There were two kids left, and Luka was about to collapse.

He could stop, he knew that. These were the most recent cases, and the infection didn't date back more than a couple of days. There was a very slim chance they would tell him anything the others hadn't. He just wanted to finish. He wanted to collect data from everyone, just to be sure. Just to be thorough. He was aware that the spells had eaten away most of his magic, and was starting to feed off other, more important things. He was aware that it wasn't just the headache making him dizzy, and that the black spots in his vision were becoming harder to ignore. He sat down on the floor, before he passed out, and took deep breaths.

He had dropped the warding spell ages ago, but it hadn't made much of a difference. Although it had made it a little easier to focus, at least before the headache and exhaustion had overwhelmed him. While allowing himself a brief respite, he reflected over the things that were obvious.

One: This had only hit students so far. There were no teachers, no Agents. Which made sense, since this had started with a student, and the students used more magic around each other, than they did around anyone else. Still, it was another hint that no one had done anything about this. Nothing except containment, which was typical of the Council. In his experience, their initial plans usually involved hiding from the problem and hoping for the best.

Two: This was meant to target the Academy, probably to get to the Council, but if he was correct in his assumption that this was a problem with a solution, it wasn't meant to be solved by them. Healers couldn't solve this. Agents couldn't solve this. The Council employed one person, who might have a chance to solve it, the only person allowed to do spells within the walls of the Academy. (Certain things, like the wards and suppressors, could only be accomplished with spells. It wasn't a pleasant job, from what Luka had heard.) Either they hadn't considered that, or they had dismissed it. Or maybe the Spellcaster had already given up.

Three: He was definitely missing an important clue, because his head was pounding and he couldn't think. He didn't actually know if the wards were still as punishing as they had been earlier, because he was fairly certain that headache had been joined by another headache caused by excessive spell use.

He registered the door opening, but he didn't react. If it was Alice returning, perhaps he could convince her to do the last two. If it was Dr. Garland, he was determined to ignore her.

There were two sets of footsteps, and if he focused, he could sense… He opened his eyes to confirm, and sure enough. Hadley Thomas was standing in front of him, watching him as if falling asleep on the job wasn't an acceptable use of his time. Even if he hadn’t actually been asleep. He might wish he was asleep, but unfortunately, Hadley was very real.

"You already got us access to an Oracle?" he asked, assuming he was there to escort them. "I'm not done here."

"No," Hadley said. He went from looking judgmental to uncomfortable, but that could have been because of all the unconscious people. "You're not getting access."

"Fuck," Luka muttered. He was too tired for this. "Why the hell not?"

"I would feel better about explaining this, if you looked awake."

"Alice is awake," Luka said. She was standing against the wall next to the door, and Luka realized he was going to have to move to accommodate all the uncomfortable people.

He pushed himself up off the floor, swayed, and crashed into the wall. Hadley's arm had reached out for him, an automatic response, but had stopped short of touching him. "I'm fine," Luka said.

He clutched the wall, steadying himself.

"Would you sit down?" Hadley complained. "You look like you're going to pass out."

Luka shook his head, even though it sent it spinning. "I need air," he said. "And coffee."

He wondered if he had any magic left, just enough to get him outside, but he didn’t even bother checking.

Hadley held out his arm to him, even though he looked like he would rather die.

"Don't touch me," Luka said.

"Fine," Hadley huffed. "I'll find you some coffee."

He forced himself to walk, and really, once he started moving the dizziness wasn't so bad. Alice stayed close to him, but he was pretty sure he wasn't going to pass out. When they made it outside, the fresh air might actually have helped clear his head, if the bright light of the midday sun hadn't seared into his brain. Hadley was waiting by a bench, and handed Luka the cup of coffee. He drank it too quickly, forgetting that he couldn't heal the burns.

"So?" Luka said, annoyed with himself as much as everything else now. "Start talking."

He held the coffee cup between his hands, waiting for it to cool down. Hadley looked from him to the bench, and Luka swore he was going to smack him if he didn't get to the point so he could go home. He was fine. His head was throbbing, and the light was still too bright, but he was barely swaying.

He sat down.

"Right," Hadley said. "I talked to Constance."

Alice joined Luka on the bench, which made him feel less impaired.

"Why the fuck would you call Constance?"

No one on the Council liked Luka, but Constance Van Aller had made a point to personally banish Luka from the Academy ten years ago, even though she was already the head of the Council back then and barely needed to do anything in person. When she told him that she never wanted to see him within the gates ever again, she had probably meant it. There was no way she had approved of this arrangement, and he could have told Hadley she wasn't going to be helpful. He sat back and waited for what he imagined would be a completely reasonable explanation.

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"Because you said it was urgent," Hadley explained.

"Right. Should I have mentioned that Constance hates me? Because I thought that would be obvious."

"She didn't say no because of you," Hadley said, sighing. "When you confirmed the infection is caused by a spell, it officially became an attack on the Academy. Under an attack, the protocol is to lock down access to the Oracles."

Luka finished his coffee, and tossed the cup in the trash can next to the bench. "Great," he said. "Then we're done here. I'll send you my account number, so you can pay me for my time."

He would have dramatically walked off, but even thinking about the effort of that exhausted him.

"Lavrin."

"I don't know what to tell you, Thomas. It's all we have."

He must have decided Luka was being unreasonable, and probably assumed he was lying too, because he looked to Alice.

"Well, it's… our best option. Sir. The spell has traps built in, so we can't touch it. We can't create a counter."

Hadley looked back at Luka. "You can't? Or is it just really difficult?"

"Do you want me to try?" Luka asked. "Because I can guarantee you that I will kill at least half of those people before I succeed. We need the person who created the spell, Thomas, and we need Oracles to find them."

