Chapter 18

The official story came together over the next week like a puzzle that had been waiting for someone to assemble it.

Professor Silas Blackwood. Member of The Bound. Miriam Moss's cult of radical practitioners who believed the old families had hoarded power too long. He'd used his position as portal studies instructor to identify vulnerable students. First-generation. Scholarship. No family connections to ask uncomfortable questions. He'd approached them with lies about emergencies and opportunities, walked them through a hidden portal, and delivered them to Miriam's extraction facility.

He'd acted alone. The school had no knowledge. The administration was shocked and horrified. New security measures were being implemented. The portal network was under review. The matter was resolved.

Vane gave another speech in the great hall. More formal this time, a week after the first. Talked about vigilance and community. About the danger of radical ideologies and the importance of trusting the institution to protect us. He praised the students who had uncovered the threat, though he didn't name us. Said the school was safe now. Said we could move forward.

Everyone applauded.

I sat in the back and watched the faces around me. Relief. Comfort. The particular satisfaction of a problem being solved by someone else. They wanted to believe it was over. Wanted to go back to worrying about assignments and Drift matches and who was dating who.

I wanted to believe it too.

But Blackwood's words kept echoing in my head. You've just given them a cleaner ending.

Lucia was released from the infirmary three days after Blackwood's arrest. She'd recovered enough to walk, to talk, to attend classes. But the shimmer around her chest was faded. Damaged in ways the healers said might never fully heal.

"They're calling it 'exposure trauma,'" she told me when I visited her in her new room. They'd moved her to a single, away from her old roommate who asked too many questions. "Like I saw something scary and it broke me. Not like someone literally drained part of my soul."

"What are you going to do?"

"Stay. Finish the year." She shrugged. The gesture was hollow. "What else is there? Go home and explain to my family why their daughter came back less than she left? They saved for years to give me this opportunity. I'm not going to waste it."

"It's not your fault."

"I know." She looked at me. Her eyes were older than they'd been a month ago. "But fault doesn't change facts. I'm diminished. That's the word they keep using. Diminished capacity. Diminished potential. Diminished." She almost laughed. "At least I'm alive. That's what everyone keeps telling me. At least you're alive."

I didn't know what to say. So I said nothing.

The group felt smaller without Marcus.

We still met in the empty classroom. Still talked about what we'd found, what it meant, what we should do next. But there were only four of us now, and the conversations kept circling back to the same questions without answers.

"The official story doesn't make sense," Sasha said. She had her notebook out, pages covered in her precise handwriting. Timelines. Names. Connections. "Blackwood was at Mudwick for twelve years. If he was sending students to Miriam that whole time, that's dozens of victims. Maybe hundreds. How did no one notice?"

"People did notice," Dao said. "The students who disappeared. The families who asked questions. They noticed. They just got ignored or shut down."

"That's my point. Ignoring that many red flags takes effort. It's not incompetence. It's policy."

"So you're saying the school knew?"

"I'm saying someone knew. Whether it was the administration or just the right people in the right positions, someone was making sure nobody looked too closely at what Blackwood was doing."

Thaddeus shifted in his seat. He'd been quiet since the arrest. Processing, I thought. Or maybe just retreating into the comfortable explanations he'd grown up with.

"Blackwood confessed," he said. "He admitted to working for Miriam. Why would he lie?"

"Because he was going to be blamed anyway." Dao leaned forward. "You heard him. 'I'm the sacrifice.' He knew exactly how this would play out. Confess to working for Miriam, take all the blame, let the institution off the hook."

"Or he was telling the truth and Miriam really is behind all of this."

"Both things could be true." I said it before I'd fully thought it through. "Miriam could be real. The threat could be real. And the school could still be complicit. Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"Then who do we trust?"

Nobody had an answer.

Marcus had left behind a note. I found it in my room the morning after he left, slipped under my door sometime during the night.

Gran's research is in boxes in her attic. Decades of work she was too scared to finish. I'm going to finish it.

The Accord keeps coming up. An agreement between the founding families. Something that predates Miriam by generations. If I can find out what it was, maybe I can find out what it became.

Don't trust anyone who benefits from keeping secrets. That includes professors who seem too helpful.

I'll send word if I find something. Be careful.

- M

I read the note three times. The last line bothered me most.

Professors who seem too helpful.

He meant Cross. Had to mean Cross. She was the only professor who'd been helping me. The one who'd recruited me, trained me, made me feel like I belonged at Mudwick.

