People fear many things. The dark. Insects. Animals. The depths of the ocean. Death, hunger, sickness. But in this age, the thing people feared most could be summed up in a single word: Creatures.
The second floor had become a different place.
Twenty minutes ago it had been alcoves and conversations and Gus carrying a tray up three flights of stairs because the rolls were getting cold. Now the chandeliers were dark — killed by whatever Crack Skull had done to the light below — and the only illumination came from the emergency torches in their wall brackets, guttering orange in the draft that moved through the building from the blown-open entrance. The alcove benches had been overturned. Students moved in the corridors in groups of two and three, some armed, some not, all with the particular quality of motion that came from not knowing where to go and moving anyway.
Rowan knew where to go.
He'd known since the moment the doors came off, since the sound reached the second floor and he'd looked at Mira and she'd looked at him and neither of them had needed to say it. They were first years. Their element was running toward the team captains, not toward the fight. The team captains needed to know what was in the building — not just the creatures, which they could feel and hear and deduce, but Crack Skull, what it had done, what it had taken from Azrael. Someone had to carry that information to people who could use it.
Mira had already worked out the route.
"North exit," she said. She was moving already, low and fast along the wall, away from the railings that overlooked the first floor, away from the sounds rising from below. "Service stairs in the back. They come out near the east garden."
"And from the east garden?"
"We run."
Rowan gripped his staff. His robe was already hampering him — he'd bunched the hem in his left fist, ungainly and undignified and not even slightly his concern right now. "Right. Yes. We run."
Behind them, from the direction of the main hall, a sound that shook the building in its foundations — something massive meeting stone, or stone giving way, or both at once. The torches in their brackets lurched. The emergency light in the corridor contracted and held.
They ran.
* * *
The north corridor ended in a T-junction.
Left led to the service stairs and the east exit and the night air and whatever safety the grounds outside could offer. Right led back toward the secondary hall and the sounds of things that had come through the wall between the kitchen wing and the main building.
They went left.
The clay golem was already there.
It had come up the service stairs — or through the wall beside the service stairs, which was now partially missing, the stone pushed inward in large fragments rather than broken, the way material moved when something didn't understand that walls were meant to be permanent. It stood in the corridor between them and the exit with the patient immobility of something that didn't have anywhere else to be. The construction of it was visible even in the bad light: river clay, dark grey-brown, packed and compressed and animated by something that made it move with the unhurried deliberation of a thing that had never been in a hurry and saw no reason to start. It was roughly human in shape. Roughly. The proportions were agricultural — massive through the torso, arms that descended past where a knee would be, fingers that were more like paddles, blunt and flat and capable of removing a door from its frame without particular effort.
Its face had no features. Just a smooth plane, slightly concave, tilted in their direction.
It knew they were there.
Rowan stopped. Behind him he heard Mira stop, heard the creak of her bow as she drew it. He didn't look back. He was looking at the golem, at the distance between them and it, at the service door behind it that led to the stairs that led to the garden that led to away.
Eight meters. Maybe nine.
The golem took one step toward them, and the floor groaned under it.
"Rowan." Mira's voice was what it always was — level, quiet, gathering information. "Arrows won't do much."
"No," he agreed. Clay was clay. It didn't have vital points. It didn't have anything that could be pierced and cause it to stop being what it was. "Back up. Slowly."
They backed up.
The golem came forward at the same pace — matching them, not pursuing, not rushing. As if it had determined that they were going to be here for a while and had made its peace with that.
Rowan's back hit a wall.
He raised his staff.
Water won't crack it. A Cataracta might scatter it, might buy thirty seconds, costs me everything I have.
He was calculating and he knew he was calculating and he also knew the numbers didn't come out well. His element against a clay golem was spending a great deal to accomplish a little. He didn't have Kayra's earth, Leila's fire, Orin's silver precision. He had water and a staff and the particular brand of creative desperation that had gotten him through a week on an island.
