Chapter 15

Something was wrong with Kezia.

She sat three rows ahead of me in Echoes, and I'd never paid her much attention before. Just another first-year I passed in hallways. But that morning she looked hollowed out. Dark circles under her eyes, shoulders folded in, moving through the motions without being present. When Professor Aldridge asked her to demonstrate a basic reading, she just stood there. Staring at the practice wall like she'd forgotten why she was in the room.

Aldridge moved on without comment. The class shifted uncomfortably. Kezia sat back down and didn't look up again.

After class I caught up with her in the hallway. I'm not sure why. Something about the way she'd stood there, the blankness of it, pulled at me in a way I couldn't ignore.

"Hey. Are you okay?"

She looked at me like she was trying to place my face. The weird transfer kid. Nobody she'd ever had a real conversation with.

"Lucia's gone," she said. "Sent an email last night saying there was a family emergency. She's not coming back."

"That's awful. I'm sorry."

"The thing is..." She hesitated, glancing around like she was worried about being overheard. "She didn't say goodbye. We've been roommates for two months. She didn't knock on my door, didn't leave a note. Just an email at 2am and then her stuff was gone by morning. They said her family came for her things, but I didn't hear anyone."

"Maybe you were sleeping deeply?"

"I wasn't sleeping. I was up late studying. I would have heard." Her voice cracked. "We were supposed to go to breakfast together. She always gets the good eggs before they run out and saves me one. She wouldn't just leave without telling me."

"Was anything else missing? Besides her stuff?"

Kezia's face tightened. "Everything. Even her tokens. She had this shell from her grandmother's beach in Veracruz. She carried it everywhere. Touched it before tests, before matches, before anything that mattered." She wiped at her eyes. "She never would have left that behind. Never."

I didn't know Lucia well. But I'd met her once, in the hallway near the library. Crowded between classes, bodies pressing close, the usual chaos of students rushing to be somewhere else. Her shoulder had brushed mine. Just a second of contact.

What I'd felt wasn't someone with family trouble on her mind.

It was something draining out of her. Like watching water spiral down a sink, except the water was Lucia herself. Whatever made her a Zant, whatever she'd accumulated just by being alive and feeling things, it was bleeding out of her. And she didn't understand why. Confusion. Fear. The particular terror of feeling yourself become less without knowing the cause.

But there was something else too. Something I hadn't had words for at the time. Not just the draining, but the space it was draining from. Like I could feel the shape of what should have been there, the capacity inside her that was being emptied. A container being hollowed out. She had room for so much more than what was left.

I'd pulled away before I could feel more. Kept walking. Didn't think about it again until now.

"Did she seem okay?" I asked. "Before the email, I mean. Was anything wrong?"

Kezia wiped at her eyes. "She'd been tired lately. More than usual. Said she was having trouble sleeping, trouble focusing. But that's just Mudwick, right? Everyone's exhausted."

"Yeah. Everyone's exhausted."

"It doesn't make sense. Her family lives in New Mexico. That's a two-day drive. How did they get here before sunrise without notice?"

I didn't have an answer for her.

Kezia took a shaky breath. "Sorry. I don't even know why I'm telling you all this. You didn't even know her."

"It's okay. Sometimes it's easier to talk to someone who isn't already part of it."

She nodded slowly. "I should get to class."

She walked away, shoulders hunched, still hugging her books. I watched her go and thought about Lucia Medina saving good eggs for her roommate. About a shell from Veracruz that someone carried everywhere. About a person who'd been real and present and alive, and who was now just an email sent at 2am.

The whispers started before lunch. I heard them in the hallway between classes. Two upperclassmen talking in low voices, going quiet when they noticed me passing.

"...said she's recruiting again..."

"...that's just rumors, nobody knows..."

"...third one this year if you count the summer..."

Third one. That stopped me. I'd heard about Lucia. But two others?

I didn't catch the name they mentioned. But I caught the fear.

In the dining hall, a group of students at the next table were having the same conversation. This time I heard the name clearly.

