’re asking the wrong question.”
“How would you know any of this unless you were there?”
His expression didn’t change.
“If I had been, you’d know.”
The distant sounds of the class faded behind us.
“The Lanterns aren’t just a club,” he continued. “That’s their public face. The mask they wear so people like you don’t look too closely at the darkness underneath.”
My pen jerked across the page, leaving a black gash in the margin of my notes.
“So, what? You’re here to warn me?”
“No,” he said, voice flattening. “I’m here to make you an offer.”
I looked down and forced my pen to move, sketching meaningless shapes to keep my hands from shaking.
He watched the motion, head tilting.
“What did they take?” he asked. “When they broke in?”
“Nothing.” The word came out too fast. Too defensive. “They couldn’t get in. Harvey built that basement like a vault.”
Heaton’s eyes narrowed.
“Let me guess. Retina scanners. Palm readers. Layers of encryption.”
A chill washed through me.
“You think that stops anyone with enough motive and a scalpel?”
The image hit so fast and clean I swayed.
He saw it.
Then shrugged, almost lazily.
“You wanted to know whether I was there. Trust me, October. You’d know if I came calling.”
I squared my shoulders and forced my chin up.
“Good to know. Now are you going to get to the offer, or do you just enjoy sounding threatening?”
Something shifted in his face.
“The Lanterns couldn’t get in,” he said. “But you could.”
He reached out and dragged one cold finger down the strap of my backpack.
Static skipped under my skin.
“Sorry. I don’t have that kind of access.”
“Maybe not.” He rocked back on his heels. “But I can get you through the door.”
Every nerve in me locked.
“And if I do,” he said, “you’ll owe me.”
“What do you want, Heaton?”
He reached into his jacket and slipped a folded photograph into my hand.
At the center of the image was a palm-sized compass, its cloudy crystalline face set inside a dark, skeletal frame that made it look older than it should have been.
My stomach turned.
I knew it. I had seen it before, half-buried in ash after the lab explosion, its surface split clean.
“That’s—”
“The Aetherium Compass.”
I looked from the photograph to his cold, steady eyes.
“Don’t you get it? This is my dad’s world, not mine. This means nothing to me.”
“No,” he breathed. “That’s the problem.”
His eyes didn’t leave mine.
“You still think you get to stand outside this. You don’t.”
A draft moved between us, cold enough to lift the hair at the back of my neck.
“What your father was using that for matters,” he said. “In the wrong hands, it gets ugly fast.”
He tapped the edge of the photograph once.
“If I get you into that lab, the Compass comes to me. Not Julian. Not the Lanterns.”
His voice dropped.
“Me.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Deadly.”
A bitter laugh escaped me.
“So that’s your grand plan? I hand over my dad’s life’s work to the guy who’s been stalking me through parking lots and greenhouse tables?”
“That’s your version of this?”
“It’s the obvious one.”
He leaned closer.
“You want answers,” he said. “You want Harvey.”
His eyes flicked once to the photograph in my hand, then back to my face.
“I want the thing that put all of this in motion.”
He let the words hang there until I couldn’t remember what the sun felt like on my skin.
No.
The word burned through me.
No to his terms. No to the way he said it, like my choices had already been narrowed down to one. No to my dad’s legacy becoming another piece on someone else’s board.
But then Harvey’s voice cut through the noise in my head, sharp as static.
Be careful. They’re not who they say they are.
There’s a file . . .
If I walked away now, I was severing the only thread that led back to him.
“And you believe my dad was using this,” I said, looking down at the strange crystal sphere in the image, “to find something?”
“I know he was.”
“And you want to use it.”
His jaw shifted once.
“I want to finish what he started.”
Silence pressed in, taut as wire.
I tightened my hold on the photograph, the paper crinkling beneath my thumb.
“If I help you,” I asked slowly, “what does that make me?”
The hardness in his expression dissolved, replaced by a stark, unflinching clarity.
“A survivor,” he said. “If you’re smart.”
“And if I refuse?”
A dangerous light kindled in his eyes.
“Then you keep playing catch-up while they tear through what’s left of your life.”
I wanted to believe he was wrong. That I could keep my life intact.
But the photograph felt heavier by the second.
And the truth was already sinking its teeth into me.