It's going to have to be enough.
He took a breath.
Then the light came.
* * *
It came from the junction behind them — not the orange flicker of the emergency torches but something colder and more deliberate, white-gold and directional, casting sharp shadows where the torchlight had cast soft ones.
Arlo walked through it.
He was not in the armchair anymore. He was not wearing the expression of someone who found answering things tiring. He walked into the corridor with his hands loose at his sides and his long white hair pushed back from his face, and the light was coming from him — off him, through him, generated at some point in the last few minutes from what he was and what he'd decided to do with it. It moved with him. It preceded him. It reached the golem before he did and the golem's featureless face turned toward it.
"There you are," Arlo said. He wasn't talking to Rowan or Mira.
Milo came through the junction a step behind him, and where Arlo moved with the ease of someone who had always found physical effort optional, Milo moved with the compressed efficiency of a person who had spent years making every motion count. He was shorter than Arlo by half a head and broader across the shoulders, and his hands were already coated — earth element, that dull grey-brown that Rowan recognized from watching Kayra, but denser, more deliberate, the product of someone who had been doing this since before Rowan had known it was a thing you could do. His feet settled into the floor when he stopped, weight distributed, spine straight. He read the golem the way Mira read rooms.
"Ei," Milo said, half to himself.
He meant the fifth fundamental. The one that came after Suru and Kaba and Zou and the fourth — the one that lived in perception rather than action, in the particular sensitivity that came from having trained your magical channels long enough that they started giving you information back. Milo's Ei was not a weapon. It was a reading. And what it read in the clay golem, in the four seconds he stood looking at it with his hands coated and his feet settled, was sufficient.
"The binding node is in the base of the torso," he said to Arlo. "Left of center. Roughly where a navel would be."
Arlo looked at the golem's midsection. "Buried or surfaced?"
"Three inches deep. Dense clay around it."
"That's inconvenient."
"Yes."
Arlo flexed his hands. The light around him organized itself — not randomly, not diffusely, but with the specific intention of someone who had been working this element long enough to think in its terms. What formed was not a weapon in any conventional sense. Plates. Overlapping, angular, each one the size of a playing card at first and expanding as they settled into position, white-gold and hard-edged and bright enough to read by. They arranged themselves around his forearms, his shoulders, his chest — armor in the literal sense, shaped from solidified light, each plate locked to the next along a seam that was too precise to be improvised.
Rowan stared.
"Get behind us," Arlo said, not looking at him.
Rowan and Mira moved behind them without being asked twice.
* * *
The golem moved first.
Not toward Arlo — toward Milo, which suggested that whatever animated it had some capacity for threat assessment and had correctly identified the Ei-user as the more immediately dangerous of the two. The arm came down in a hammer motion, flat-palmed, the kind of strike that was meant to press rather than cut, to pin and crush rather than pierce.
Milo wasn't there.
He'd moved half a second before the strike, not from the arm — from something his Ei had read in the golem's weight distribution, a half-second telegraph in the clay's center of gravity before the motion began. He was to the left, inside the arm's travel arc, and his Kaba-coated fist went into the golem's side with the force of someone who knew exactly where the structural grain of clay ran and was hitting across it.
The golem's left side compressed inward.
Not cracked — clay didn't crack cleanly. But compressed, deformed, the material displaced and the geometry of the thing made temporarily wrong. It stumbled half a step. Milo hit it again from the same angle, same point, because the Ei told him the displacement had created a stress line and the stress line was the thing to follow.
The golem turned toward him.
Arlo came in from the front.
The light plates on his arms locked together as he moved, the forearms becoming a single surface, and he drove them into the golem's chest in a motion that was less punch and more shove — transferring all of his forward momentum into the impact point, the light-armor acting as a transmission medium, bright enough that the corridor whitened around the contact. The golem went back two steps. The wall behind it took the rest of the force and gave some of it back.