"Miriam."

One of them noticed me listening and shot me a look. I turned back to my food, but not before catching more.

A second-year with dark hair was leaning in, voice low but intense. "My brother's friend knew someone who got recruited. Before they graduated. Miriam's network found them, promised them everything. Power, connections, a place in the real hierarchy. They disappeared a month later."

"That's just stories," someone else said. "Miriam Moss hasn't been seen in years."

"She doesn't need to be seen. She has people everywhere. And she knows exactly who to target." The second-year's voice dropped even lower, but I still caught it. "Scholarship students. First-gen. People nobody will miss."

"Who's Miriam?" I asked when the group sat down.

Dao's hands went still. He'd been fidgeting with a salt shaker, turning it end over end the way he always did. Now his fingers just stopped.

"Where'd you hear that name?"

"People are talking. Something about Lucia leaving. And two others before her?"

"Three students this year," Dao said quietly. "Two over the summer, before you got here. Administration said transfers both times. Family reasons. Same story every time. Nobody talked about it much because everyone was on break. But now Lucia makes three." He glanced around, then leaned closer. "Miriam's... it's complicated. She was a student here, a long time ago. Now she's something else. The teachers don't like us talking about her."

"Why not?"

"Because she's dangerous. Or she was. Or she is." He shook his head. "The stories don't all agree. Some people say she went crazy and started draining practitioners. Others say she's building an army. Others say she's dead and the stories are just to scare first-years."

Thaddeus set down his fork carefully. "People leave schools, Dao. It happens. Three people having bad luck in the same year doesn't mean there's some kind of..." He waved his hand vaguely. "Conspiracy."

"Three family emergencies in three months. And the official explanation is the same every time. Family reasons. Family reasons. Family reasons." Dao's voice was flat. Not angry yet, but getting there. "My family taught me that official explanations are for people who benefit from them. The people in charge tell you everything's fine. And then you wake up and your name means nothing and nobody will explain why."

Thaddeus flinched. Small, barely visible, but I caught it. His hand drifted to his pocket where he kept his grandmother's token, the polished wood he reached for when things got heavy. His fingers closed around it through the fabric.

"I'm not saying we shouldn't ask questions," he said. "I'm saying maybe we should ask the people whose job it is to answer them. The headmaster. Our advisors. People who actually know what's going on."

"When I touched her last week, something was wrong," I said, keeping my voice low. "She was being drained. Whatever makes us Zants, it was leaking out of her and she didn't know why."

The table went quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of people eating. The kind of quiet where everyone stops moving at the same time.

"Drained how?" Sasha asked. She'd been listening without speaking since I'd brought up the name, which was normal for Sasha. What wasn't normal was what I was picking up from her. Not the usual careful attention, the sorting and filing. Something tighter. Like she was bracing for the answer.

"Like she was becoming less. Emptying out. You know how you can feel people's histories? The weight of everything they've experienced? Hers was getting lighter. Thinner. Like someone was siphoning it away." I paused, trying to find the right words. "And there was this space. Inside her. I could feel how much room she had, how much capacity. And most of it was empty. Like a house with all the furniture taken out."

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Dao was staring at his hands, still flat on the table. Thaddeus had stopped reaching for his token and was just sitting there, fork forgotten.

"That doesn't happen naturally," Dao said finally. His voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard before. Careful. Like he was handling something fragile. "People accumulate. They don't just lose what they've built up. Not like that. Not unless someone takes it."

"The two from the summer," Sasha said. "What do we know about them?"

"I don't know their names. Just that they left."

"Does anyone?" She looked around the table. Nobody answered. "Then we need to find out. Who they were. When exactly they left. What they had in common. If there's a pattern, we map it. If there isn't, we stop guessing."

"Come on, Sasha." Thaddeus shook his head. "These are people. You can't just turn them into a research project."

"I'm not turning them into anything. I'm trying to figure out what happened to them because nobody else seems interested in asking." She pulled out her notebook. Already writing. "Lucia was first-gen. Scholarship. I know because we had the same orientation group. They put all the scholarship students together the first day." She looked up. "Were the summer students in that group too? Does anyone know?"

