Chapter 28 · Loopbound - Chapter 28: Mom in the Breach

The floor's tearing itself apart under Callum's boots.

He's three levels down, past the restricted archive, past the old wards Vera showed him in loop forty-two. The walls are bleeding light where the anchor split. Evan's blood is still warm on the binding circle upstairs, and the whole academy's coming down early because Nolan's emergency fail-safe just failed.

Callum can hear her.

"Mom!"

His voice cracks on it. He hasn't called her that out loud in twenty years. The corridor bends wrong, stones pulling away from mortar, and there she is.

She's kneeling in the center of a gutted ritual space, hands pressed to a fracture in the floor that's leaking something that isn't light and isn't shadow. Her hair's the same dark brown he remembers, but it's shot through with white now, and her Thornwell uniform jacket's scorched at the sleeves.

She doesn't look up.

"Callum. You shouldn't be here."

"Yeah, well." He's moving before he finishes the sentence, crossing the warped floor in four strides. "Neither should you. Come on."

She shakes her head. Doesn't pull her hands away from the fracture.

"I can't. If I let go, the breach opens all the way.