Milo was already at the base of the torso.
His fingers were in the clay — not at the surface, in it, the Kaba coating letting him push through the resistance of the compressed material with a patience that the golem's animation couldn't quite respond to fast enough. Finding the binding node by feel, guided by the Ei that was still reading, still feeding him information about density and resistance and the particular quality of the thing at the center of it all.
The golem reached for him.
Arlo stepped between them. The light plates took the impact — three of them shattered, the white-gold fragments dissolving before they hit the floor, and Arlo rocked back but didn't go down, and new plates formed where the broken ones had been, drawn from the same source, quick enough that the gap was never more than a second.
"Milo."
"Almost."
The golem hit him again. Two more plates. Arlo's jaw set.
"Milo."
"Almost."
The third strike caught him across the shoulder and spun him into the wall. He hit it with a sound that echoed down the corridor and came off it already moving, already generating new plates, already getting back between Milo and the thing that was trying to stop what Milo was doing.
His light was dimmer.
Not gone — but the plates came slower now, the precision of them slightly reduced, the sharp edges gone a little soft. He was spending himself and he knew it and he kept spending because Milo's arm was elbow-deep in the clay and the binding node was there and the alternative was the thing reaching Milo.
"Now," Milo said.
Not a warning. A statement of fact.
His hand closed around the binding node — Rowan couldn't see it but he felt the moment, felt the change in the air of the corridor, the particular shift that happened when something that had been animated stopped being animated. It was the same shift he'd felt at the end of the island fights, the specific quality of absence.
The golem stopped.
Mid-motion, mid-swing, the arm already committed to an arc that would have taken Arlo's remaining plates off — it stopped. Froze. The clay held its shape for one long second, the way a wave held its shape at the peak of its height before gravity remembered it.
Then it collapsed.
All of it, at once, the way things collapsed when the thing holding them together ceased to exist. The clay hit the floor in a heap and stayed there, formless, nothing more than material, the corridor full of the smell of wet earth and something faintly mineral, like a riverbed in summer.
Milo withdrew his arm. He looked at the node in his palm — a small thing, dark crystal, already going dull. He set it against the floor and ground it under his heel until it was powder.
Arlo was sitting against the wall.
His light was almost gone. The plates had dissolved entirely, and without them he looked very much like someone who had just been hit by a large amount of clay three times and was taking a moment to assess the situation. He had his hands on his knees. His white hair was disarranged. He looked, for the first time in Rowan's experience of him, entirely awake.
"Good," he said. Then he closed his eyes.
"We need to move," Milo said to Rowan and Mira. He was already wiping his arm on the inside of his robe, which was ruined, which he did not appear to consider relevant. "The exit's clear. Go."
"You're not coming?"
He looked at Arlo. "We'll follow when he can walk." A pause. "Go. Now. That's why you're running — because you're faster than we are right now. Let that mean something."
Rowan looked at Arlo sitting against the wall with his eyes closed and his light spent.
He looked at the clay on the floor and the dark powder where the node had been.
He looked at Milo, who was looking at him with the expression of someone who had made a decision and was waiting for the other person to catch up.
"Thank you," Rowan said.
Milo nodded once. "Go."
They went.
* * *
The service stairs were narrow and dark and smelled of stone dust and cold air.
Rowan went down them two at a time, staff in one hand, robe-hem in the other, making far too much noise and not caring in the slightest. Behind him Mira descended in near-silence, the way she moved everywhere — each foot placed, weight transferred, nothing wasted.
The exit door at the bottom opened onto the east garden.
Night air. Torchlight from the outer walls. The sound of the building behind them, muffled through the stone and the distance, carrying things they couldn't identify and didn't want to.
Oryn was already in the garden.
He was standing at the edge of the torchlight, near the garden's low stone wall, in the particular posture that meant he had been there long enough to have chosen his position deliberately. His robe was on. His hands were at his sides. He wasn't looking at the door they'd come through — he was looking at the building's east face, at the windows, at the upper floors where lights still moved in ways that suggested things happening that weren't lanterns or candles.