"I wasn't here over the summer," Dao said. "But the rumors I heard..." He stopped. Started again. "People were saying they were scholarship kids. Both of them."

Sasha wrote that down. Then she sat very still, pen hovering over the page, and I watched something shift behind her eyes. The analysis catching up to the implication.

"Three students," she said slowly. "All scholarship. All first-gen." She looked at Thaddeus and the steadiness in her voice cost her something. "That's me, Thaddeus. That's my profile. First-gen, scholarship, parents who don't even know what this place really is. If I disappeared tomorrow, who would they call? What would they even say?"

Thaddeus opened his mouth. Closed it. His fingers tightened around the token in his pocket.

"My grandmother used to warn me about this." Dao pushed his food away. He was choosing his words now, each one deliberate. "Taking saturation from people instead of places. She had a name for it."

He stopped. I could feel him deciding how far to go. How much of his family's shame to put on the table.

"Extraction," he said. "That's what she called the process."

"Coach Baptiste mentioned something like that," Thaddeus said slowly. "In Defensive Techniques. How to recognize when you're being drained. I thought it was theoretical."

"My grandmother didn't talk about it like theory." Dao's jaw was tight. "She said the real crime wasn't what my grandfather did. It was what he found evidence of. Something worse."

He stopped again. Picked up the salt shaker. Set it back down without turning it.

"People disappearing," he said. "People nobody would miss. She had another word for it, for the whole thing. Not just the extraction but the choosing. The targeting." He looked at the table instead of at us. "She called it culling."

The word landed on the table and stayed there.

I was watching Marcus when Dao said it. Not on purpose. My eyes had drifted to him during Dao's pause, and I caught it. The moment the word registered. His whole body went rigid, just for a second. Not surprise. Recognition. The look of someone hearing a thing they'd heard before, in a context that made it suddenly, terribly real.

Then the armor slammed shut. Shoulders turned, jaw locked, everything sealed. He stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor and two tables turned to look.

"I have somewhere to be."

He was gone before anyone could respond. Sasha watched him all the way to the door. She didn't say anything about it. Just turned back to her notebook and kept writing.

"What are you going to do with that list?" Thaddeus asked.

"I don't know yet." She wrote without looking up. "But if I don't build it, nobody will."

He didn't argue. Just sat there with his hand around his token and the first crack in his faith spreading quietly across his face.

That afternoon, the school called an assembly.

It was unusual enough that people murmured as they filed into the old chapel. Mid-week, no warning, just an announcement during third period that all students should report to the main hall. I found my friends in the crowd and we claimed seats near the middle. Sasha had her notebook. Dao's hands were moving again, turning a pen cap over and over between his fingers.

Headmaster Vane walked to the front of the room looking tired but composed. The same warmth I'd noticed at orientation was still there, but tempered now with something heavier. Behind him stood a silver-haired man in a corduroy jacket, hands clasped in front of him like he was at a funeral.

"I know there have been concerns," Vane said, his voice carrying without effort. "Rumors. Whispers in hallways. I wanted to address them directly."

The room went quiet.

"Three students have left Mudwick this year for family emergencies. This is unusual. I understand why it's caused worry." He gestured to the man behind him. "Dean Pemberton has personally spoken with all three families. These departures were voluntary. No one has been taken against their will."

Pemberton stepped forward slightly, nodding. "Mrs. Medina was very grateful for our support during a difficult time," he said. His voice was warm, grandfatherly. The kind of voice that made you want to believe whatever it told you. "Lucia is home safe with her family. She asked me to tell her classmates not to worry."

I watched him. From this distance I couldn't get much, but what I caught felt genuine. Concern for students. The particular heaviness of someone who'd delivered bad news too many times. Nothing sinister. Nothing hidden.

Either he believed what he was saying, or he was very good at lying.

Someone near the back raised a hand. "What about the Miriam stories?"

