Chapter 26 · Untitled Chapter

"You saw it." Karl's voice came out of the dark before I saw him move. "Your mother's work. Beautiful, wasn't it?"

Leon's fingers locked around my wrist, hard enough to bruise. "Don't answer him."

I tore free anyway. My legs were numb, my chest hollow, but my head had finally cleared. The loops. The deaths. The reason I kept waking up while nobody else remembered a thing.

I was the anchor. Born one. My mother had turned herself into a living circuit for alchemy nobody else could hold, and I'd inherited it like a birthmark.

"She didn't deserve what they did to her." My voice stayed steady, even if the rest of me didn't. "They threw her out for solving something nobody else could touch."

"Exactly." Karl stepped out from between the shelves. The barrier core pulsed red in his fist, painting his face the color of an open wound. "Elena Kline proved a living subject could stabilize forbidden alchemy. Aldric buried her for it. Called it ethics."

"Don't say her name."

"I finished what she started." His fingers tightened around the core. The red light brightened, hot and hungry. "Six hours. No dead students. No scandal.