He heard them and turned.
"You're heading for the captains' quarter," he said. Not a question.
"Yes." Rowan was still catching his breath. "Crack Skull — it took something from Azrael, his fire, it's different now, larger, someone needs to—"
"I know." Oryn looked at the building again. Then back at them. "I'll walk with you."
There was something in how he said it that Rowan didn't have time to look at directly. He filed it away and kept moving.
They crossed the garden at a run, Oryn matching their pace without apparent effort, silent beside them in the way he was always silent — not absent, just contained, carrying whatever he was carrying without putting it down where someone could see it.
They were halfway across the garden when the cold came.
* * *
Not wind. Not weather. The specific cold that had no meteorological explanation — the cold of something that consumed warmth rather than simply displacing it, that arrived with the quality of a presence rather than a temperature.
They stopped.
At the garden's far gate, where the path led through to the outer road and the captains' quarter beyond, something stood.
It was larger than it had been in the hall.
The stolen fire was visible inside it — not on it, not around it, but inside it, visible through the bones the way candlelight was visible through paper held to a flame. The ribs glowed orange-white from within. The eye sockets burned. The coat moved in a wind that didn't exist, and the arrows in the skull cast their own shadows inward from the light behind them. It was the same skeleton that had walked into the Academy's courtyard on the night of the exam, the same skeleton that had deflected Azrael's Hell Ray with a single lazy motion, the same skeleton that had ended Agnes on the island without breaking its stride.
But it was carrying something new inside it now, and it knew it, and that knowing had changed something in how it stood.
The green eyes moved across the three of them.
Rowan's throat closed.
We can't fight this. We cannot fight this. This is the thing that beat Azrael Solarius and Azrael Solarius beat everything.
Mira was beside him. He couldn't see her face but he could feel from her stillness that she'd reached the same conclusion and was working on the problem anyway, because that was what Mira did.
Oryn stepped forward.
One step. Just one. Enough to put him slightly in front of the other two.
"Go around," he said. His voice was quiet. "The west wall has a gap near the third garden pillar. You can fit through."
"Oryn—"
"I know the garden." He still wasn't looking at them. "I came out here earlier tonight. I walked it. Go."
"What are you going to—"
"Go," he said. "Please."
The last word was the one that stopped Rowan's argument.
Oryn didn't say please. In all the months Rowan had known him, in all the alcoves and celebrations and shared silences, he could not remember Oryn saying please for anything.
Mira's hand closed around Rowan's arm.
He looked at her. Her eyes said what her mouth didn't.
He knows what he's doing. Let him do it.
Rowan looked at the back of Oryn's head. At the rainbow trim of the Tricksters robe. At the hands at his sides, loose and ready.
He looked at Crack Skull at the gate, at the fire burning inside the bones.
He understood.
He let Mira pull him left, toward the west wall, toward the gap Oryn had found and memorized and saved for exactly this purpose.
He didn't look back.
He couldn't.
* * *
Oryn stood in the east garden and looked at the thing at the gate.
The thing at the gate looked at him.
The fire inside it shifted — a slow pulse, the way embers pulsed when something moved the air near them. The green eyes were steady. Oryn had seen a great many things in those eyes over the course of the year, from the island to the crystal ceremony to here, and what he'd learned about them was that they calculated. They were always calculating. The skeleton moved with intention and the intention came from somewhere, and what drove that somewhere was a kind of patient and total intelligence that had no interest in being surprised.
So don't surprise it, Oryn thought. Confuse it.
He raised his hands.
The Tricksters element was not the element of combat. It was not force or precision or endurance or any of the qualities that the other teams' elements gave their members. It was the element of the interval — of the space between what was real and what was perceived, between what existed and what appeared to exist, between what a thing was and what a thing seemed to be. You could not kill with it, not directly. You could not defend with it, not in any conventional sense. What you could do with it was make something see what you wanted it to see.
