Chapter 18

Derek found me in the library on a Thursday afternoon.

I'd been sitting in the back corner trying to read a chapter on resonance anchoring that might as well have been written in a different language. My brain was somewhere else entirely. It had been somewhere else since the lake, since Marcus's voice cracking over a grandmother who was dying in fragments, since Blackwood's cheerful observation about maintenance closures and sleeping portals. I kept turning things over like Dao turned his lock picks, except nothing clicked.

Derek slid into the chair across from me and I almost didn't recognize him. I knew him the way you know people at a school like Mudwick. Name, face, the vague context of shared meals and crossed paths. Second-year. Quiet kid. The kind of person who existed in the background of other people's stories.

He didn't look like a background character now. He looked like someone who hadn't slept in days and had come to a decision about it.

"You're Eli Lawrence," he said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

"You're the one who reads people."

I closed my book. "Who told you that?"

"Everyone knows. It's Mudwick. Everybody knows everything except the things that actually matter." He pressed his palms flat on the table. His fingers were trembling. "I need to tell someone and you're the only person I think might believe me."

I waited.

"My roommate is gone," he said. "Jerome Wallace. We've shared a room since last year. They pair up the scholarship kids, did you know that? Put us together like we're a category instead of people." He swallowed. "I woke up Tuesday morning and his bed was made. Hospital corners. His closet was empty. His books, his posters, his headphones that were always on his desk. All of it, gone. Like he'd never been there."

The words hit the air between us and stayed there, heavy and familiar.

"Housing told me he withdrew," Derek continued. "Family situation. Said it happened overnight, which is apparently a thing that happens sometimes. Quick and clean for the student's privacy." He laughed but there was nothing in it. "They said it with the same face. They said it with that voice. The one where everything's fine and you're crazy for thinking otherwise."

"Derek."

"I wasn't asleep." His voice dropped. Not to a whisper. Lower than that. To the register people use when they're saying something they know sounds impossible. "That's what I need you to understand. They think I was asleep but I wasn't. I heard them come in. I felt something, like a weight pressing down on me, and I couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Couldn't turn my head. But my eyes were open."

The library was quiet around us. Two students at a table near the window. A librarian reshelfing books in the far aisle. Normal sounds in a normal place and none of it touched what was happening at our table.

"There were people standing around Jerome's bed. Three of them, maybe four. I couldn't see their faces because my eyes wouldn't focus properly, like looking through water. But I could see what they were doing." He pressed his hands harder against the table. The trembling got worse. "One of them had their hands over Jerome's chest. Not touching him. Hovering. And something was coming out of him. I don't know how else to describe it. Like light but not light. Like heat rising off pavement except it was coming out of a person and going into their hands."

I sat very still.

"Jerome didn't make a sound. He just lay there while they pulled something out of him. And I was lying ten feet away and I couldn't move and I couldn't scream and I couldn't do anything except watch." Derek's jaw tightened. "Then I felt the pressure get heavier, like someone turning up a dial, and I went under. When I woke up it was morning and the bed was made and the closet was empty and housing told me he'd withdrawn."

"Did you tell anyone?"

"I told my RA. She said I'd had a nightmare. Stress-related. Said the transition of losing a roommate can trigger vivid dreams." His eyes were bright and furious. "I wasn't dreaming. I know what dreaming feels like. I know what it feels like to be unable to move because something is holding you down. Those aren't the same thing."

He sat back in his chair. The trembling had stopped but something else had taken its place. The rigid stillness of a person who's spent days being told they imagined something they know they saw.

"Jerome was my friend," he said. "Not my best friend. Not someone I'd known my whole life. But we shared a room for over a year. We ate meals together. He helped me with practicum when I was struggling and I helped him study for Cross's midterm. He was a real person and now he's gone and they cleaned his side of the room like they were erasing a whiteboard."

I thought about Lucia. About Kezia not saving a seat anymore. About the way the school absorbed absence the way dirt absorbs rain.

"You believe me," Derek said. It wasn't a question this time either.

