Chapter 13

The first day back felt like returning to a different world.

Two weeks at home. Two weeks of pretending to be normal while everything inside me had changed. Dad had made his famous terrible spaghetti and asked surface questions about classes. I'd given surface answers and tried not to flinch when he touched my shoulder.

And Shelby.

We'd met at Denny's like she'd asked. Wednesday, 2pm, our usual booth. She'd been so happy to see me, talking fast about Christmas and Brianna's latest drama and the Algebra test she'd barely survived. I'd sat across from her with my coffee and said all the right things while a wall of glass grew between us.

She'd noticed something was wrong. Of course she had. She knew me better than anyone.

"You're different," she'd said, halfway through the cheese fries. Not accusing. Just sad. "Something happened at that school."

I'd told her I was fine. Just tired. Just adjusting. The lies had come so easily by then.

But the worst part was the photo.

I'd found it while packing to come back. Mom's face, laughing at something Dad had said, her hand raised to push hair out of her eyes. I'd stared at it for twenty minutes, thinking about all the questions she'd asked me when I was young. Whether I felt things I couldn't explain. Whether I knew things I shouldn't know.

She'd been looking for this. For what I was. And I'd never be able to ask her why.

I'd brought the photo back to Mudwick. It sat on my nightstand now, watching me like she was still trying to figure out the answer.

The campus was quieter than I remembered. January had settled over everything in shades of gray and brown. The trees were bare, the ground frozen, the lake a flat mirror that reflected nothing. Students moved between buildings with their heads down, hurrying against the cold.

Not everyone had come back.

The rumor mill was already churning. Two more students hadn't returned from break. Family circumstances, according to housing. Decided not to continue their studies. The same script they always used.

Two more gaps in the roster. Two more empty beds.

Whatever had paused for winter break was already starting again.

I found the others at dinner, our usual corner table. The mood was different than it had been before break. Heavier. More certain.

Sasha had her notebook out, already adding the new disappearances to her running tally. Dao was eating methodically, his jaw tight. Thaddeus looked like he hadn't slept.

Marcus wasn't there.

"Where's Marcus?" I asked, sitting down.

Dao and Sasha exchanged a look.

"His grandmother died," Sasha said quietly. "Christmas Eve. He stayed for the funeral, just got back this morning."

Something cold settled in my stomach. "Did he... did she tell him anything else? Before?"

"He wants to meet tonight. After dinner." Sasha's voice was careful. "He says she had one last lucid moment. The night before she died. Said she told him everything she could remember."

"Everything?"

"That's what he said."

I pushed my food around my plate. Mrs. Holloway had spent fifty years keeping secrets, trying to protect her family from something she'd never been able to stop. Now she was gone, and whatever she'd known had passed to Marcus.

The question was whether any of it would help.

We gathered in the empty classroom that had become our unofficial meeting space. The evening light was gone, replaced by the harsh fluorescent glow of overhead lights that hummed faintly at a frequency that set my teeth on edge.

Marcus was already there when we arrived. He looked different. Older somehow, though it had only been two weeks. The arrogance that had armored him at the start of the year was completely gone now, replaced by something quieter. Something that had seen death and decided what it meant.

"I'm sorry about your grandmother," Thaddeus said.

Marcus nodded once. "She went peacefully. At the end." He took a breath. "But before that, she had one night where she was completely herself. Completely clear. And she told me things."

He pulled a notebook from his jacket. Not Sasha's neat documentation, but pages covered in cramped handwriting, the kind of notes you take when someone is talking faster than you can process.

"The portal in sublevel three. It's real. Gran remembered when it was built. 1962. She was a student here then, just a first-year." He flipped through pages. "A man named Harlan Vance designed it. Brilliant threshold engineer. The portal was supposed to be for emergencies, a way to evacuate students if there was ever a crisis that compromised the main gates."

"But that's not what it's used for," Sasha said.

"No." Marcus's voice was flat. "Gran said within a year of the portal opening, students started disappearing. Same profile we've been tracking. Scholarship students. First-generation. People without connections in the Zant world. They called it 'culling' even then. She didn't know that word when she first heard it. Had to ask what it meant."

"And nobody stopped it?"

"People tried. There was a group of students, Gran among them, who figured out what was happening. They tried to expose it. Went to the headmaster at the time." He paused. "Three of them disappeared within a month. The rest got the message. Stay quiet or become the next victims."

The room was silent. I thought about Mrs. Holloway as a young woman, watching her friends vanish, learning that the only way to survive was to pretend she hadn't seen anything.