The one I'd told everything to.

I tried to think through the sequence of events. Cross was the first person outside the group who knew about the facility. I showed her the photos. She promised to investigate.

Two days later, we caught Blackwood ourselves. But Cross showed up right on schedule, as if she'd known exactly where we'd be. She said the wards alerted them. Said they were already on their way.

Maybe that was true.

Or maybe she'd made a call after I left her office. Warned someone. Given them time to prepare a sacrifice.

I couldn't feel anything wrong in her. Every time I was near her, I felt the same warmth I'd always felt. The same genuine care. If she was hiding something, her walls were perfect.

But the man in gray at the facility had walls too. Different from Cross's. Hers felt like warmth with something locked behind it. His had felt like stone. Like absence. And underneath that absence, I'd caught something else. Not his thoughts or feelings. Something harder to name.

His category, maybe. Like he belonged to a Sign, but not one of the four I'd learned about. Something older. Something that didn't fit the framework everyone at Mudwick used.

I hadn't been able to process it in the moment. Too much happening. Too much fear. But lying awake at night, the memory kept surfacing. The way he'd felt like a closed door that led somewhere I didn't have a map for.

Cross's walls were professional. Practiced. The kind of barriers any experienced Zant might build.

His walls were something else entirely.

I didn't know what that meant. Filed it away with all the other questions I couldn't answer.

That night I checked my phone for the first time in days. Nothing from Shelby. Two weeks of silence now. Not since my vague "rough semester" text that she'd answered with "yeah. me too."

I'd been the one who let things go quiet. But her silence felt different. Less waiting and more withdrawal. She was protecting herself from me. From the friend who kept disappearing into a life he wouldn't explain.

Part of me wanted to reach out. Type something that might bridge the gap. But what would I say? Still can't tell you anything. Still lying about everything that matters. Miss you anyway.

The silence was worse than questions. Questions I could deflect. Silence meant she'd stopped asking. Stopped expecting anything from me at all.

I put the phone away and tried to sleep.

Training continued.

Cross met with me twice that week. Worked on filtering techniques. Helped me practice controlling the range of my reads. Gave me exercises to strengthen my walls.

She was warm. Patient. Invested. Everything a mentor should be.

"You've been through a lot," she said during our second session. "Finding that facility. Confronting Blackwood. That would shake anyone."

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to be fine. It's okay to struggle with what you saw."

I looked at her. Pushed gently against her presence, feeling for cracks.

Nothing. Just concern. Just care.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"How did you know where we'd be? When Blackwood was arrested. You showed up right when we confronted him."

Her expression didn't change. "The wards. When he entered the restricted area, they triggered an alert. We were already moving when you caught up with him."

"But how did you know we'd be there?"

"I didn't. I assumed you'd stay out of it after I told you I was investigating." A slight smile. "I should have known better. You're not the type to stay out of things."

It was a reasonable answer. It made sense. And I couldn't feel any deception in it.

But I also couldn't feel anything underneath it. Her surface was all I had access to. Whatever was below that surface, if anything was below it, stayed hidden.

"Eli." Cross leaned forward. "I know this is hard. You wanted to trust me, and now you're not sure if you can. That's understandable. But I need you to hear this: I am on your side. Everything I've done has been to help you."

"I believe you."

I wasn't sure if that was true. But I said it anyway, because what else could I say? I can't read you, so I can't trust you? That would only make sense if I could read everyone, and I couldn't. Cross's walls might be evidence of guilt. Or they might just be the normal defenses of someone who'd spent decades learning to protect herself.

I had no way to tell the difference.

Thaddeus stopped coming to meetings.

Not dramatically. He didn't announce he was leaving or explain his reasons. He just had other things to do. Family obligations. Upper-year mentors who wanted his time. Study groups for classes he was struggling with.

The excuses were always reasonable. Always believable. And always just enough to keep him from being in the room when we talked about what came next.

"He's pulling away," Sasha said after the third meeting he missed.

"Can you blame him?" Dao was pacing again. He paced when he was frustrated. "He believed in the system. Now he's watching it prove him wrong. That's not easy for someone who grew up being told institutions work."

"We need him."

"We need people who are willing to keep fighting. If he's not willing, he's just deadweight."

"That's harsh."