"Yeah. I believe you."

"What do I do with this?"

I didn't have an answer that would help him. What I had was a growing list of things that pointed in the same direction, and his account had just added a line under all of them.

"Can I tell the people I trust?" I asked. "There's a group of us. We've been paying attention."

He studied me for a long moment. "Is one of them the girl with the notebooks? Okonkwo?"

"Yeah."

"Good." He stood up. He looked lighter for having said it, and older for having to say it at all. "Tell whoever you need to tell. But Eli? Be careful. Whatever they did to Jerome, they did it in a room with someone else ten feet away. They didn't care that I was there. That means they knew I couldn't stop them, or they knew they could make me forget." He paused. "I didn't forget. I don't know why. But I didn't."

He left. I sat in the library with my useless textbook and a feeling in my chest like the floor was tilting.

I told them at the corner table that evening.

The dining hall was loud with the noise of three hundred students living their normal lives, eating their normal food, complaining about their normal homework. Our table in the back corner had become a fixed point over the last few weeks. The spot where five people who knew too much sat together and pretended to be eating dinner.

Four tonight. Marcus hadn't shown up.

I told them everything Derek had said. Kept my voice low and my face neutral, like we were discussing a group project. Sasha had her pen out before I finished the first sentence.

"Jerome Wallace," she said, writing. She looked up. "Scholarship?"

"Yeah. Why does that matter?"

"Second-year?" she asked, ignoring my question.

"Yeah."

"First-gen?"

I thought about it. Derek hadn't said those words specifically, but he'd said just like me, and Derek was both of those things. "I think so."

Sasha wrote something else and drew a line connecting it to whatever web she'd been building for weeks. "Same profile as Lucia. Same as the summer withdrawals. Same as every single one."

Dao wasn't fidgeting. His hands were flat on the table, completely still, and that stillness sent something cold through me because I'd learned what it meant. When Dao's hands stopped moving, the anger had gone somewhere past heat. Past restlessness. Into something dense and focused. "He watched them extract Jerome. That's what Derek described. Hands over the chest. Something being pulled out. That's extraction."

"We don't know that for certain," Thaddeus said, but his hand had gone to his pocket where his grandmother's token sat. The reflexive grab of a person looking for something solid.

"We know it," Dao said. "Two students, two weeks. Same profile. Same impossible overnight cleanup. And now a witness who saw someone pulling saturation out of a human being with their hands. What else do you want, Thaddeus? A signed confession?"

"I want to be wrong." Thaddeus said it without anger. He said it the way you'd say you wanted it to stop raining. Just a wish. Weightless. "I want there to be an explanation that doesn't mean what I think it means."

Sasha looked up from her notebook. "There isn't one."

The words landed and nobody tried to soften them.

"Derek said they paralyzed him," I continued. "Some kind of immobilization. He was awake but couldn't move, couldn't make sound. They did this ten feet from a witness and either didn't care or had a way to handle it."

"A way to handle it that didn't work," Sasha said. She wrote something else, underlined it twice. "That matters. Whatever they used to keep him under, it failed. Or it wasn't designed for someone like Derek. That's a variable they didn't account for."

Dao's hands were still motionless. "The thing my family was accused of," he said. His voice was flat and even. "Draining a sacred site. Extracting saturation from a place. That's what destroyed my grandfather. An accusation that was never proven, never disproven, just left hanging until the weight of it crushed everything." He looked at me. "They're doing the same thing. Not to a place. To people. To students. And the institution that accused my grandfather of extraction is running a school where extraction is happening in the dorms."

Nobody spoke. The dining hall noise kept going. Forks on plates. Laughter from the table by the windows. Someone complaining loudly about a practicum score.

"If my grandmother were here," Dao said, and stopped. His jaw worked for a moment. "She always said the real crime wasn't what he did. It was what he found. What if he found this? What if that's why they destroyed him? Not because he was guilty but because he knew?"

