Chapter 24

The last day of the year arrived quietly.

No fanfare. No ceremony. Just students packing bags and saying goodbyes, the dorms slowly emptying as portals carried people home to their ordinary lives. The extraordinary hidden away for another summer.

I took my time packing. Folded clothes I could have thrown in a bag. Organized books I wouldn't read until September. Anything to stretch out the final hours, to delay the moment when I'd have to walk through a portal and pretend to be normal again.

Dao found me staring at an empty drawer.

"You know that's not going to pack itself."

"I know."

He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. We'd been roommates for nine months. Had gone from strangers to whatever we were now. Not just friends. Something forged in shared danger and impossible knowledge.

"Summer plans?" he asked.

"Ohio. Dad. Pretending magic doesn't exist." I closed the drawer. "You?"

"Family stuff. My grandmother's memorial is in July. First anniversary." His voice was carefully flat. "Bunch of relatives who still whisper about the accusations. Should be fun."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's just how it is." He pushed off the doorframe. "Listen, I wanted to say something before we scatter."

"Yeah?"

"This year. Everything that happened. The investigation, the facility, Declaration Day." He struggled with the words. "I came here angry. At the school, at the families who ruined mine, at everyone who looked the other way. I thought I'd be fighting alone."

"You're not alone."

"I know that now." He met my eyes. "You could have walked away. After the cover-up, after they wrapped everything in a neat story and told us to forget it. You could have declared for some Sign that didn't fit, graduated in three years, disappeared into a normal life. Nobody would have blamed you."

"I would have blamed me."

"Yeah." He almost smiled. "That's why I trust you. Not because you're brave or smart or whatever. Because you're too stubborn to quit even when quitting makes sense."

"I think that was a compliment."

"Take it however you want." He held out his hand. "See you in September?"

I shook it. Felt his determination, his grief, his fierce refusal to let his family's name stay tarnished. All of it burning steady underneath the jokes and the hard exterior.

"September," I said. "We'll figure out what comes next."

"Damn right we will."

He left. The room felt emptier without him.

Sasha caught me on my way to the Portal Hall.

She had a leather satchel over one shoulder, stuffed with books she'd probably read twice by the time school started again. Her notebook was clutched to her chest like a shield.

"I made copies," she said without preamble. "Everything we found. The research on the Accord, the symbols, the patterns. I've got one set, you've got one set, Dao's got one set. If anything happens to one of us over the summer..."

"Nothing's going to happen."

"Probably not. But probably isn't certainly." She handed me a thick envelope. "Keep it somewhere safe. Somewhere your dad won't accidentally find it."

I took the envelope. Felt its weight. Months of work condensed into paper.

"Sasha, I wanted to thank you. For everything this year. The research, the planning, the way you kept us organized when everything was falling apart."

"I was protecting myself." Her voice was matter-of-fact. "I fit the profile. First-gen, scholarship, no connections. Without you and Dao, I was just waiting to disappear."

"That's not the only reason."

"No." She looked away. "But it's the easiest one to say."

We stood there for a moment. The awkwardness of people who'd been through something together but didn't quite know how to acknowledge it.

"My grandmother would have liked you," Sasha said finally. "She always said the only thing worth having was knowledge that couldn't be taken away. You're good at collecting that."

"So are you."

"I know." She almost smiled. "Stay safe, Eli. Don't do anything stupid until I'm there to document it."

"No promises."

She walked away toward her own portal. I watched her go, then looked down at the envelope in my hands. Months of secrets. Answers that raised more questions. The shape of something old and terrible that we'd only just started to understand.

I tucked it into my bag and kept walking.

The portal to Ohio was in a small alcove off the main hall.

Not one of the grand Sign doors. Just a utilitarian gateway, maintained for students going home to places too mundane to warrant their own architecture. I'd walked through it in September feeling terrified and hopeful. Now I felt something else. Something harder to name.

I paused with my hand on the frame.

Behind me, the Portal Hall hummed with activity. Students saying goodbye, families collecting their children, faculty offering final words of encouragement. The ordinary end to an extraordinary year.

And above us, felt but not seen, the hidden doors. Three Signs that officially didn't exist. Three mysteries that would still be waiting when I came back.

I thought about everything I'd learned. The Accord. The extractions. Vane's exhausted compliance. Cross's impossible walls. The system that had been running for generations, grinding up students like Lucia, like all the ones who'd come before.

I wasn't going to let it keep running. Not forever. Not without a fight.

But first I had to survive the summer. Had to go home and be Eli Lawrence from Millbrook, Ohio. Had to eat Dad's cooking and avoid the neighbors' questions and figure out how to be a person who didn't see conspiracies in every shadow.

I stepped through the portal.

Dad was waiting on the other side.

Not in Ohio. The portal deposited me in a nondescript room in Columbus, the nearest gateway to Millbrook. Dad had driven two hours to pick me up, was leaning against his truck in the parking lot with a smile that didn't quite hide his worry.

"Hey, kid."

"Hey, Dad."

He hugged me. Tight, like he was checking I was still solid. I let him, breathing in the familiar smell of motor oil and coffee and home.

"You look different," he said when he pulled back.

"Different how?"

"Older. Tired." He studied my face. "Like you've been carrying something heavy."

"It's been a long year."

"Want to talk about it?"

"Maybe. Eventually." I threw my bag in the truck bed. "Right now I just want to go home and eat something that isn't cafeteria food."