Oryn was the best at it in his year.
He was also the only one in his year.
The magic built between his hands — not visible, exactly, but present, a distortion in the air, a wobble in the torchlight around his palms. The Tricksters element at work looked less like power and more like a headache, like the air was uncertain about its own geometry. Oryn had spent two months learning exactly what it felt like when the illusion stabilized, when it cohered into something an external intelligence would read as real.
He felt it stabilize now.
He pushed it outward.
What Crack Skull saw at that moment was not one person in a garden.
It saw three.
Oryn, and to his left a figure in a Pumpkins orange robe carrying a staff, and to his right a figure in a dark robe with a bow. Not copies, not echoes — full presences, each carrying the particular weight and heat signature and magical resonance of a real person, because Oryn had been standing next to Rowan and Mira for the last ten minutes and he knew exactly what they felt like to something that perceived the world through energy and intention. The illusions stood in the garden the way Rowan and Mira had stood in the garden. The illusions looked at Crack Skull the way Rowan and Mira would have looked at it.
Crack Skull's green eyes moved across all three figures.
And then they went still.
Oryn watched.
He watched the thing at the gate assess what it was seeing, watched it calculate, watched it make a decision. He had perhaps fifteen seconds — the illusion was the best he could produce, built from perfect knowledge of the two people he was mimicking, but it was still an illusion, and something that had lived as long as Crack Skull had lived would start finding the seams.
Fifteen seconds was enough.
Mira and Rowan needed thirty to reach the gap.
Fifteen is what I have.
He held the illusion.
He held the Rowan-shape and the Mira-shape perfectly still in the garden, at exactly the spacing they'd been standing at, carrying exactly the signatures they carried. He poured everything he had into the coherence of it, every scrap of the two months' training, every hour in front of the dough dolls, every session where Dusk had stood in the corridor and looked at him with those dark-circled eyes and said again and he had done it again.
He heard Crack Skull move.
Not toward him.
Past him. Through the gate. Toward the open ground of the garden, the center of it, where the torchlight from the outer walls fell most directly and where, from the gate's angle, the three figures stood against the path.
Toward the Rowan-shape.
Toward the Mira-shape.
Oryn tracked it without turning his head — peripheral vision, the sense of presence that the Ei training had given him even if Ei wasn't his primary technique. He tracked the fire inside the bones moving through the garden with that slow and total certainty, tracked it passing him on his left, close enough that the heat of Azrael's stolen fire was briefly, terribly real against the side of his face.
He didn't move.
He breathed. Steady. Even.
He held the illusion.
Ten seconds.
The thing reached the center of the garden. The green eyes were fixed on the two figures.
Twelve.
He heard, from the direction of the west wall, the faint scrape of a robe against stone. The gap. Someone going through.
Fourteen.
A second scrape.
Both of them.
Oryn exhaled.
He let the illusion go.
* * *
The garden was very quiet.
The Rowan-shape and the Mira-shape ceased to exist at the same instant, the way illusions ceased to exist — not gradually, not with a warning, with a between-state where the unreal faded to reveal the real. One moment they were there. The next they were not. The garden held their absence the way a room held the absence of a sound.
Crack Skull stood in the center of the garden.
The fire inside the bones shifted.
The green eyes moved to where the figures had been. To the empty air where they had stood. To the path that led to the west wall, where the torchlight showed, to anyone who was looking closely enough, the faint disturbance of recently moved air.
Then the green eyes moved to Oryn.
Oryn stood at the edge of the torchlight and looked back.
There was a silence. Not the silence of two things about to fight — the silence of two things that both understood what had just happened and were pausing in the understanding of it, the way you paused when something clarified itself.
Crack Skull looked at him for a long time.
Oryn didn't look away.