Sasha put her pen down. She looked at Dao with something I hadn't seen from her before. Not the careful analytical attention. Something rawer. Recognition, maybe. The look of someone who understood what it felt like to watch a system close its fist around the people you loved.

"Two students in two weeks," she said. "Before that, the summer withdrawals. My data goes back six years but the yearbook archives go back decades. This isn't new. This is infrastructure."

The word sat on the table like a brick.

"So what do we do?" Thaddeus asked. His voice was steady but his hand hadn't left his pocket.

Before anyone could answer, Marcus appeared.

He didn't come from the direction of the dorms. He came from outside, through the side door that led to the courtyard. His jacket was zipped but not buttoned and his hair was wet from a rain that must have started while we were inside. He looked like he'd been walking for a while without paying attention to where.

Worse than the lake. That was my first thought. At the lake he'd been grief-stripped, all the armor gone and nothing underneath but a kid losing his grandmother. This was different. This was someone who'd been hollowed out by something other than grief and then grief had come along and finished the job.

He pulled out the empty chair and sat down without asking. Didn't look at any of us directly. His eyes were aimed at the table surface, at the scratched wood and the water rings from a hundred forgotten glasses.

"Hospice called again," he said.

Nobody said anything.

"She's going fast. The nurses say it could be days." His voice was flat. Reporting. Like reading aloud from a medical chart. "She didn't know my name this morning. She looked at me on the phone screen and asked who I was. Then a minute later she grabbed my aunt's arm and started talking about the school."

He tried to cover his hands. They were shaking. Not the fine tremor of anxiety or the twitch of nervousness. Full, visible trembling, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than muscles. And he wasn't hiding them. That was the thing that told me everything else. Marcus Holloway, who'd spent every day since I'd met him behind armor thick enough to stop a bullet, was sitting at our table with his hands shaking and making no effort whatsoever to stop it.

"She keeps saying Renwick," he said. "Over and over. Like a prayer. 'Renwick was the one who found it. Renwick was the one who knew.' She stares at me and says it like if she can just get me to understand this one thing, maybe the rest doesn't matter." He looked up for the first time. His eyes were red. "I've been carrying this for weeks. Since before the Drift match. Since before Lucia. Gran's been warning me about this place since the day she put me on the train and I thought she was just old and scared and confused."

"Marcus," Thaddeus said softly.

"She told me about a portal." His voice was still flat but there was a crack running through it, the kind of crack that precedes collapse. "Sublevel three. Near the eastern foundations. It's been closed for maintenance for years but that's not why it's closed. She said that's where they take them. That's where they go through."

Sasha's pen had stopped moving.

"She called it culling." He said the word the same way Dao had said it weeks ago at this same table. Like something you could taste. "Not a metaphor. Not a figure of speech. A practice. Something that people did on purpose and covered up and did again. She said they chose the ones nobody would miss. The ones without old families. Without connections. The ones the institution could erase without anyone asking questions."

He looked at Sasha. Then at me. Two people who fit that description perfectly. The look wasn't strategic. It wasn't pointed. It was a boy understanding for the first time what his grandmother's warnings actually meant.

"She said the Holloway name used to open that door." His hands shook harder. "She said it like I should be ashamed of it. Like knowing the name that opened the door where people went to be destroyed was something I needed to carry."

The table was very quiet.

"I should have told you sooner," Marcus said. "I know that. I was scared. Not of you. Not of any of this." He gestured vaguely at the dining hall, at Mudwick, at everything. "Of finding out my grandmother wasn't confused. Of finding out she was right."

Dao reached across the table and put his hand over Marcus's shaking one. Just for a second. Not a grip or a clasp. Just contact. Palm over knuckles, brief and firm, and then he pulled back.

"She was right," Dao said.

Marcus nodded. He didn't seem surprised. He seemed relieved, the way people are relieved when the thing they've been dreading finally arrives and they don't have to dread it anymore.

Sasha stood up. She walked to the drink station without a word and came back with a glass of water. She set it in front of Marcus. Then she sat down next to him instead of across from him. Close enough that their shoulders were almost touching.

