Chapter 19

The thought crept in slowly, the way bad ideas do.

At first it was just a flicker. A what-if that passed through my mind during a lecture I wasn't listening to. What if I just went home? Packed my bag, walked through a portal, showed up on Dad's doorstep. What would happen?

I pushed the thought away. Focused on the professor's voice. Took notes I wouldn't remember.

But the thought came back. During meals. During practice. During the long hours in my room when I should have been sleeping. What if I just left?

Spring had arrived at Mudwick while I wasn't paying attention. Late March now, the grounds shaking off winter, everything turning green and alive. The beautiful weather felt like an insult. How dare the world bloom while something rotten grew underneath it?

The investigation was closed. Blackwood was convicted. The official story was settled and everyone had moved on. Marcus was gone, somewhere in his grandmother's attic sorting through decades of research. Thaddeus was barely present. Cross might be compromised, might be exactly what she seemed, might be anything, and I had no way to know.

What was I staying for?

The question didn't have a good answer. Every reason I came up with felt thin. Learning magic I wasn't sure I wanted. Playing Drift on a team that was falling apart. Investigating something that couldn't be investigated because every time we found evidence, the institution just absorbed it and kept running.

I thought about Millbrook. The familiar streets. The house where Dad waited. Even Shelby, complicated as that was. At least there I knew who I was. The weird kid who read people. Not a pawn in a game I didn't understand.

The thought grew heavier each day. Less like a what-if and more like a plan.

I texted Shelby one afternoon. First contact in weeks. Sorry I've been quiet. Rough semester.

Her reply came hours later. Yeah. Me too.

Short. Guarded. I could feel the distance in those three words. She was protecting herself now. Building walls against someone who kept disappearing without explanation.

I deserved it. I knew I deserved it.

I stared at the screen for a long time, trying to think of something else to say. Some way to bridge the gap I'd created. But everything I typed felt like another lie, so I deleted it all and put the phone away.

I called Dad on a Tuesday afternoon. Not late at night. Not impulsive. Deliberate.

"Hey, kid. Everything okay?" He sounded surprised. I usually only called on weekends.

"Yeah. I just... I've been thinking."

"About?"

"About whether I should come home."

Silence on the line. I could hear him processing. Recalibrating.

"Did something happen?"

"No. I mean, yes, but it's over now. The school handled it." The lie came easy. "I just... I'm not sure this is where I'm supposed to be."

More silence. When he spoke again, his voice was careful.

"You know I'd love to have you home. House is too quiet without you. But Eli, I need you to think about why you're asking."

"What do you mean?"

"Are you leaving because you want to come back? Or are you leaving because staying is hard?"

The question hit like a punch.

Because the answer was obvious. Staying was hard. That was the whole reason. The only reason.

"There's nothing wrong with hard," Dad continued. "Hard is where you find out what you're made of. But if you come home just because things got difficult... you'll always wonder. And wondering is its own kind of hard."

"What if I come home and I'm happier?"

"Then you made the right choice." A pause. "But will you be happier? Or will you just be less? Going through motions in a place that doesn't fit you anymore?"

I thought about Millbrook. The empty factory on the hill. The boarded-up storefronts and the faded signs. The house where Mom's absence lived in every wall. Shelby saving me a seat at lunch because her mother told her to.

I'd left that place for a reason. The reason was that I was suffocating there. That my ability was growing and I couldn't control it and eventually I was going to hurt someone or lose my mind.

Going back didn't undo any of that. It just meant suffocating somewhere familiar instead of somewhere strange.

"I don't know what to do, Dad."

"Nobody does, kid. That's the secret. We're all just figuring it out as we go." His voice softened. "Look, I'm not going to tell you what to choose. You're old enough to make your own decisions. But I will say this: the Eli who left here a few months ago was scared and confused and had no idea what he was. The Eli I'm talking to now sounds different. Sounds like someone who's been through something. That's not nothing."

"Being through something doesn't mean I want more of it."

"No. But it means you can handle more of it." He sighed. "Whatever you decide, I'm here. You know that. Door's always open, room's still yours. But don't come home just because it's easier. Come home because it's right."

I didn't have an answer for that. So I just said I loved him and hung up.

The phone sat in my hand for a long time after. Heavy with everything I hadn't said.

Thaddeus found me an hour later. He'd been looking for me, which was unusual. He'd been avoiding everyone lately.

"Can we talk?"

We walked to a quiet corner of the grounds. Away from other students, away from windows where professors might see. He was nervous. I could feel it radiating off him without even trying to read him.

"I wanted to tell you in person," he said. "I'm stepping back. From all of it."

"I know."

He blinked. "You do?"

"You've been pulling away for weeks. This is just making it official."

"It's not that I don't care." The words came out rehearsed. He'd practiced this. "I do care. But my family... there are expectations. Paths I'm supposed to follow. If I keep pushing against the institution, those paths close."

"So you're choosing the paths."

"I'm choosing to survive." He couldn't meet my eyes. "Maybe that makes me a coward. But I've seen what happens to people who fight systems. My family has stories. Ancestors who pushed too hard and got pushed back harder. I don't want to be a cautionary tale."

