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"Take one more step and I'll burn that robe right off you!"
He takes another step.
Of course he does.
I hit the stairs two at a time. Boots slamming stone, breath ripping out of me, blue glyph light smearing past every ten feet. The whole stairwell smells like old parchment and ozone. Spent magic.
"You wrote my name in frost!" My shout spirals up into the dark. "You made this mine!"
A door creaks above me.
"Don't you dare—"
The stairs dump me onto a landing. Three oak doors. The middle one's still swinging shut, brass handle trembling.
I catch it with my palm and shove through.
Old observation room. Dead telescopes, dusty lenses, star charts nobody's touched since before I was born. Through the tall windows I can see the ceremony hall glowing down on the grounds like a jewel box full of people who don't know they've got thirty minutes left.
Empty room.
No. There's another door on the far wall. Cracked an inch.
And somebody's breathing behind it.
"I know you're in there." My voice comes out steadier than my hands. I slide along the wall. "You called my name. So talk to me."
Nothing.
"Fine. I'll start. Garrett Voss died tonight with my handwriting on his poison. Any of that ringing a bell?"
"You're persistent." A man's voice. Young. Not scared. Just tired in a way that scares me more.
"Yeah, well. People keep dying and my recipes keep showing up." I push the door with my boot. "Makes a girl nosy."
Storage room. Broken telescopes, cracked glass, boxes of charts. And him, dead center, still in that black robe.
Taller than I thought. Hood swallowing his face. But his hands are bare and I can see them clear as day — young hands, ink stains on two fingers. Student hands.
"You shouldn't be here," he says.
"You put my name on a window in frost."
"That was a warning."
"It was an invitation and you know it." I step closer. "Start with Garrett."
"That wasn't supposed to happen."
"Oh, fantastic. I feel so much better."
He moves. Fast. Suddenly he's between me and the door and I stop cold, close enough that I can hear the catch in his breath, close enough to smell copper on him. Under the hood his eyes are bloodshot and wide and wrong.
"Stop investigating," he says. "Every time you push, it gets worse. Different people die. The pattern breaks."
"Pattern." I don't back up. "There's a list? Somebody's got a list?"
He reaches into his robe and I tense — but it's paper. Folded small. He holds it out.
"What is that?"
"The original sequence." His hand's shaking so hard the paper whispers. "Three deaths. Same order. Every single time. But you saved Mara. So it corrected. It took Garrett instead."
My mouth goes to sand.
"Say that word again."
"Which word?"
"It. The thing that corrected." I'm staring at him. "You mean the loop."
His head snaps up. "You remember."
Not a question.
"Six PM to midnight. Over and over." I swallow. "And you're the one running it."
"No."
"You're wearing a murder robe, so forgive me—"
"I'm trying to stop it!"
"By killing people?"
"They were already dead!" It slams off the stone and comes back at us both. Then quieter, ragged: "They were already dead, Ivy. I'm just trying to find out why."
The way he says my name. Like he's said it a hundred times before tonight.
"Who are you?"
He doesn't move. Wind rattles the windows. Somewhere below, a clock starts up.
Eleven thirty.
Then he pushes back the hood.
I forget how to breathe.
Twenty, maybe. Dark hair stuck to his temples. Sharp face. Eyes like he hasn't slept in a week.
I know that face.
Because I held it while it died.
Third loop. Eastern wing. Blood coming through his fingers, him choking out something about bells and a barrier, my hands pressed to his chest and doing absolutely nothing. He died on that floor. And when midnight came he was standing in the ceremony hall again, laughing at somebody's joke.
"You're—" Nothing else comes out.
"Karl Murray." His smile is a bad one. "Yeah."
"You died. In my hands."
"I know. I remember it." He looks at his own palms like they're borrowed. "Every loop, I remember dying. Then I wake up here and watch it come for me again."
My back finds the wall. I let it hold me because my knees won't.
"Then you're like me."
"Not like you." His eyes lock onto mine and don't let go. "You're outside it. You change things. I'm nailed to it. I see the whole shape and I can't touch it. And every time somebody gets saved who shouldn't be, it takes a different body."
"So I let people die."
"I don't know!" Raw, cracked. "I don't know, okay? Dozens of loops. Maybe hundreds. Every time I think I've got the answer the bells eat it."
Eleven forty-five.
"Why me?" I ask. "Out of everyone in this school, why write my name?"
He looks away. "Because you're the only one who's ever changed anything. You broke the pattern." A beat. "And I thought if anybody could end it—"
"End it how?"
"Find who cast the spell. Find out why those three had to go. Break it from inside." He digs out something small. A crystal, glowing faint blue. "Piece of the barrier core. The thing pinning the night in place. It's hidden somewhere in the academy and it's tied to the caster. Find the core, you find them."
He holds it out. I take it, and his fingers brush mine — warm, way too warm for someone I watched go cold. Neither of us lets go for a second longer than we should.
"And you?" My voice drops. "If I break it, what happens to you?"
"I already died once tonight, remember?" He laughs, one ugly note. "Me walking around, me remembering — that's the loop patching a hole. You break it, I go back to dead. Properly."
"Karl—"
"Don't." He steps back, finally. "Don't do the face. I've watched you do that face."
Eleven fifty-five.
"Then give me a start," I say fast. "Where do I look?"
"Somewhere the caster can check on it without anyone blinking." He glances at the window. "Five minutes. Spend them right."
"Wait—" He's already at the door. "Karl. The victims. What did they have in common?"
He stops in the doorway and looks back, and something in his face goes soft and terrible.
"They all knew a secret about this place. That's why they got picked."
"What secret?"
The first bell hits. The sound rolls over the academy like water over a drowning man.
"Ivy, listen to me—" He's shouting over it now, crystal light flaring in my fist. "Your name wasn't on that window because I put it there first. It's carved into the spell. Under the caster's. You're not the one breaking this loop—"
Second bell.
"—you're the reason it—"