"It's true." Dao stopped by the window. Looked out at the grounds where the last of the winter gray was finally giving way to early spring. March had arrived with that uncertain weather that couldn't decide if it was done being cold. "I've seen this before. After my grandfather was accused, after everything fell apart, people who said they were our friends started finding reasons not to be around. Too busy. Other commitments. You can always tell when someone's looking for an exit."

I thought about Thaddeus. The way he'd helped us get into the sublevel. The way he'd carried Lucia through the portal. He wasn't a coward. But he also wasn't built for this. For fighting something that didn't have clear edges or obvious villains.

"Give him time," I said. "This is a lot to process."

"We don't have time." Dao turned back to face us. "Spring break is next week. After that, we've got two months until the year ends. The longer we wait, the more the official story solidifies. The more people forget what we found. The more the system convinces everyone that one bad professor explains everything."

"So what do you suggest?"

"I don't know." His hands clenched into fists. "That's the problem. We caught Blackwood. We rescued Lucia. We have evidence of extraction. And none of it mattered. The institution just absorbed it all and kept running."

"Maybe that's the point," Sasha said quietly. "Maybe we're not supposed to win. Maybe the best we can do is survive and keep asking questions."

"That's not good enough."

"It might have to be."

I called Dad that night.

It was late. Later than I should have been awake. But I couldn't sleep, and the silence of my room felt too heavy.

"Hello?" His voice was groggy. I'd woken him up.

"Hey. Sorry. I shouldn't have—"

"No, no. It's fine." The rustle of blankets. A lamp clicking on. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I just..." I didn't know how to finish. "I wanted to hear your voice."

A pause. The kind of pause that meant he was choosing his next words carefully.

"You know, when your mom was going through something hard, she used to do this. Call me in the middle of the night. Wouldn't explain what was wrong. Just needed to know someone was there."

"What did you do?"

"Listened, mostly. Let her talk if she wanted to talk. Let her be quiet if she didn't." Another pause. "I'm listening now, if you need it."

I leaned back against the wall. Phone pressed to my ear. Tried to figure out what I could say that wouldn't sound insane.

"Do you ever feel like you know something is wrong, but you can't prove it? Like everyone's telling you one story, and it makes sense, and you have no reason to doubt it, but somewhere inside you know it isn't true?"

"Yeah." He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Yeah, I've felt that."

"What do you do?"

"Depends. Sometimes you trust your gut and you're right. Sometimes you trust your gut and you're wrong, and you spend years cleaning up the mess." He sighed. "There's no formula, Eli. You just make the best choice you can with what you know, and you live with the consequences."

"That's not very helpful."

"I know. Sorry." A small laugh. "If I had better answers, I'd give them to you. But life doesn't come with answer keys. You just muddle through and hope you don't screw up too badly."

We sat in silence for a while. I could hear him breathing. The familiar sound of my father existing on the other end of a phone line, hundreds of miles away in an empty house in Ohio.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"If something was really wrong. If I was in trouble. You'd want me to tell you, right?"

"Of course."

"Even if you couldn't help? Even if there was nothing you could do?"

"Especially then." His voice was firm. "I'd rather know and feel helpless than not know and wonder. That's what being a parent means. You carry your kid's problems whether they tell you about them or not. Might as well have the full picture."

I thought about telling him. Everything. The facility. The extraction. Cross and her perfect walls. The feeling that the school I'd been sent to was rotten at its core.

But what would that accomplish? He'd worry. He'd want to come get me, bring me home. And home wasn't an answer. Home was just a different kind of isolation.

"I'm okay," I said. "Just tired. School stuff."

"Alright." He didn't believe me. I could hear it in his voice. "But Eli? If that changes. If 'okay' becomes 'not okay.' You call me. Day or night. I'll figure out the rest."

"I will."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

The call ended. I sat in the dark, phone still in my hand, and felt the weight of the lie settle over me.

I wasn't okay. Things weren't fine. And there was nothing my father could do about any of it.

The next week crawled by.

Classes. Meals. Drift practice with a team that didn't feel like a team anymore. The rhythms of school life continuing like nothing had changed.

Blackwood's trial happened somewhere off-campus. We weren't told the details. Just that he'd been convicted, sentenced, removed from the practitioner community permanently. Justice served. Case closed.

Lucia went back to classes. Attended lectures. Took notes. Did everything a student was supposed to do. But the light behind her eyes was dimmer now. The shimmer around her chest was barely visible. She was surviving, not living.