"And if more students disappear? If someone else ends up like Lucia?"

"Then I'll feel terrible about it. But feeling terrible is survivable. Being destroyed isn't."

I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him that survival without purpose wasn't really living. But the words felt hollow. Who was I to lecture about fighting when I was thinking about running?

Thaddeus looked at me finally. Something calculating in his expression.

"You should think about it too. You fit the profile. First-generation. No connections. No powerful family to ask questions if something happens to you. You're exactly who they target."

"I know."

"So maybe fighting isn't the smart play. Maybe the smart play is what my family's been doing for generations. Graduate. Get positioned. Accumulate power slowly, carefully, in ways that don't draw attention. Then, when you're someone who matters, use that power to change things from inside."

"That could take decades."

"It could. But at least you'd be alive for those decades." He shrugged. "It's not heroic. I know that. But it might actually work. All the heroes I've heard of? They're dead or destroyed. The people who actually changed things? They were patient."

I thought about that. The long game. The careful accumulation of influence. Becoming someone who mattered and then, finally, doing something with it.

It wasn't wrong. From a certain angle, it was the only approach that made sense.

But I thought about Lucia in the infirmary. About the shimmer fading from her chest while Thaddeus's ancestors were being patient. About all the students who'd disappeared over the decades while the system ground on.

Patience was a luxury. Some people couldn't afford to wait.

"I hope it works for you," I said. "I mean that."

"But you're not going to do it."

"I don't know what I'm going to do."

Thaddeus nodded. He'd expected that answer.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I wanted to be braver. I just... I'm not." He held out his hand. "No hard feelings?"

I shook it. Felt his relief, his guilt, his genuine regret all tangled together. He meant what he said. He was sorry. He just wasn't sorry enough to change anything.

"No hard feelings."

He walked away. Back toward the main building. Back toward the paths his family had laid out for him. Back toward the long, patient game that might change something in fifty years or might just make him comfortable while the world burned.

I watched him go and tried to figure out if I hated him or understood him.

Both, probably. Both at once.

That evening I walked to the lake.

Everyone warned about this place. The whispers. The voices. The sense that something lived beneath the surface that didn't have humanity's best interests at heart. But tonight the warnings felt distant. Less real than the weight I was carrying.

I sat on the bank and watched the water. It was still. Too still. No wind, no ripples, no sign of life. Just a flat gray mirror reflecting a sky that couldn't decide if it was done being winter.

I'd come here to think. To be somewhere that wasn't my room, wasn't a classroom, wasn't anywhere that other students might find me and want to talk. Just silence and water and space to figure things out.

But when I closed my eyes, the lake was there.

Not the sound of it. Not the smell or the cold air rising off the surface. The lake itself. Present in a way that places shouldn't be present to someone like me.

I read people. That was the whole point. That was what made me different from the other Zants at Mudwick. Emotions, intentions, the things humans carry around inside them. Not places. Not buildings. Not ancient bodies of water that had been here longer than the school.

But lately something had been shifting. The facility walls pressing against me. The door feeling like it remembered. And now this.

There was something down there. Something old. Patient. Vast. Not malevolent exactly, but not benevolent either. Just there. Watching. Waiting.

The awareness of it washed over me and I stood up fast, stepping back from the bank. My heart was pounding. My hands were shaking.

I wasn't ready for that. Whatever that was.

I walked back toward the buildings, not quite running but moving faster than I needed to. Behind me, the lake stayed still. Silent. Keeping whatever it knew to itself.

The Drift match happened three days later.

First competitive match since everything fell apart. We had a new fifth player, a second-year transfer named Orin who seemed competent but distant. He didn't know our history. Didn't ask about Marcus. Just showed up, did his job, and disappeared afterward.

Sasha was there. Dao was there. Thaddeus wasn't.

And me. I was there. Physically.

The match started. I read the opposing team's reader like I was supposed to. Felt her attention shift, called out where she was sending her teammates. Did the job.

But none of it felt real. The pools shimmering across the field, the energy flowing into players, the pushes and freezes and tactical decisions. It all seemed small. A game we played while something monstrous happened underneath us.

We lost. Not badly. A close match that could have gone either way. But it went their way, and afterward nobody seemed surprised.

Sasha found me on the field after the others had left. I was sitting on the grass, staring at nothing.

"You weren't there," she said.

"I was on the field."

"Your body was. The rest of you was somewhere else." She sat down next to me. "Where were you?"

"Trying to figure out why any of this matters."

"The match?"

"The match. The school. The investigation. All of it." I pulled at the grass. Watched the blades tear. "We did everything right. Found the facility. Caught Blackwood. Rescued Lucia. And nothing changed. They just wrapped it up in a neat story and kept running."

"So you want to quit?"

"I want to understand the point. Of staying. Of fighting. Of anything."

Sasha was quiet. I could feel her thinking, choosing her words.

"My grandmother was the first in our family to go to university," she said. "Back in Nigeria, decades ago. Everyone told her it was pointless. Women don't need education. The system will never accept you. You'll just waste years and end up back where you started."

"What happened?"