"I can do that." He climbed into the driver's seat. "Fair warning, though. I've been experimenting with the slow cooker. Results have been... mixed."

"I'll take my chances."

We drove. The Ohio landscape rolled past, flat and green and utterly normal. Farms and gas stations and billboards advertising things that had nothing to do with magic or Signs or ancient conspiracies. A world where the biggest problems were crop prices and potholes and whether the Reds would have a winning season.

I'd missed it. More than I'd expected.

"Shelby called yesterday," Dad said after a while. "Said you two talked."

"Yeah. Finally."

"She sounded better. Less worried." He glanced at me. "Whatever you said, it helped."

"I told her the truth. As much as I could."

"That's usually a good start." He was quiet for a moment. "She's a good friend, Eli. The kind that sticks around even when you make it hard. Don't take that for granted."

"I won't. Not anymore."

We drove the rest of the way in comfortable silence. The truck's engine hummed. The radio played classic rock too quiet to really hear. And slowly, mile by mile, I felt the weight of the year starting to lift.

Not gone. Just... lighter. Shared between the person I'd been at Mudwick and the person I was here, coming home.

The house looked the same.

Same peeling paint on the shutters. Same crack in the driveway Dad had been meaning to fix for three years. Same empty flower beds where Mom used to plant things.

I stood on the porch for a moment, just looking. Remembering the person who'd left here in September. Scared and confused and desperate for answers.

I had answers now. Not all of them, but enough to know the questions went deeper than I'd imagined. Enough to know that my mother's fear hadn't been paranoia. That the things she'd been running from were real.

Someday I'd find out exactly what she'd known. What she'd been involved in. Why she'd spent her life checking mirrors and warning me not to let anyone see what I could do.

But that was a mystery for another time.

I went inside. The house smelled like dust and Dad's failed slow cooker experiment. I dropped my bag in my old room, lay down on the bed I'd slept in for seventeen years, and stared at the ceiling.

Normal. This was normal. This was home.

I could do this for a summer.

I found the note three days later.

Not slipped under a door. Not hidden in my bag. It was in my jacket pocket, the one I'd worn to Declaration Day. I hadn't checked it until now because I hadn't needed the jacket. Ohio in June was warm and ordinary.

But when I reached in looking for my earbuds, my fingers found paper.

I pulled it out carefully. Unfolded it.

A symbol. The interlocking design I'd seen in the facility, the one that marked the Accord's work. Crossed out with a single harsh line.

And below it, in handwriting I didn't recognize:

You see what they really are now. You know the shape of it even if you don't have the details. That's more than most people ever learn.

The system can't be fixed from inside. Everyone who tries gets absorbed or destroyed. Vane learned that. Cross learned that. So did I, once.

But systems can be broken from outside. Not by one person. By many. Working together. Knowing the truth.

When you're ready to do something about it, find me.

The Wellspring remembers what was taken. It's time someone remembered with it.

No signature. But at the bottom of the page, a single word.

Miriam.

I read it twice. Three times. Let the words settle into my mind.

Miriam Moss. The name Marcus had whispered. The person his grandmother had mentioned in connection with resistance, with fighting back, with refusing to accept the system as it was.

She'd been watching. Had seen what I'd done at Declaration Day. Had decided I was worth contacting.

I sat on my bed, holding the note, feeling something shift inside me.

All year I'd been reacting. Learning. Surviving. Gathering pieces of a puzzle I didn't fully understand.

But this was different. This was an invitation.

Not to join a faction or serve an agenda. Just to know more. To be part of something larger than my small group of friends trying to survive in a system designed to consume us.

The Wellspring remembers what was taken.

I thought about the hidden doors. The Signs that officially didn't exist. The pieces of the magical world that had been locked away for reasons nobody would explain.

Whatever the Wellspring was, it mattered. Miriam thought so. The Accord clearly thought so, or they wouldn't have worked so hard to hide it.

And I could feel it. Had been feeling it all year. The pull from above the Portal Hall. The sense of something waiting.

Maybe that was why none of the four Signs fit. Maybe I wasn't meant for Hearth or Thorn or Gate or Tide.

Maybe I was meant for something older. Something they'd tried to erase.

I folded the note carefully. Tucked it into the envelope with Sasha's research. Hid the envelope in the back of my closet, behind boxes of childhood things Dad never threw away.

Then I went downstairs. Dad was in the kitchen, wrestling with the slow cooker again. Normal sounds. Normal life.

"Need help?" I asked.

"Please. This thing is possessed."

I helped him figure out the temperature settings. We made something that was probably beef stew. We ate it on the porch, watching the sun go down over Millbrook's empty streets.

Normal. Home. Safe.

For now.

The summer stretched ahead of me. Three months of pretending to be ordinary. Three months of sitting with what I knew and waiting for September.

But I wasn't just waiting. Not anymore.

I had Sasha's research to study. I had the man in gray's words to analyze. I had Miriam's note to consider.

And I had a choice to make.

When I went back to Mudwick, I could keep playing defense. Watching, gathering information, trying to stay safe. Or I could accept Miriam's invitation. Step outside the system entirely. Join whatever resistance she was building.

I didn't know what that would mean. What it would cost. What I'd have to give up or become.

But I knew one thing for certain.

I wasn't going to end up like Vane. Tired and compromised and settling for the small goods I could control while the big evils continued in the shadows.

I wasn't going to let them win.

The first year was over. I'd survived it. Found my people. Learned the shape of the enemy.

The war hadn't started yet.

But when it did, I'd be ready.