Chapter 15

The transit was nothing like the one that brought me to Mudwick.

That crossing had been smooth. Quick. A moment of disorientation and then I was somewhere else. This was different. The between-space that I'd barely noticed before was present now, pressing against us from all sides. Cold that wasn't temperature. Pressure that wasn't physical. And something in the darkness beyond the light, watching with an attention that made my skin crawl.

I couldn't see the others. Couldn't feel them. Just the pull of the portal dragging me forward and the sense that if I stopped moving, if I hesitated for even a second, something in this place would notice.

Then light. Ground under my feet. Air that tasted wrong.

I stumbled out and nearly fell. Dao caught my arm, steadied me. The others were emerging behind us, one by one, all of them shaking.

"Everyone okay?" Marcus's voice was rough.

Nods. Nobody spoke. We were all processing what we'd just passed through. The transit point on this side looked even worse than the one we'd entered. The edges flickered and sparked, unstable in ways that made me nervous about going back through. Old infrastructure. Neglected. Like a road nobody had maintained in decades.

But that was a problem for later. Right now, we had to figure out where we were.

The facility was clean. That was the first thing I noticed. White walls, bright lighting, floors that gleamed like they'd been polished that morning. After the ancient stone and amber shadows of the sublevels, this felt aggressively modern. Clinical. The kind of sterile wrongness you feel in hospitals and prisons.

"This doesn't look like what I expected," Thaddeus whispered.

He was right. When you imagine a villain's lair, you picture darkness. Cobwebs. Maybe some ominous machinery. Not this. Not fluorescent lights and clean corridors that could have belonged to any medical facility in the country.

But I felt what the walls didn't show.

The moment we stepped away from the portal, it hit me. Accumulated terror so thick I could barely breathe. Students had come through here. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They'd arrived confused and afraid and they'd left empty. Or they hadn't left at all.

And underneath the terror, something else. The building itself.

I shouldn't have been able to feel it. The walls had been deliberately hollowed, scraped clean of saturation the way sublevel one had been. But the suffering had been too great, had lasted too long. It had soaked into the structure despite everything. Decades of pain pressed into white tile and fluorescent fixtures. The clinical surfaces couldn't hide what had happened here. Not from me. Not anymore.

The walls remembered, even if they'd been forbidden to.

I must have made a sound because Sasha grabbed my shoulder.

"Eli?"

"I'm okay." I wasn't okay. "There's just... a lot here. A lot of fear. Old fear. Decades of it." I didn't tell her I was feeling the building itself. Didn't have words for what was happening to my abilities. "The walls. They're trying to show me things."

"Walls don't show things," Dao said. "You read people."

"I know." But that wasn't quite true anymore, was it? "Can we just keep moving?"

"Can you function?"

I nodded. Didn't trust my voice.

Dao was already scanning the corridor. "Which way?"

I reached out. Not for place-memory this time. For people. Living minds moving through the building. Staff going about their work. Guards on patrol. Anyone who might spot five students who absolutely should not be here. The accumulated terror made it harder, not easier. Every time I pushed past it, fragments caught on me. Glimpses of students who came before. Their last moments of hope. The slow realization that something was very wrong.

But underneath the noise, I found what I was looking for. Patterns of attention. People moving through the facility like blood through veins.

"Left," I said. "There's someone coming from the right. Two people. Moving slow but they'll be here in about a minute."

Nobody questioned it. They just moved.

We made it thirty feet before I had to stop them again.

"Wait." I held up a hand. "Door ahead. Someone's about to come through."

We pressed against the wall. Seconds later, the door opened. A woman in a white coat walked out, checking something on a tablet, and turned the opposite direction without looking our way.

Dao let out a breath he'd been holding. "How did you know?"

"I felt her getting closer. Felt her attention shifting toward the door." I rubbed my temples. The readings were leaving marks. Each one cost something. "She was thinking about something on that tablet. Distracted. Lucky for us."

"Can you keep doing this?"

"I don't have a choice."