"She spent fifty years watching it happen," Marcus continued. "Saw the patterns. Noticed who disappeared. Tried to warn people when she could, but carefully. So carefully that nobody ever listened." His voice cracked slightly. "She said the hardest part was knowing, and not being able to do anything. Said it broke something in her that never healed."

"But she told you where to look," Sasha said. "That's something."

"She told me exactly where to look." Marcus flipped to a specific page. "The portal is in a chamber off the main sublevel corridor, near the eastern foundations. It's protected by old wards, family-keyed locks, things that haven't been updated since they were installed. The Holloway name should still work on some of them. Gran wasn't sure which ones."

"Should work?" Dao asked.

"Best she could give me." Marcus closed the notebook. "She also told me something else. Something she'd never said before." He looked around at each of us. "She said whoever's running this isn't working alone. There's a network. People inside the school, people outside. And they're connected to families that go back generations. Old money. Old power. People who've been doing this for longer than anyone alive remembers."

"Did she know names?"

"No. She said knowing names was what got her friends killed." Marcus's jaw was tight. "But she said one thing that stuck with me. She said the extraction isn't random. It isn't just about power. There's a purpose. Something they're building toward. Something that needs what they're taking."

"Building toward what?"

"She didn't know. Or couldn't remember by the end." He put the notebook away. "But she said if we wanted to stop it, really stop it, we had to find out what they were using the extracted energy for. The victims are just fuel. The question is what engine they're feeding."

The silence that followed was heavier than anything I'd felt in that room before.

"So we do what we planned," Sasha said finally. "We investigate the portal. We find evidence. We figure out what they're building."

"And then?"

"Then we decide what to do with what we know."

I looked around the room. At the faces of people who'd spent two weeks at home, pretending to be normal, knowing what waited when they came back.

Dao, whose anger had crystallized into something cold and focused.

Sasha, whose fear had transformed into meticulous preparation.

Marcus, carrying his grandmother's final gift like a weight he was determined to use.

Thaddeus, his faith in institutions shattered but his faith in doing right somehow intact.

And me. Reading everyone. Feeling everything. Using abilities I still didn't fully understand to navigate a world that wanted to consume us.

"When do we go?" I asked.

"Tomorrow night," Sasha said. "I spent the break refining the plan. The stairwell in the east wing, same as before. But now we know exactly what we're looking for."

"And if we find it?"

"Then we document everything. And we get out before anyone knows we were there."

Tomorrow night. The words settled into my bones.

Twenty-four hours until we walked into something that had been swallowing students for sixty years.

After the meeting broke up, I walked.

The grounds were quiet in the January cold. Students hurrying between buildings, breath fogging in the air. The normal rhythms of a school that looked normal if you didn't know what was underneath.

I ended up at the edge of the lake.

The water was frozen now, at least along the shore. A skin of ice that cracked when I stepped too close. The warnings about this place felt different in winter. The voices and whispers harder to imagine when everything was so still.

But when I closed my eyes and reached out, they were there. Not voices exactly. More like pressure. An awareness that wasn't human, watching from somewhere deep.

And something else.

The lake itself.

Just for a moment, I felt it. Not the traces of people who'd stood here before me, not the emotional residue of a thousand worried students. The lake. The ancient thing at the bottom. Patient and vast and waiting.

I opened my eyes and stepped back.

That wasn't supposed to happen. I read people, not places. That was the whole problem, the thing that made me different from everyone else here.

But lately, something had been shifting. The flicker during the Drift match. The walls of the classroom almost speaking to me. And now the lake, recognizable and real in a way that place-memory had never been before.

Cross had said my development was unusual. That she wanted to explore it next semester.

Was this what she meant? Was I becoming something different than what I'd been?

Or had I always been this, and just not known how to use it?

I didn't have answers. And right now, there wasn't time to look for them. Tomorrow night mattered more than whatever was happening to my abilities.

But I filed it away. Another question for later. Another piece of a puzzle I couldn't see the shape of yet.

I didn't sleep well that night.

The traces of former students pressed against my awareness, but differently now. Not just anxiety and hope and the ordinary fears of young people learning to be something new. Tonight I felt older traces. Darker ones.

Fear. Desperation. The particular kind of terror that comes from knowing something is wrong and not being able to stop it.

How many students had lain in beds like this one, knowing what was coming? How many had felt themselves fading and not understood why? How many had tried to run, tried to hide, tried to fight, and failed anyway?

The pattern stretched back sixty years. Mrs. Holloway had seen it when she was young. Which meant people had been disappearing for generations. Which meant the system wasn't a flaw. It was a feature.

