somewhat.
“I’ll see you around,” I say. “In class. Because the school isn’t closing.”
He shakes his head, his darkly handsome features etched with concern. “Be careful, Reckless. Please.”
“Always.”
I shoot him a cocky grin before I turn and walk away, but with every step I take, the smile slides off my face a little more. Despite my bravado in front of Roman, I really am scared as I head into the infirmary. It’s on the west side of campus, in its own special building, and an air of gravity and importance clings to it.
What if Asher really is hurt, and they just don’t know it yet?
What if the school does get shut down?
What if this person strikes again and kills someone else? What if they plan another attack like the one in the dining hall, and next time somebody, or several people, get hurt in a way that can’t be fixed?
As I walk down the hallway, searching for the entrance to the recovery ward, hushed, urgent voices reach my ears.
I freeze when I recognize Hardwick’s smooth timbre.
Eavesdropping isn’t something I make a habit of, but what if this is news about the school shutting down? I need to know.
It’s also a little strange that the dean would be having a meeting in a room in the infirmary when he’s got a nice big office in the admin building. Either he was already here visiting the injured students, or he specifically didn’t want to have this conversation in his own office.
Either way, I’m curious.
I stray closer to the door where the voices are emanating from. It’s open just a crack, as if someone pulled on it to close it but forgot to make sure it latched all the way. I sidle up, flattening my body against the wall and peeking through the crack. It looks like an out-of-use meeting room, and inside, I can see Hardwick and two other staff members. I recognize them—one’s a professor for the third years, and the other works in administration.
“But what if that spell destabilized the protection wards?” the professor, Emmitt Macombe, is saying. He’s an unreasonably tall man with a gaunt face and intense green eyes.
“I checked,” Hardwick assures him in a soothing tone. “The artifacts are still safe. Nothing’s been disturbed by the magical outburst.”
I’m guessing the outburst he’s referring to is when all of us unleashed our power at once in the dining hall. It was a hell of a lot of magic to have flying around in the air.
“Those objects are under three layers of runes,” the woman from administration says, her tone impatient. I forget her name… Ms. Pierce, maybe? “They won’t be disturbed that easily.”
“But they’re under three layers of runes for a reason,” Professor Macombe replies, his tone growing curt in response. “They’re incredibly dangerous. If something like the dining hall event were to happen again and trigger any of them—”
Wait, dangerous artifacts? In the school? What the fuck? Who thought that was a good idea? Hey, I know this school is full of people with powerful and Unpredictable magic that they can’t control yet, but let’s put a bunch of dangerous objects here too. That can’t possibly backfire.
Idiots.
“We can’t move them,” Hardwick insists, still in that calming voice. “First, we can’t risk them being detected, and second—and perhaps more importantly—they are our bargaining chip. You know the conditions.”
Conditions? Bargaining chip? I tug my lip between my teeth. What the hell is he talking about?
“The school can be kept afloat even if we’re not playing nanny to a bunch of magical time bombs,” Macombe insists. “That was fine when the founders of the academy needed to gain the Circuit’s trust to get started, but we have a good reputation now. We can stand on our own two feet; we don’t need to keep sitting on a disaster just waiting to happen!”
I tap my fingers together, pulling on various scraps of knowledge stored in my brain to try to make sense of all this. I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I think I’m starting to get an idea of what’s going on.
Unpredictable magic users are frowned upon—thanks to my history class, I know that the prejudice against us has been around pretty much ever since the first Unpredictable manifested their powers. But then one day a long time ago, some group decided they wanted to start a school for those kinds of people to teach them how to control their magic. If the government said no, what might that group