We kept moving. The hollowness was everywhere now. I didn't notice it at first, too focused on tracking the staff, feeling for threats, trying to navigate us through the building without getting caught. But when we paused in an empty corridor to get our bearings, Sasha pointed it out.

"Feel the walls," she said.

I already knew what she meant. I'd been trying not to think about it. The walls were hollow. Not structurally. Magically. Whatever saturation this place might have accumulated over the years had been stripped away. Scoured clean. The same deliberate emptiness we'd felt in sublevel one, but more thorough. More professional.

"She does this," Dao said. His voice was tight with anger. "Miriam. She poisons places so they can never hold anything again. So nobody can read what happened there."

"Why would she do that here?" Thaddeus asked. "In her own facility?"

"Because she doesn't want anyone to know what she's doing. Even after she's gone." Dao touched the wall like he was confirming something. "My grandfather told me about places she'd destroyed. Sacred sites that practitioners had used for centuries. She burned them all. Left nothing but dead air."

I thought about Cross's warnings. About Miriam targeting vulnerable students. About the forbidden techniques she'd learned and the chaos she'd caused. This fit the profile. All of it.

But something still felt wrong. A facility this clean, this organized, this well-maintained. It didn't match the image of a rogue practitioner working alone. This looked institutional. Systematic.

And I was still feeling things I shouldn't be able to feel. The walls, despite being hollowed. The building's memory, despite being scraped clean. Either I was developing abilities nobody had told me about, or this place was so saturated with suffering that even dead walls couldn't contain it.

I didn't say anything. We had more immediate problems.

"We need to find where they're keeping the students," Sasha said. "If there are any left to find."

I reached out again. Pushed past the hollowed walls and the accumulated terror. Somewhere in this building, there were people who weren't staff. People who were afraid in a different way. A fresher way.

"This way," I said. "I think I feel them."

The extraction room was worse than anything I'd imagined.

Students in rows. Maybe twenty of them. They were reclined in chairs that looked almost comfortable, the kind you'd see in a dentist's office or a blood donation center. Clean white surfaces. Soft lighting. Nothing that screamed torture chamber.

But the tubes told a different story.

They weren't carrying blood. They were carrying light. Thin threads of shimmer flowing from the students' chests into collection vessels mounted on stands beside each chair. The light was different colors for each student. Some golden, some silver, some tinged with blue or green. Different affinities. Different abilities. Being sorted and stored like inventory.

Thaddeus made a sound like he was going to be sick.

"This is what they do," Sasha whispered. She was photographing everything, hands shaking so badly the pictures would probably be blurred. "This is what happens to the students who disappear."

If I died here, in this clinical nightmare, Shelby would never know what happened to me. She'd text and text and eventually give up, and she'd spend the rest of her life wondering why I'd stopped answering. Wondering if something she'd said had driven me away. Never knowing that I'd been drained in a white room with fluorescent lights while trying to help people I'd only known for a few months.

The thought hit me like a punch. I shoved it down. No time for it now.

Most of the students in the chairs were too far gone to notice us. Their eyes were open but empty. The light flowing out of them was thin, stuttering. Almost depleted. But one of them turned her head when we entered. Her eyes took too long to focus, but when they did, I recognized her.

Lucia.

The girl who'd bumped into me in the hallway. The one Kezia had been looking for. Her face was gaunt now, all the softness drained out of it. The shimmer around her chest was barely visible, just a few weak threads still connected to the collection vessel.

But she knew us. I could see it in her eyes. Recognition. And something else. Hope. Desperate, disbelieving hope.

"You're real," she whispered. Her voice was barely there. "I thought I was dreaming again."

Sasha moved to her chair, examining the connections. "How do we disconnect her without hurting her?"

"Carefully." I crouched beside Lucia, took her hand. The contact sent fragments of her experience crashing through me. The day they came for her. The lie they'd told. The moment she realized it was too late.

"They said I'd go home." Lucia's eyes were wet. "They said my scholarship was ending early. That my family wanted me back. I believed them. I walked through the portal with them because I believed them."