She didn't say anything comforting. Didn't offer reassurance or platitudes or any of the things people say when they don't know what to say. She just stayed. Present. Solid. The girl who organized her fear into color-coded systems sitting next to the boy who'd armored himself against everything, and between them just the simple fact of being there.

Marcus picked up the glass with both hands. Took a sip. Set it down carefully, like even that small action required concentration. He noticed Sasha next to him. I watched something flicker across his face that wasn't gratitude exactly. It was closer to recognition. The look of someone being seen by someone who understood what it cost to be visible.

We sat with it for a while. The dining hall emptied in stages around us. People leaving in groups of two and three, headed for the dorms or the library or wherever you go when you're living a normal life at a school that isn't what you think it is.

It was Sasha who finally spoke.

"So are we doing this or not?"

She said it without looking up. Her notebook was open in front of her, the pages covered in weeks of names and dates and connections, the architecture of a fear she'd been building since the night Lucia vanished. She closed it. Not the careful way she usually did, pen tucked into the spine, pages aligned. She just closed it. Like she was done with the part of this that involved writing things down.

Dao looked at her. Thaddeus looked at her. Marcus looked at the table.

I thought about Derek in the library. About his friend being unmade ten feet away while he lay paralyzed. About Lucia's shell from Veracruz and Sasha's data going back decades and Dao's grandfather asking questions that got his family destroyed. About Blackwood's sleeping portals and Marcus's grandmother repeating a name she couldn't let go of even as everything else slipped away.

"We're doing this," I said.

Three words. They came out steady and sure and I have no idea where that steadiness came from because everything underneath was shaking.

"We plan over break," Sasha said. She was already back in motion, the analytical engine engaging with something concrete to work against. "I have patrol schedules. I have the architecture from the public records. I need the sublevel layout if Marcus can get it."

"The Holloway name still opens doors," Marcus said. His voice was rough but it was his voice, not the hollow report from a few minutes ago. "Old doors. The kind that run on family recognition instead of modern wards. If the portal's where my grandmother says it is, I can probably get us close."

"My grandmother's lock picks can handle the rest," Dao said. The ghost of his old humor surfaced for half a second. Not a joke. Just the reflex of someone who coped with impossible things by finding the absurd in them.

"Come back in January ready," Sasha said. She looked around the table. At each of us. "This isn't research anymore. We need to know what's on the other side of that portal. We need to see it with our own eyes."

Thaddeus was quiet through all of this. His hand was still in his pocket, thumb running along the smooth surface of his token. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful.

"I don't believe the institution is doing this," he said. "I want to say that out loud because I think it matters. I think there's an explanation that doesn't involve the school being rotten at its core." He looked at Dao, then at Sasha, then at me. "But I believe you. All of you. And if you're going, I'm going."

It cost him something to say that. I could feel it. The weight of choosing between a worldview he'd built his whole life on and the people sitting at this table. He chose us.

"Okay," Sasha said. And that was it.

Professor Cross found me on the path between the dining hall and the dorms.

The rain had stopped and the campus was that particular November shade of gray that made everything look like a photograph from a different era. She was wearing a dark coat and carrying a leather portfolio and she smiled when she saw me, the warm genuine smile that always made me feel like I'd been noticed by someone who actually cared.

"Eli. I was hoping I'd catch you before the break."

"Professor Cross."

"Walk with me?"

We walked. The path wound past the practice courts and the old chapel, past the trees that had gone bare and the lampposts that cast wet halos on the stones. Cross matched my pace. She always did that. Adjusted to whoever she was with, not the other way around.

"How are you feeling about the semester?" she asked. "Honestly."

"Honestly? Overwhelmed."

She laughed, soft and real. "That's the right answer. If you weren't overwhelmed, I'd be worried. First year at Mudwick is designed to overwhelm. It's the only way the growth happens."

"Doesn't feel like growth."

