In the end, it was almost disappointing how quickly the raid was over.

Perhaps Alice had wanted it to last longer to justify the anxiety that had been building up in her chest.

But really, she wanted it to be endless. Because the end meant taking stock, counting the wounded and the dead. A few fights were still unfolding, but Agents had started pouring inside the building. She saw the glow of magic through the open door and the gaps in the boarded-up windows, green and blues blending together with bits of yellow mixing in. Agents led out a procession of rouges, wearing suppressors like handcuffs around their wrists. It looked like a win for the Council, but judging by the bodies on the ground, there were no winners in this. Of course it wasn't over. The students were still dying one by one — she had been afraid to ask, but eventually discovered that they had lost three more since Matt — and they still didn't have the cure. She suspected some form of torture was supposed to change that, but there was no telling how long that would take, and none of it sat well with her.

"Damn it," Hadley muttered softly beside her.

Alice turned her attention on the man, who was currently being led past them. He was flanked by two agents and a suppressor was glowing with a cold white light around his wrists. She saw the familiarity in his features, but couldn't place him.

"What?" She asked, glancing at Hadley's face. His expression was grim.

"That's a Council member," he said.

Alice looked at him again. He was young for a council member, but she saw it now. He had only been appointed last year.

They had suspected the bad guy had people inside the Academy, but—

"Why would a Council member do this? If he wanted things to change, he had every chance to do something about it."

"I don't know," Hadley said. "Maybe he's not being heard. Maybe he was working against them even before he was appointed." He sounded like his whole world was falling apart in front of him. "I don't know," he said again.

They watched more mages being marched past, and maybe Hadley recognized others, even though Alice didn't. "I can't believe Lavrin was right," he whispered.

"Luka predicted this?" Alice asked. She didn't even know whether or not to be surprised. Even with his distrust in the Academy and the Council, there was no good reason to think a Council member would turn against their own.

"No. Not exactly," Hadley said. "He used to say that someday the threat would come from within. He thought the way we were being taught, what we were being told, was too neat. He didn't believe that no mage had ever snapped or gone bad, and was sure that it was just a matter of time before we found out what kind of corruption was being buried by the Council and the Academy. He had this… thing about weaknesses. He wanted to know as much as he could about the limits of other mages, sure that some day, he would need to use it against them."

"Well, this whole thing started when a mage went bad. It's not the first time something like this happens."

Hadley shook his head. "Rogues are different. They're against us from the start, that's the whole point of going rogue. The amount of resources we spend on managing them is staggering, and even then, something like this slips through."

"You managed Luka?" She shouldn't be surprised, but she had always gotten the sense that Luka had eluded them. That maybe there had been some lingering trust there, that they weren't looking at him too hard. Or, at least, that Hadley wasn't.

"Not well enough," Hadley muttered.

“What about the Alexander Protocol?” Alice wondered. That had been a mage, too. Even if he had only been a student.

Hadley shook his head. “Alexander Peer wasn’t corrupted, he was… in pain, and the Protocol was put in place to prevent it from happening again.”

She had always known the Alexander Protocol had to do with the incident ten years ago, and since Luka had told her it was a Soul Eater, she had put the pieces together, although not exactly the why. The Alexander Protocol was meant to ensure that no student was alone. It was forced study groups and sparring partners and if you didn’t find your own, they would be assigned to you. So, Alexander had been lonely and angry, maybe bullied, and he had taken it out on the entire Academy.

He had killed himself to release the Soul Eater.

It had been sitting in between the lines all along, but Alexander had only ever been painted as a victim, and while suicide was certainly on the list of rumors, it hadn’t been the only theory.

She continued to watch for Luka, hoping he hadn't taken up the uniform, so she dismissed every animal mask, every black suit, but the only person who stood out was the man in the floral shirt. The one Phillip had referred to as the leader. She didn't see Luka.

"He's not there," Alice said, but it was hopeful. A plea. Just because she didn't see him, didn't mean he wasn't lying dead inside.