My chest hurt. Not from the reading. From the simple cruelty of it. They didn't drag students out of bed. They didn't use force. They came with a story. A reasonable explanation. A familiar face offering to help. And the students went willingly. Right through the portal. Right into these chairs.

"We're getting you out," I said. "Can you walk?"

"I don't know." She tried to move, winced. "Everything feels far away. Like my body isn't quite mine anymore."

Sasha found a release mechanism. The tubes disconnected with a soft hiss, the last threads of light fading. Lucia gasped, then went limp.

"She's okay," Sasha said quickly. "Just the shock of disconnection. She'll need help walking."

Dao and Thaddeus moved to support her. She weighed almost nothing between them.

I looked at the other students. The ones who were too far gone to respond. Too hollow to save.

"We can't take them all," Marcus said quietly. He'd been watching the door, but his voice cracked on the words. "We can barely take her."

"I know."

"Eli. We have to go."

"I know."

But I stood there for another moment anyway. Looking at the students we were leaving behind. Feeling the weight of the choice.

The room itself pressed against me. All four walls, the floor, the ceiling. Saturated with years of silent screaming that the hollowing couldn't quite erase. Every student who'd been drained here had left something behind, some trace of their terror and despair, and I was feeling all of it at once.

I shouldn't have been able to. I was a people-reader. Places weren't supposed to talk to me.

But they were talking now. Louder than the people, sometimes.

"Eli." Sasha's voice cut through. "We have to move."

I pulled myself together. Filed away another impossibility for later.

We were almost to the portal when Marcus stopped.

I felt his reaction before I saw what caused it. A spike of shock so intense it cut through all the background noise. Disbelief. Horror. And underneath it, a crack forming in something he'd believed his whole life.

"Marcus?"

He was staring at the wall. A section near the portal chamber, away from the main corridors. A memorial of some kind. Names carved into stone, dozens of them, faded with age. The heading above the list was barely legible.

THE HOLLOWED.

"These are victims," Sasha said, photographing the wall. "People they drained."

Marcus didn't respond. He'd found something on the list. His hand was shaking as he traced the letters.

ELEANOR HOLLOWAY. 1962.

"That's my great-aunt." His voice didn't sound like his. "Gran's older sister. She died before I was born. They said it was an accident. They said she fell."

Nobody knew what to say.

"She didn't fall. She was here. In this place. They put her in one of those chairs and they drained her until there was nothing left." Marcus's hand dropped from the wall. "Gran knew. She knew what happened to her sister and she never told anyone. She just stayed quiet. Stayed safe. Let them think the Holloways had learned their lesson."

"Marcus." Dao's voice was gentle. "We need to go."

"The Holloways used to have investigators. People who tracked down rogue practitioners. That's what Gran always said. That's why our name used to matter." He was still staring at the wall. "Eleanor must have gotten too close. Found something she wasn't supposed to find. And they killed her for it."

"That's why your family was destroyed," Thaddeus said slowly. "Not for asking questions. For finding answers."

Marcus nodded. His face was blank, but I could feel the devastation underneath. Everything he'd believed about his family's fall. The shame he'd carried. The legacy he'd tried to rebuild. It wasn't about cowardice or mistakes. His family had been targeted. Punished. Someone in his bloodline had tried to stop this, and they'd been erased for it.

"Miriam didn't start this," he said. "But she's been using it. Expanding it. And my family tried to stop her, and she destroyed them."

I opened my mouth to question it. Something still didn't fit. But before I could speak, I felt it. Someone was coming. Not staff. Something else. Something that made my ability slide off like water on glass.

"We need to go," I said. "Now."

Sasha grabbed one more photo. Dao and Thaddeus adjusted their grip on Lucia. Marcus took one last look at his great-aunt's name.

Then we ran for the portal.

We almost made it.

The portal chamber was right there. Twenty feet. The flickering light of the transit point waiting to take us back.

That's when I felt it again. The smooth blankness I'd felt from Cross. The practiced absence that meant someone had learned to hide from readers.

Someone was waiting for us.