"It never does from the inside." She paused. "I've been monitoring your development with Professor Aldridge. Your people-trace reading is progressing faster than we anticipated. The way you read during the Drift match was remarkable."

"It was the only thing I could do. I can't read the field."

"No. But what you can do is something most practitioners never develop at all. Reading people's emotional residue, their histories, the traces they leave in spaces. That's not a consolation prize, Eli. That's a rare and powerful ability."

She stopped walking. We were standing near the edge of the quad, the old stone buildings rising up around us, the windows dark except where someone had left a light on. She turned to face me and her expression shifted from professional warmth to something more personal. More direct.

"Show me," she said. "Something you've been working on."

I hesitated. Then I reached out with the sense that wasn't touch or sight or hearing. The one that lived somewhere between instinct and understanding. I felt the path beneath my feet, the layered traces of hundreds of students walking this route over years and decades. Fear and excitement and homesickness and ambition, all of it pressed into the ground like footprints in wet cement. I focused and for a second, just a second, the traces sharpened. Not into images or stories. Into shapes. Patterns. The ghost-map of everyone who'd walked here, each one leaving something of themselves behind.

Then it was gone. The focus slipped and I was just standing on a path in the rain feeling the cold through my jacket.

"That," Cross said. Her voice had changed. Still warm but there was something underneath it, a current of attention that felt less like a teacher watching a student and more like a scientist watching a result. "What was that just now?"

"Place-memory. I think. For a second I could feel the traces people left in the ground. But it disappeared."

"Place-memory for someone whose primary ability is people-reading." She said it slowly, like she was fitting a piece into a puzzle I couldn't see. "Your development is unusual, Eli. More unusual than I expected."

"Is that bad?"

"It's not bad at all." She stepped closer. Put her hand on my shoulder. The gesture was so natural, so perfectly calibrated to be reassuring without being intrusive, that I leaned into it without thinking. "You matter to me. I hope you know that. Not just as a student. As a person. What you're becoming is going to be extraordinary."

Something in my chest loosened. The knot that had been tightening since Lucia, since Derek, since Marcus's shaking hands and Sasha's closed notebook. Cross's hand on my shoulder felt like an anchor. Like a fixed point in a world that was spinning faster than I could track.

"Come back ready to discover what you're becoming," she said. "I'll be here."

"Thank you, Professor."

She squeezed my shoulder once and let go. Smiled. That warm, genuine, I-see-you smile that made me believe everything was going to be okay.

I walked to the dorms feeling steadier than I had in weeks.

She felt like safety. She felt like the one person at this school who actually cared about me as a person and not as a puzzle to solve. The one adult I could trust.

I held onto that feeling all the way back to my room. I held onto it the way you hold onto a railing in a storm. Not knowing that the railing was part of the structure that was going to fall.

That night I called Dad.

"Hey, kid." The TV was on in the background. Some game. The familiar noise of a house with one person in it. "You getting excited about Christmas?"

"Yeah. Can't wait."

"Shelby stopped by yesterday. She wanted to know if you were coming home for the whole break. I told her yes and she got that look on her face. The one where she's trying not to grin."

"That sounds like Shelby."

"She's a good kid, Eli. She asks about you." He paused. "How are you doing? For real."

"For real? I'm tired. It's been a long semester."

"Well, you've got three weeks of bad cooking and your old man's company to look forward to. I'll try to make it bearable."

"It sounds perfect."

He told me about fixing the faucet himself. About the neighbor's dog getting loose again. About a sale on steaks at the grocery store. Small, ordinary things. The texture of a life that had nothing to do with extraction or culling or portals that opened onto places you should never see. I listened to all of it and tried to hold it close and felt the distance between us like a physical thing.

"Love you, Dad."

"Love you too, E. See you in two weeks."

I hung up and stared at the ceiling. The coin sat on my nightstand, catching the last light from the window. Small and ordinary and connected to a man who loved me and a house that was waiting and a world that didn't know any of this existed.