"No," Hadley agreed. "He isn't."

Unlike Alice, Hadley sounded disappointed, and she understood that he wanted him caught. He wanted him in a position, where he would be punished for his betrayal. It was, she suspected, entirely for personal reasons. He probably didn't even care that Luka had betrayed the Council, only that he had betrayed him personally.

"You think we've lost him."

"Yes. If he's not here, we're not going to find him. Luka is very good at disappearing when he wants to."

There was the matter of closure on the case, and she didn't think Luka would be truly gone until it was over. She wouldn't blame him, if the raid had been his excuse to leave it to Hadley to find the cure, but he would want to know. She was sure he would need to know.

The Rogues had been prepared, but not for the sheer number of Agents descending on them. Hadley had pulled out all the stops, called in everyone who was even remotely able and not desperately needed elsewhere. So, while the Academy had never been more vulnerable than it was during the hour of this raid, the Rogues didn't stand a chance. Which in no way meant they hadn’t won. Not the war, but there were battles, too. The Agents hadn't come to kill, but the Rogues had, and they were determined to take as many Agents down as possible.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

In the first wave, too many had fallen. Spells were inlaid in the ground, traps, and like mines they went off. Fighters had been sent in first, but the Rogues had Forgers and Summoners on the front line, charging from afar, wearing down the magic of the Fighters storming them. One by one, they fell.

Alice would have been discouraged, but she wasn't there. She was on the sidelines, Hadley by her side, watching. The Healers were standing with them, pacing, tapping their fingers, their feet, tense with impatience and impotence. They could do nothing while the battle was raging, far too valuable to sacrifice. Maybe Luka had already changed her perception of Healers, of what they were capable of, because she didn't fully understand why there weren't Battle Healers. Healers with offensive capabilities. Of course, that required creative magic use, spells, things the Council didn't approve of, but looking out at the field of dying mages, she couldn't help but think it would save lives.

Hadley’s attention had already drifted off from the massacre laid out before them, and onto his phone. So when Alice spotted Field in the line of Agents, she drifted towards him. The Agents had been as faceless to her as the Rogues, since she hadn’t expected to find anyone she knew among them. Nick and Teagan’s mentors were here, but apprentices hadn’t even been allowed at the scene. The only face she had been watching for was Luka’s. She had forgotten to take Field into account, probably because he was a nature mage. He looked tired, a little broken, but he smiled when their eyes met. It released something in her, like she could breathe a little deeper, even through the horror of it all. She hated that he had been there, and she hadn’t known, because any one of those bodies might as well have been him and then when would she have found out?

"I know the guy managed to recruit from our side," he said, when Alice approached, "but you people have issues."

He stretched out the tension in his shoulders, and Alice nudged him. "Right," she said. "because you guys are all peace, love and understanding."

She smiled, but it faltered when she saw the blood covering his hands. He was wearing a red checkered shirt, and it hadn't immediately been obvious, but there was a lot of blood.

"How much of that is yours?" She asked.

Field looked down at his hands. "Oh," he sighed. "Almost none of it."

"What was it like?" She didn't really want to ask, and she assumed he didn't really want to answer, so she immediately shook her head. "Don't answer that." It had been a slip, her curiosity overtaking her common sense.

It was all becoming too real, and this wasn't the kind of Agent she wanted to be.

She wanted to save people, not… get blood on her hands.

"Were you worried about me?" He asked, smiling.

"I would have been," Alice answered, "But I didn't know you were here."

"Well, I was uniquely suited to the task."

"Right," Alice said. "I wasn't going to say anything, but you really have set yourself up for the front lines, haven't you?"

He shrugged.

"I'm not really sure you're in a position to complain about our issues, Field."

He smiled. "I suppose you're right."

"And you're okay?" She asked, looking him over once more. Nothing seemed to be bleeding. At least he wasn't dripping with it.

"I'm okay," he assured her.

"Good." She wanted to reach out, to make sure, but something stopped her. Maybe the blood. Maybe something else.