Somewhere in this school, someone had decided that certain students were expendable. Had built systems to identify them, extract whatever made them valuable, and dispose of them when they were empty. Had been doing it long enough that it felt normal. Natural. Just the way things worked.

And tomorrow night, we were going to find out exactly what that looked like.

I lay in the dark and listened to Dao breathe and thought about Mom's photo on the nightstand. Her face frozen in laughter, caught in a moment before everything fell apart.

She'd known something about what I was. Had asked questions I couldn't answer because I didn't have the words yet.

I wondered what she would think of what I was about to do. Whether she'd be proud or terrified.

Probably both. That seemed to be the way of things now.

Morning came gray and cold.

I dragged myself through the day on autopilot. Classes I couldn't focus on. Meals I couldn't taste. Hours crawling by while the clock in my head kept counting down.

At lunch, we sat together like always. Made small talk about Drift practice and assignments and the weather. Normal things. Student things. Anyone watching would have seen five friends eating together, nothing unusual.

But I could feel the tension underneath. Sasha's careful control barely containing her fear. Dao's anger looking for any excuse to ignite. Thaddeus's faith straining against everything he was learning. Marcus's grief transformed into determination.

And me. Whatever I was now. Reader of people. Sometimes of places. Weapon that hadn't decided what it was aimed at.

After lunch, Thaddeus caught my arm.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

We walked to a quiet corner of the hallway. He kept his voice low.

"Are we doing the right thing?"

"I don't know."

"That's not comforting."

"I know." I leaned against the wall. "But I can't tell you it's definitely right. Maybe we're wrong about everything. Maybe there's an explanation we haven't thought of. Maybe Cross really is investigating and we're about to get in her way."

"Do you believe that?"

"No. I felt what she was hiding. But I could be wrong. I could be reading things that aren't there."

He was quiet for a moment. Students passed us, heading to afternoon classes. The normal flow of Mudwick life.

"I grew up believing in institutions," he said finally. "Rules, systems, authorities. I thought they existed to protect people. To make things fair."

"And now?"

"Now I think maybe they exist to protect themselves. To make sure the people with power keep it." He shook his head. "I don't like thinking that. It makes the world feel smaller. Meaner."

"Maybe it is smaller. Meaner."

"Maybe." He took a breath. "But I'm still coming tonight. Because if there's even a chance we can help people, I have to try. Even if the institutions are broken. Maybe especially if they're broken."

"That's surprisingly optimistic for someone who just said the world is mean."

"I'm not optimistic. I'm stubborn." He almost smiled. "There's a difference."

Evening came.

We gathered one last time in the empty classroom. Not to plan. The plan was set. Just to be together before we did something that couldn't be undone.

Dao had his tools. Sasha had her camera. Marcus had his family name and his grandmother's final knowledge. Thaddeus had his stubborn faith. I had my ability to read what people tried to hide.

It wasn't much. Against whatever waited in sublevel three, against whoever had been taking students for generations, it probably wasn't enough.

But it was what we had.

"Everyone knows what we're doing?" Sasha asked.

Nods around the room.

"And everyone's sure? This is the last chance to walk away."

Nobody moved.

"Okay." She took a breath. "We meet at the east wing stairwell at midnight. We move quietly. We don't split up. If something goes wrong, we run. No heroes."

"What if we find what we're looking for?" Thaddeus asked.

"Then we document everything. Pictures, notes, whatever we can get. And we get out before anyone knows we were there."

"And after?"

"After, we figure out who to tell. Who might actually do something about it."

She didn't say what we'd do if there was nobody to tell. If the conspiracy went all the way up. If everyone who should help was part of the problem.

We'd deal with that when we got there. If we got there.

"Any last questions?"

Silence.

"Okay." Sasha closed her notebook. "Midnight. Don't be late."

We filtered out separately. No need to draw attention by leaving as a group.

At the door, I paused. Looked back at the empty classroom where we'd spent so many hours planning and arguing and becoming whatever we were now.

Five students. First-years, mostly. No power, no connections, no authority.

Against decades of institutional silence. Against people who'd been taking students for longer than we'd been alive.

It should have felt hopeless. It probably was hopeless.

But I remembered what Mrs. Holloway had told Marcus. The standing up matters. Even if you fail. Even if nobody listens.

I walked out of the classroom and toward midnight. Toward the east wing. Toward whatever we were about to find.

Tomorrow we'd know if we were right about everything.

Or we'd be the next students to disappear.