My phone buzzed. Shelby.

two weeks!! i already know what i'm ordering. cheese fries obviously. and a milkshake. and maybe those onion rings if they still have them. this is a serious meal eli. prepare yourself.

I typed back: i'll start training now.

you better. oh also. i've been watching this documentary about puppets. like the history of puppetry. i know that sounds weird but it's actually fascinating? there's this whole section about bunraku, which is japanese puppet theater, and the puppeteers wear all black and they're right there on stage but you're supposed to pretend you can't see them. like the audience agrees to not see the people controlling the story. isn't that kind of beautiful and kind of terrifying at the same time?

I read the message twice. The audience agrees to not see the people controlling the story.

yeah, I typed. that's exactly what it is.

anyway can't wait to see your face. two weeks. denny's. be there or face consequences.

i'll be there.

I put the phone down. Shelby in Ohio, making plans for cheese fries and telling me about puppeteers in black. Dad in his quiet house with a notebook full of evidence my mother had gathered. The ordinary world reaching for me with both hands, warm and real and completely separate from what I was becoming.

I got ready for bed. Dao was already in his bunk, facing the wall. His speaker was off, which was unusual. The room was quiet in a way it hadn't been since before Lucia.

"You awake?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"You okay?"

He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice was different from the flat certainty he'd shown at the table. Smaller. Closer to the version of Dao that existed after the lights went out when the armor of humor couldn't sustain itself in the dark.

"My grandmother called tonight," he said. "I told her about the withdrawal numbers Sasha found. The enrollment data. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said something in Tagalog that I didn't catch and switched to English and told me to be careful. Not the way she usually says it. Not 'don't stay up too late, don't forget to eat.' She said 'be careful the way your grandfather should have been careful.'"

I lay in the dark and listened to him breathe.

"She's scared," he said. "She's been scared for twenty years and she's still scared. And the thing that scares her most isn't what they did to my grandfather. It's that I might find out she was right."

The traces of old students pressed in from the walls. I could feel them the way I always could in this building. The residual anxiety of every kid who'd ever lain awake in this room wondering if they belonged. Layers and layers of it, decades deep. Bad dreams soaked into the plaster.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep and couldn't.

Somewhere on the other side of campus, past the practice courts and the old chapel and the administrative building where Thaddeus's family name was carved into stone, there was a door in sublevel three that had been closed for maintenance. A door that a dying woman kept trying to tell her grandson about with the last pieces of a memory that was falling apart. A door that the Holloway name used to open.

Behind it, something was happening to students who looked like Sasha and Derek and Jerome and Lucia and me. Something systematic. Something that had been happening for longer than any of us had been alive.

We were going to find out what. After break. After Christmas and cheese fries and all the ordinary things that separated right now from what came next. We were going to come back and walk through that door and see what the institution had been hiding in its foundations.

The fear was everywhere now, once you knew how to feel it. In the walls. In the silence. In the carefully made beds and the empty closets and the official explanations that dissolved when you looked at them too closely.

Dao shifted in his bunk. Neither of us was sleeping.

I lay in the dark and held the coin and thought about a grandmother who spent her last days trying to warn someone. About another grandmother who spent twenty years being scared of what her grandson might find. About a mother who kept a notebook full of evidence about a son she understood better than anyone knew.

All these women. Watching. Knowing. Trying to protect the people they loved from a machine they could see but couldn't stop.

I wasn't going to sleep tonight. Neither was Dao. Across campus, in their own rooms, Sasha and Thaddeus and Marcus were probably awake too. Five people who'd looked at the shape of something terrible and said we're doing this anyway.

Two weeks until break. Then three weeks pretending to be normal. Then back. Then the door.

The fear didn't go away. It just made room for something else alongside it. Something that felt less like courage and more like the absence of any other option. We couldn't unknow what we knew. We couldn't unsee what Derek had seen. We couldn't unhear a dying woman's warnings or unfind Sasha's data or unlearn the word that Dao's grandmother had carried across twenty years and an ocean.

Culling.

A practice. A structure. A door in sublevel three.

We were doing this.