"What happens now?" Field asked. "Do you know?"

She watched the procession, that was still passing them. There were so many of them. Would they really execute them all? "No," she said. "They'll do whatever they have to do to get the cure, I guess."

"And you?"

She wanted no part of extracting the cure, unable to handle anymore pain. Bearing witness had felt important, but now all she felt was useless. While she watched Agents and masked Rogues bleeding and dying, the thought that imposed on her mind was: How did we get here? She could trace back the moves, every wrong decision that had been made to push events in this direction, but no amount of reflecting on it put the pieces together. How had they ended up here? In this situation that surely no one had wanted, that had no winners. She thought about the Rogue leader, the one who had smiled as he was led through the carnage in cuffs, and thought that maybe he had. It was easier to blame him, than to admit her own hand in this, and Luka’s, and Hadley’s, but was it fair?

Could she really shift all the blame to the villain, because it was convenient? Because it allowed her to wash the blood off her own hands?

“I don’t know.”

She looked at the square, the blood shimmering in the waning light. She needed to find a way to live with this.

"Heading back to the Academy?" Field asked, and when she nodded, he held out his hand. She looked with skepticism at the blood, but accepted it anyway.

"Come with me."

He pulled her away from the Agents and the Rogues, away from the bodies and the blood, past the wards that concealed the gruesome truth from the rest of the world. He took her across the street, to the slim patch of green running along the river. The line of trees muted the road on the other side, but the space was too narrow to stand aside from the city surrounding it. They walked for a maybe half a mile and passed under an old stone bridge, before Field walked towards a small copse of trees. He stepped inside the nearly perfect circle, and took her hand again as she joined him.

"It's my turn to show off," he said.

"All you do is show—" The space around her shifted, twisted. It was like jumping, but it wasn't. Jumping was all about energy and connections, and maybe this was too, but none she could feel. It wasn't the restlessness of urban magic, the echoes of people left behind when they rushed from place to place, it was about something quieter, something more ancient: This was folklore and faith. It was being suspended in water, it was air filling her lungs until it felt like drowning, it was an eerie loneliness, even as she was holding on to Field.

She knew of fairy rings of course, but somehow she had never imagined they worked like this.

"—off," she finished, as they materialized in the fields behind the Academy. This fairy ring was little more than a dark line of grass, running in a circle around them. The strange power of the jump left her faintly nauseated and out of breath, and she wondered if that was what urban magic felt like to Field. She had just barely showed off, when they went into the city together, but they had jumped, and perhaps this was a form of payback. This was different, though. This was a glimpse into just how old their magic was, and it made her feel impossibly young.

"You can jump freely between places?" Alice asked. Urban mages were limited by the connections, by the lines of public transportation. They couldn't even jump between two stations, unless some sort of transportation ran between them regularly.

"Well, there needs to be a fairy ring, but otherwise, yes."

"Show-off," she muttered, and he flashed her a quick smile in response. She stepped out of the circle with some care. She didn't know if she could somehow break the circle, if it would ruin the magic. When she got her bearings, it was easy enough to navigate. Even though cities seemed chaotic, she had more of an instinct there, a better sense of direction, but here, even though the city called to her, she needed her eyes to keep up. She had buildings on one side, and endless trees on the other, so it was no problem to turn towards the Academy. The circle was even fairly close to campus, and it was definitely faster than the alternative, which might have taken her at least half an hour.

Field squeezed her hand gently, which was when she realized their hands were still linked.

"Hey," he said, "are you okay?"

She had been watching the Academy buildings, but not really seeing them. The raid would be haunting her for a while. She blinked, and refocused on him. Are any of us? she wanted to say, but she couldn’t, so she lied instead.

"Yeah. Of course."

She liked Field, but she wasn't ready to be a mess around him. His hand slipped away, and with it, the sunshine heat of his touch. She linked her own hands as a surrogate, but it wasn't the same. She still felt the cold creeping in.