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“Cilia!” one of them wailed, cradling the girl’s head. “No, no, no, Cilia, come back. Please come back. Please.”

Emelle was the one who looked up and noticed me first, splattered with speckles of crimson. Her bloodshot eyes widened, and I used that split second of connection to scour her recent memories of what had happened.

“Where. Is. He?” Rayna hissed at the elite who had shed Gileon’s body like a snakeskin.

On her knees, her dress drenched in crusted blood and her eyes piercing through the curtains of her wild hair, she was perhaps the most terrifying thing Emelle had ever seen. Not that Emelle herself was scared of Rayna, but she could sense a shift in the elites surrounding them. As if suddenly, they all realized just how much of a predator they’d been sent to shackle.

When Gileon’s impersonator failed to answer, Rayna’s voice—and whatever else lurked inside her—unleashed itself.

“WHERE IS HE?”

No sooner had her shout echoed throughout campus than a vicious slice of a knife followed it. Gileon’s impersonator crumpled to the ground, neck spurting blood, eyes blank.

Emelle felt a moment of shock and trembling awe. As if it wasn’t just the girl she’d met on her first day at the Esholian Institute before her, but someone every corner of the world needed to heed. To bow down to.

Then chaos exploded. Mrs. Smetlar screamed. The rest of the elites sent their powers slamming into Rayna, knocking her sideways with the force of a dozen hammers. She was unconscious before her head even cracked against Bascite Boulevard, and something within Emelle ripped open, too.

She’d never been as brave or as forceful as her best friend. She’d always shied away behind a protective film of small smiles and quiet words and never wanting to be too much. But the second those elites hoisted Rayna’s limp body into the air, that film tore and a scream burst from Emelle’s lips.

This time, it wasn’t just a useless, helpless one. This time, it was for her birds.

They soared in from the jungle and the rooftops, diving down to attack the elites with beaks and claws before they could drag Rayna away. At the same moment, Lander burst forward in panther form, aiming for the back of an elite’s throat. Spiders swelled from the alleyways and cracks at Rodhi’s command. Even Wren charged forward with nothing but her own raised fists, as if she could single-handedly pummel the Good Council to death.

They all knew that if the elites managed to get Rayna into that prison, they’d never see her again.

But it was too few against too many. The elites whipped around and started firing their powers at random. Blades of ice shot Emelle’s way, one of them narrowly missing her cheek. The ground grew spikes all around her, driving the Esholian students back, and a command to quit breathing gripped Emelle’s mind from one of the Mind Manipulator elites.

Her lungs seized up. Lander was blasted back by an invisible force. Rodhi’s spiders wilted as one of the Shape Shifting elites embossed his skin with a magnifying glass and burned them to a crisp. Wren fell to the ground in a writhing heap, clutching at her throat. Next second, Emelle broke through the hold the Mind Manipulator had on her own throat to shout out a warning to her birds.

She wasn’t fast enough. Right in front of her eyes, all her winged friends disintegrated in piles of ash.

The scream that followed didn’t come from her own chest, though. One of the Wild Whisperers in Rayna’s year—Mitzi—bellowed a sound unlike any Emelle had ever heard. The kind of sound you make the moment the world slides away.

Emelle turned just in time to watch Cilia look down at her torso…

Where one of the ice shards had lodged in her chest.

Emelle’s eyes tried to blink away the image of Cilia toppling to the ground. Tried and failed, and too much blood gushed and drowned this moment in time, and dizziness tugged her forward, onto her knees at Cilia’s feet that were twitching into stillness, and nothing made sense. They couldn’t take all her roommates away from her. Dazmine and Cilia and Rayna…

Rayna.

By the time Emelle’s head jerked back up, it was to find the surviving elites fleeing with Rayna’s still-unconscious body, Mrs. Smetlar flying after them. Fleeing down Bascite Boulevard, toward the Testing Center where their carriages were surely waiting to take her away.

Forever.

I ripped myself out of Emelle’s memories, each of my breaths brittle.

Processing what I’d just seen.

Rayna had been exiled. My brave, beautiful woman, covered in wounds from who the fuck knew where, had been brought to her knees in front of the entire Esholian Institute. She had managed to kill an elite before they’d knocked her out. And her friends had tried to fight for her but had lost one of their own instead.

She…

She was gone. They’d taken her to the one place I couldn’t reach, the place where Dyonisia would torment and torture and do God knew what else to her.

The prison on top of Bascite Mountain.

By this point, Emelle wasn’t the only one who had noticed me. Lander, Rodhi, and Wren were staring at me, a mix of anguish and relief flooding their expressions, and I could feel the attention of hundreds of students pricking my back where my tattoo began to slither into motion beneath my shirt.