I saw her in the dining hall sometimes. Sitting alone at a corner table, eating mechanically. When I tried to join her, she was polite but distant. Like she didn't want to be reminded of what connected us.

Thaddeus showed up to one more meeting. Sat in the back. Didn't say much.

"I want to keep helping," he said when Dao pressed him. "I do. But I also have to think about my future. My family's position. If I get labeled as a troublemaker, as someone who doesn't trust institutions..."

"So that's it? You're choosing politics over truth?"

"I'm choosing survival." He wouldn't meet Dao's eyes. "You can hate me for it. But some of us don't have the luxury of burning bridges. Some of us have to live in this world after you're done trying to tear it down."

He left. We let him go.

Sasha was still with us. Still researching. Still filling notebooks with connections and questions. But I could see the fear underneath her determination. She fit the victim profile. First-generation. Scholarship. No powerful family to protect her. Every day she stayed at Mudwick was a calculated risk.

"I found something," she said one evening. Just the three of us now, in the empty classroom. "The symbols from the facility. The ones Cross said were Miriam's."

"What about them?"

"They're not Miriam's. They're older." She spread papers across the table. Photographs of the facility walls next to images from old books. "These same symbols appear in documents from the school's founding. From before that, even. They're connected to something called the Founding Accord."

"Marcus mentioned that. His grandmother's research."

"It keeps coming up." Sasha tapped one of the pages. "But there's no official record of what it actually was. Just references. Allusions. Like everyone who wrote about this stuff assumed their readers already knew."

"So the disappearances go back further than Miriam."

"Decades further. Maybe centuries." She looked at me. "Whatever's happening here, it's not one rogue professor. It's not even one terrorist organization. It's something built into the foundation of this place. Something the founders agreed to."

"An accord."

"Exactly."

Dao was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was different. Less angry. More tired.

"My grandfather was accused of draining a heritage site. That was the official story. But he always said it wasn't him. Said someone else did it and he was just convenient to blame." He looked at the symbols on Sasha's papers. "What if that's what this is? What if Miriam is just the convenient name they hang everything on? The boogeyman who explains all the ugliness so nobody has to look at what's really happening?"

"She's real, though. The destruction she's caused is real."

"Real and useful aren't mutually exclusive." Dao shook his head. "I'm not saying she's innocent. I'm saying maybe she's not the whole story. Maybe she's doing exactly what they want her to do. Providing the threat that justifies the response."

I thought about the man in gray at the facility. His calm explanation of how things worked. His certainty that we'd come around eventually. The way he'd felt like something outside the categories I understood. He hadn't sounded like someone following a terrorist. He'd sounded like someone following policy.

"We need more information," Sasha said. "About the Accord. About what the founders agreed to. About how deep this goes."

"Where do we get that?"

"I don't know. The library has limits. The archives are restricted. And I don't exactly have connections who can pull strings."

"Marcus might find something in his grandmother's research."

"If he does, he'll tell us." Sasha gathered her papers. "In the meantime, we keep looking. Keep asking questions. It's all we can do."

It wasn't enough. We all knew it wasn't enough.

But it was something. And something was better than nothing.

I walked back to my room alone that night. The corridors were quiet. Most students were asleep, or at least pretending to be.

I thought about everything we'd learned. The facility. Blackwood. The Accord. The symbols that predated Miriam by generations. The way the institution had absorbed our discovery and turned it into a story that protected itself.

We'd caught the villain. Rescued the victim. Exposed the conspiracy.

And nothing had changed.

The system was still running. Students were still at risk. Somewhere, probably, another facility was doing exactly what the first one had done. Another professor was identifying targets. Another batch of vulnerable kids was being prepared for extraction.

We hadn't won. We'd just given them a reason to be more careful.

I stopped outside my door. Pressed my hand against the wood. Felt the faint traces of everyone who'd lived in this room before me. Students who'd come to Mudwick full of hope. Students who'd learned what this place really was. Students who'd graduated or transferred or disappeared.

The door felt like something. Not just wood and hinges. Like it remembered.

I pulled my hand back. Another thing I shouldn't be able to feel. Another crack in what I thought I knew about my abilities.

Somewhere in that history, had any of them figured it out? Had any of them tried to fight back? And if so, what had happened to them?

I didn't have answers. Might never have answers. Just questions that multiplied every time I thought I'd solved something.

Blackwood was caught. The case was closed. The official story was settled.

And I'd never felt less certain of anything in my life.