He had a very still face. He always had. In the castle on the island, in the crystal ceremony, in the alcove at the second-floor celebration — he had never been the kind of person whose face told you much about what was happening inside it. But there was something in it now that hadn't been there before, or that had been there but not visible, a quality that had needed this particular moment to surface. Not fear. Not defiance. Something quieter and more settled than either, something that knew itself.
He said: "Good evening."
He had said it before, in a second-floor alcove, to Eren, because it was the right thing to say and he said what was right and didn't embellish. He said it now for the same reason.
Crack Skull moved.
It was not slow. It was not hesitant. There was no period where Oryn might have run, because Crack Skull did not give periods for running to the people it had decided to reach. It covered the distance between the center of the garden and the edge of the torchlight in a motion that the eye couldn't fully follow — the fire inside the bones streaking orange-white across the dark of the garden, the coat spreading, the night air displaced violently enough that the torches on the outer wall guttered all at once.
It was fast.
Oryn was faster, in the particular way that the Tricksters element could be fast — not in movement, but in the interval between what existed and what appeared to exist. In the half-second before Crack Skull arrived, in the fragment of time when the intelligence behind the green eyes was still computing the distance and the angle and the position of the thing it was reaching for, Oryn shifted.
Not much. A hand's width. A single step inside the reach, rather than away from it.
Enough to make the strike that had been aimed at ending things quickly land slightly differently than intended.
Not enough to matter.
He hit the ground.
The east garden was cold and the stone was hard and the torch on the outer wall nearest to him was still guttering from the displacement of the air. He lay on his back and looked up at the sky above Safe Haven, at the dark between the stars, at the faint glow of the city that bled upward even at this hour.
He could hear, from the direction of the west wall, nothing. No footsteps. No sounds of pursuit.
Good, he thought.
Above him, the fire inside Crack Skull's bones shifted. The green eyes looked down at him, reading him the way they read everything — calculating, assessing. Patient.
Oryn looked back.
He had always had an unremarkable face. It was one of the things he'd known about himself for a long time, one of the things that had made the Tricksters element feel, when the crystal had chosen it, exactly right. Unremarkable faces were the best faces for what he did. They didn't tell you anything. They made you look at other things.
He looked up at the fire in the bones and he didn't tell it anything.
The light in his eyes went out.
Quietly.
The way he did everything.
* * *
The illusion was gone.
It had been gone since he released it, but the fact of it — the fact of what had been done with it, the fact of what the shapes had been and where the real ones had gone — settled into the space of the east garden with a finality that was different from the finality of things that simply ended. This had been a transaction. Something had been given in exchange for something else, freely, with full knowledge of the terms.
Crack Skull stood over Oryn and understood this.
It had understood it in the fraction of a second when the illusion dissolved and the garden showed itself as it actually was — two absences where there had been presences, and one presence where there had been an obstacle. It had understood it the way it understood most things, completely and without sentiment, because sentiment was for things that had once been people and were trying to remember what that meant.
But there was something in the east garden, in the cold air and the guttering torchlight and the still form at its feet, that it did not immediately move away from.
The green eyes stayed.
They looked at the face that had looked back at them until it couldn't anymore. At the hands at the sides. At the Tricksters robe, the rainbow trim muted in the torchlight to something softer than it looked in daylight.
The fire inside the bones shifted, very slightly.
Then Crack Skull turned.
It walked back through the gate it had come from. The coat moved. The fire pulsed. The green eyes found the upper windows of the building ahead, found the things still unfinished inside it, resumed their calculation.
The east garden was quiet.
The torch on the outer wall nearest to where Oryn lay had stopped guttering. It burned straight now, steady, casting its small circle of orange light over the stone and the garden path and the figure in the Tricksters robe.
From beyond the west wall, somewhere in the dark of the outer grounds, two sets of footsteps moved fast and did not slow down.
They were carrying what he had given them.
They didn't know it yet.
They would.