Vane's expression didn't change. "Miriam Moss is a name that surfaces whenever something unexplained happens. She's become a kind of institutional ghost story. That doesn't mean she's responsible for every student who needs to leave for personal reasons."

"But is she real?" someone else called out.

"She was a student here, many years ago. What she's become since then, I honestly don't know. No one does." He spread his hands. "What I do know is that your safety is my priority. If anyone has concrete concerns, anything they've seen or experienced that worries them, my door is open. Always."

The sincerity in his voice was unmistakable. I watched him, reading what I could from a distance. Concern. Frustration. The particular stress of someone who wanted to help and wasn't sure he had all the answers. Nothing hidden. Nothing calculated.

Just a headmaster trying to manage a difficult situation.

"We'll be increasing staff presence in common areas," Vane continued. "Not because we believe anyone is in danger, but because I want you to feel safe. Feel watched over. That's what Mudwick is supposed to be." He paused. "If any of you are struggling, with this or with anything else, please reach out. To me, to your professors, to each other. We're a community. We take care of our own."

The assembly ended with reminders about holiday schedules. Winter break was coming in a few weeks. Most students would go home. Life would continue.

I glanced at Sasha. She'd written the entire assembly in her notebook. Not notes. Transcription. Exact words.

Walking out, she leaned close. "He believes what he's saying."

"Yeah. He does."

"That doesn't mean it's true."

"No. It doesn't."

Beside us, Thaddeus was quiet. His token was in his hand now, not hidden in his pocket. He turned it over and over, the polished wood catching the light. He'd spent his whole life inside institutions that worked. Schools that kept you safe, families that told the truth, systems that functioned the way they were supposed to. You could see him trying to hold onto that. Trying to make room for what Vane had said inside a worldview that still had room for trust.

The effort showed.

After the assembly, I found Cross in her office. She looked up when I knocked, and something flickered across her face. Concern, maybe. Or calculation. It was gone before I could read it.

"Eli. Come in. Is everything alright?"

"I wanted to ask about Lucia. About what might have actually happened."

Cross's expression shifted. Careful now. Attentive. "The headmaster addressed that in assembly. Family emergency."

"Her roommate was awake all night. Didn't hear anyone come for her things. And her family lives in New Mexico."

"Sometimes families make arrangements quickly when there's a crisis. Private transport, friends in the area..." She spread her hands. "It's not as unusual as it might seem."

"People are saying Miriam's name."

Cross went very still.

"Where did you hear that?"

"Around. Students talking."

She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was different. Lower. More serious.

"Miriam Moss was brilliant but troubled. She left under difficult circumstances and her name became a kind of shorthand." Cross folded her hands on her desk. "Whenever something goes wrong, students blame Miriam. Bad grade? Miriam's curse. Lost your tokens? Miriam took them. Someone transfers out? Miriam recruited them." She shook her head. "It's superstition, Eli. Ghost stories that get passed down every year."

"But she was real."

"She was real. She's probably still alive somewhere. But the idea that she's running around kidnapping students from a school with this much security?" Cross almost smiled. "Think about it logically. We have wards. Faculty. The Headmaster himself is one of the most capable practitioners in the country. If someone were actually taking students, we'd know."

"Then why do people keep saying her name?"

"Because it's easier to blame a boogeyman than accept that sometimes families have emergencies. Sometimes students struggle and don't tell anyone. Sometimes people leave." Her voice softened. "I know that's not a satisfying answer. But the truth rarely is."

I wanted to tell her about the hallway. About feeling Lucia draining away, about the empty space inside her. But something stopped me. Not suspicion exactly. More like instinct. The same instinct that used to keep me from telling people in Ohio what I could feel when I touched them.

"If I did notice something strange," I said carefully, "would you want to know?"

Cross leaned forward slightly. "If you see anything that genuinely concerns you, anything concrete, I want you to come to me. Not to other students, not to the rumor mill. To me directly. Can you do that?"

"Yeah. I can do that."