"No." Hadley shook his head. "Sorry. It's not up to me. Find another way."

"Sure. We'll just make guesses based on absolutely nothing. No problem."

He lit a cigarette, and he could feel Alice and Hadley watching him, like he could somehow come up with a better answer on the spot.

"Look," he said, resenting the attention. "I can't do anything more today. Alice, you're dismissed. I'm going home."

Alice rose from the bench, but then hesitated when no one else moved. Hadley was watching Luka.

"I'll make sure he gets home."

"Are you sure?" Alice asked.

Luka ignored them, putting the cigarette to his lips while watching his free hand. He tried to access his magic, watching for a spark of red light across his skin. He knew it wouldn't come, but what he wouldn't give right now for enough power to give himself an energy boost.

"I don't need your help," Luka said, once Alice had left.

"You need someone's help."

The obvious choice would be to call Quinn, but he would be at work, and he had promised himself not to. If he could have stayed away from Quinn entirely while on this job, he would have, but the least he could do was to keep Quinn away from the Academy. Luka didn't know exactly what had happened to Quinn to make him leave this place. He didn't know why he couldn't come back, or why he didn't want Luka to either. He suspected fear was part of it, but didn't know what it was that he feared. Quinn wasn't sharing, and Luka hadn't gone digging. At least not yet. It had never been that important, but now that Luka was back here, the questions became harder to ignore. He wanted to know what he was trying to protect him from.

"Fine," he said, finally.

When Hadley led him to a car, he stopped. He knew, rationally, that the nearest station was a twenty minute walk away, but still. What was it with mages and cars? Why did they even have cars? After a minute, he got in. He was too tired to argue, and with any luck, he could just feign sleep for the fifteen minutes it would take to drive to his place.

"So, you're a lab tech now?" Hadley said, breaking the silence, and jolting Luka back to the conscious world. He wasn't all the way asleep, although his plan to fake it had become a struggle to stay mostly awake.

"I'm not doing this with you," he mumbled, huddled sleepily against the car seat. His accent started bleeding through his words. When he wasn't paying attention, his pronunciation fell into more familiar patterns.

"We have to talk about something. Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll fall asleep in my car for the next twelve hours. Just be glad I opted for small talk."

"What's the other option?" Luka asked. His eyes shifted to the window, but they were driving on to the highway, which afforded him an unobstructed view of a beige brick wall that did absolutely nothing to keep him awake. Barely anyone had ventured out to tag it, and the one piece of graffiti he spotted was too faded to even read.

"The harder questions." Hadley said, looking intently at the traffic. A car was honking further ahead. Luka turned his head to look out the windshield, but he didn't see the thing that had offended the driver.

To be honest, he was tempted to let the conversation play out, to find out what those hard questions might be, but Hadley should have known better than to play that game with him.

"Really? Like how you didn't tell me everything?" In fact, he had barely told him anything.

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything," Luka said. Had that not been clear?

"You're definitely going to have to be more specific than that."

"Patient zero died a little over a week ago, from what I can tell. Which means he was probably infected a week or two before that. So, would you like to explain to me what the actual fuck you have been doing with all that time?"

"I wasn't in charge of the—"

"Like hell you weren't. Aren't you the strategic whatever-the-fuck of the Agents? You coordinate and monitor the cases, right?" Luka knew perfectly well what his title was, but he was determined not to acknowledge it.

"We had to be cautious. Once we realized it was spreading, we…"

"No, I got that from Dr. Garland's refusal to use magic anywhere near them. I'm not asking what you didn't do. I'm asking what you did."

"I don't know, Lavrin," Hadley said, frustrated. "We were discussing options. We were trying to determine how to safely proceed."

"You needed me to confirm it was a spell. Did you even think about consulting the Spellcaster? No, because it's better to risk my life, since I'm not an asset to the Council. Isn't that right?" His voice turned hard, and he was almost raising it towards the end. His anger was usually a quiet thing, but goddammit, he was so tired. If his accent slipped anymore, he might as well be speaking Russian.

"No," Hadley said. "No, that's not…" His hands were tight around the steering wheel, and Luka was concerned that upsetting him while he was driving had been a mistake, but it felt distant.

"We don't have to talk," Luka said. "We can just sit here. Quietly." He was still angry, but at least he had won. He huddled into his seat, determined to enjoy the peace his victory earned him.

Traffic tightened around them, as they got closer to the city. Most people still had a couple of hours left of their nine to five, so they moved with a more or less steady pace. They made it all the way to the bridge before Hadley spoke again, the towers rising above them like massive wish bones.

"I didn't bring you here as a sacrifice," he said, quietly. "That's not what this is."

Luka startled. He hadn't expected him to speak again, and had been watching the city drift by, unthinking.

"If you had stayed, you would have been the best Agent in the district, possibly the country."

Luka shook his head. "They wouldn't want me."

"What I'm saying is, you didn't need us. You could have handled that Soul Eater alone. I… thought you could handle this, too. I really did."

Was that why Hadley had sold him out to the Agents? The question popped into his head, but he didn't ask. He didn't argue the point either, even though it wasn't true. The idea had been his, and maybe he hadn't needed them. Maybe he had just needed any willing participants, but it mattered to him that it was people he trusted. He would have been less confident without them, his plan would have been less polished. He might have succeeded, even without them, but he wasn't sure it would have occurred to him to try. Besides which, Hadley seemed to forget that the reason they had become friends in the first place, was because they had been competing for the top spot. Hadley had been very, very good, before he let the Council emasculate him.

"I can," he said, which was mostly his pride talking. "I will."

He had no ideas left, but at least he had plenty of determination.