"She went anyway. Got her degree. Became a teacher." Sasha picked at the grass too. "She didn't change the system. The system was still broken when she died. But she changed what was possible. Her daughter, my mother, grew up knowing that education was real. That women could do it. And her daughter, me, ended up here."

"That's three generations."

"That's how long it takes sometimes. You don't see the change you make. You just make it possible for someone else to see theirs."

"That's depressing."

"It's honest." She stood up, brushed grass off her clothes. "I'm not going to tell you to stay. That's your choice. But if you leave, you're leaving me and Dao to fight this alone. And I'm scared, Eli. I fit the profile. I know I'm a target. The only thing that makes me feel like I might survive is knowing I'm not alone."

She walked away.

I sat on the field until the sun touched the horizon. Thinking about grandmothers and patience and whether three generations was too long to wait.

I went to see Lucia that evening.

She'd moved back to her regular room. Attending classes again. Doing everything a student was supposed to do. From the outside, you'd think she was fine. Recovering. Moving on.

From the inside, I could feel the damage.

She was reading when I knocked. Some textbook I didn't recognize. The shimmer around her chest was barely visible, like a candle almost burned out.

"You're thinking about leaving," she said when she saw me. Not a question.

"How did you know?"

"You have that look. The one people get when they're calculating escape routes." She set down the book. "I've thought about it too. Going home. Forgetting any of this happened."

"Why don't you?"

"Because home won't take me back. Not really." She touched her chest, where the brightness used to be. "My family saved for years to send me here. They expect me to come back powerful. Successful. Someone who made their sacrifice worth it. What do I tell them? Sorry, I got drained, but at least I'm alive?"

"That's not your fault."

"Fault doesn't matter. Results matter." She looked at me with those older eyes. The ones that had seen too much too young. "You're different. You have somewhere to go back to. Someone waiting. If I were you, I might take that."

"Would you? Really?"

She thought about it. I watched her turn the question over, examine it from different angles.

"No," she said finally. "Because leaving means they won. Means I let them take everything. At least if I stay, if I graduate, if I become something despite what they did to me... that's mine. They can't take that."

"Even if it's hard?"

"Especially if it's hard." Something like fire flickered in her damaged shimmer. Brief but real. "Hard is the only thing I have left that proves I'm still me. If I give up, if I go home and let them win, then what's the point? They already took part of my soul. I'm not giving them the rest."

I didn't know what to say. She wasn't inspiring. Wasn't giving me a pep talk or telling me I could make a difference. She was just being honest about her own survival.

And somehow that honesty cut deeper than encouragement would have.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Do you think it's possible to fight this? To actually change anything?"

Lucia laughed. It wasn't a happy sound.

"I think systems don't fall because teenagers feel strongly about injustice. I think the Accord, or whatever it is, has been running for longer than we've been alive and will probably keep running after we're dead." She shrugged. "But I also think they're scared of something. Why else work so hard to keep it hidden? Why sacrifice Blackwood so fast? They're protecting something. And things that need protection can be hurt."

"So you think there's a weakness somewhere."

"I think there has to be. Otherwise they wouldn't bother with the stories and the cover-ups. They'd just do what they do and not care who saw." She picked up her textbook again. "I don't know what the weakness is. I'm not smart enough or powerful enough to find it. But someone might be. And if I'm still here when they do, maybe I can help."

I stood up to leave. At the door, I stopped.

"Lucia? Thanks."

"For what?"

"For being honest."

She almost smiled. "Honest is all I have left. Might as well use it."

I walked back to my room through darkening corridors. Thinking about everything I'd heard. Dad's question about why I wanted to leave. Thaddeus's long game. Sasha's grandmother. Lucia's defiance. The lake, patient and vast and waiting.

None of them had told me to stay. None of them had promised things would get better or that fighting would work. They'd just been honest about their own choices and left me to make mine.

Leaving means they won.

The words stuck in my head. Not because they were profound or clever. Because they were true. If I went home, I'd be doing exactly what the system wanted. Disappearing quietly. Not in a chair with tubes in my chest, but disappearing all the same. Becoming one more student who couldn't handle it. One more problem that solved itself.

The man in gray had said I'd come around eventually. Had seemed so certain I'd end up on his side or out of the way. Leaving would prove him right.

Staying wouldn't prove him wrong. Staying might not accomplish anything at all. But at least it would be my choice. My act of defiance. The one thing they couldn't take without my consent.

I wasn't ready to decide. Not yet. The arguments for leaving were still there, still valid, still tempting.

But something had shifted. The question wasn't "should I go?" anymore.

The question was "what am I staying for?"

And that question had answers. Answers I hadn't let myself think about because thinking about them meant committing to something.

My people were here. Dao and Sasha. Scared and angry and still fighting.

The fight was here. The Accord. The answers. Everything I wanted to understand.

And leaving meant they won.

That wasn't enough. Not yet. But it was something.

I lay in bed that night and listened to the silence of the dorm. Felt the traces of students who'd lived in this room before me. Some had graduated. Some had transferred. Some had probably disappeared.

I wasn't going to be any of those things. Not yet.

Tomorrow I'd figure out what I was going to be instead.