"Good." She sat back, and her expression warmed. "I know this is a lot to process. New school, new abilities, a classmate leaving unexpectedly. It's natural to look for patterns, for explanations. Just don't let yourself get caught up in stories that have been scaring first-years since before I was a student here."

I left her office feeling more unsettled than when I'd arrived. Cross had been reassuring. Supportive. Everything a mentor should be.

So why did it feel like she'd been fishing for something?

My phone buzzed on the walk back to the dorms. Shelby.

eli. seriously. i haven't heard your actual voice in like a month. are you okay?

I stared at the screen. Started typing. Stopped. Started again. The words I wanted to say and the words I could say had almost nothing in common.

I put the phone back in my pocket without responding.

She'd see the read receipt. She'd know I saw it and didn't write back. That would hurt her in the quiet way things hurt Shelby, where she'd pretend it was fine and add it to the pile of things that weren't fine at all.

I kept walking.

That night, I couldn't sleep.

Dao was still awake too. I could tell from his breathing, from the small restless movements he made. The click of something mechanical in his hands. He'd been quiet since dinner, quieter than usual, and when Dao went quiet the room changed shape.

"You're thinking about your grandfather," I said into the dark.

The clicking stopped. "How do you know that?"

"Because I know you."

Silence for a while. The old room settled around us, its traces pressing in from every direction. Anxious students from decades past. The low hum of a building that had seen too many people pass through to be surprised by anything anymore.

"When you said Lucia was being drained." Dao's voice was careful. Feeling out the words before committing to them. "When you described that emptying out. What it felt like."

"Yeah?"

"That's what they accused my grandfather of doing. Draining a sacred site. Taking accumulated saturation for himself." The mechanical sound started again. Click. Click. Click. "What if he didn't do it?"

"You've always wondered that."

"No, I mean what if it wasn't him. What if someone was draining that site, and he found evidence of it, and the easiest way to shut him up was to say he did it himself." The clicking stopped again. "My grandmother said the real crime wasn't what he did. It was what he found. I always thought that was her way of not admitting the truth. But what if she meant it literally?"

I lay there thinking about that. About a man accused of draining a sacred place. About students being drained at a school where the official explanation was always family emergency. About the word culling, and the way it had landed on the dining table like something heavy enough to crack the surface.

"If someone is actually extracting saturation from people," I said slowly, "and your grandfather found evidence of something similar..."

"Then the accusation wasn't about what he did. It was about making sure nobody believed what he saw."

Dao's voice had changed. The careful feeling-out was gone. What replaced it was something harder. Not anger exactly, though the anger was there underneath. More like a piece of a puzzle sliding into place after years of not fitting anywhere.

"I've spent my whole life not knowing if my family deserved what happened to them," he said. "Not knowing if the name I carry is dirty or clean. And now students are disappearing and the school is saying family emergency and everyone's supposed to just accept it. The same playbook. Official explanation, close the file, move on."

"What do you want to do about it?"

"I want to find out what's actually happening. And I want to be right." He paused. "Or wrong. Wrong would be fine too. Wrong would mean Lucia really did go home for a family emergency and my grandfather really did drain that site and the world works the way they say it does. I could live with wrong."

"But you don't think you're wrong."

"No." The word was quiet and certain. "I don't."

We lay there in the dark. The room's old traces hummed around us. Through the window, the November sky was starless, the kind of dark that swallowed everything.

"Eli?"

"Yeah?"

"What Sasha said at lunch. About being the profile."

"I know."

"That can't happen."

"It won't."

"You don't know that."

He was right. I didn't know that. I didn't know anything, not really. Three students had left for family emergencies. I'd felt one of them draining in a hallway. People were whispering a name that made teachers go quiet.

I reached into my pocket and closed my hand around Dad's coin. The metal was warm from being close to my body all day. I held it and thought about the kitchen table in Ohio, about Dad in his chair with the TV on low, about a world that made sense even when it was hard.

"Good night, Dao."

"Good night, Eli."

I fell asleep eventually. The coin was still in my hand when I did.