“Remake Crelussa?” Olivia asked sharply.
“Brick by stone by ward by line.”
“Can you do that? You have to get them exactly right,” Loudon said, all seriousness for once. “Crelussa is tied to so many things. Do you understand that, Crown? Exactly. Or it—and anything connected to it—goes boom.”
I licked my lips. “Yes.”
“You might not save them. And you will be blamed,” Constantine said. “You will still be hunted.”
“We have to try,” I said quietly.
“I know, darling,” he said, and opened his palm, motioning to me, already knowing what I was going to do. There was a sadness, resignation, and surrender to his emotions that I didn’t understand.
I pulled out the box I had been safeguarding since leaving campus.
“Is that the campus magic?” Patrick asked sharply. Without waiting for a reply, he and Olivia started barking new commands at others apart from our feed.
It was the campus magic as well as the Department’s destructive magic that we had all flipped with the field Con, Stevens, Mbozi and I created.
“What are you going to do?” Mike asked softly while Will contributed to whatever Patrick and Olivia were doing.
I felt Neph open herself up to me, her emotions muted in sorrow. I couldn’t even imagine what she was feeling from all of us.
“We are going to recycle this site using the mages and magic already here,” I said, looking at the cells. Determination and confidence was strumming through me.
I opened the box on top of Constantine’s palm and withdrew the end of a long satin ribbon. I connected to the magic of the box and pulled.
This time the canopy of gold and silver satin opened outward like a parachute—throwing the magic into a shimmering net around us, then pushing like an expanding balloon to cover the entire building and site.
“Standing by,” Olivia said. “We are with you.”
“I know.” I could already feel them. Feel Excelsine waking up. The connections were too entangled to identify—an interconnected web of support connecting into an impenetrable field.
I adhered the edges of the canopy to the layer and pulled the community magic that we had engaged.
Constantine’s breath stuttered next to me, then his fingers gripped the box and his mouth firmed.
I connected to the wards and the magic, nudging it to reveal its previous state, then hooked those together. Then the next set, then the set after. Ten, twenty, fifty.
Like starting a roller coaster ride, we initially sailed forward. But all too quickly we hit the uphill climb. Everything was still building toward an end, but the car was slowing and clicking louder. It was becoming harder and harder to get the magic to do what I wanted. The edges of the wards kept slipping away.
“The magic is backsliding. Like it’s trying to go up a slide, and keeps slipping to the bottom,” Saf grimly agreed. “What is happening?”
“It's not enough. The magic isn't enough,” Olivia said.
A surge of magic powered through the canopy, and I started knitting again, faster this time. But intertwined with the surge of power came a sickly, terrible feeling.
The feeling became worse, and the copper and turquoise and violet threads that had hummed with life since Constantine had stopped hiding them started dulling, thinning in my hands. I tried to inject them with life, but as it was with the Origin Book, once the magic began pouring in one direction, it was something I didn’t know how to reverse.
I looked at Constantine. At his graying skin and resigned expression.
And I knew with a sudden, horrifying certainty that he was dying.
“No, no, no,” I said, lower body scrambling, upper half elbows deep in a magic I couldn't stop.
“Neph just passed out!” Mike said from far away. “Will, Olivia!”
“How could she pass out? What pathway was she...oh, no,” Liv said.
“Shoot, shoot, shoot, Leandred was expelled,” Kita said. “Why did no one think about that? How has he been channeling the magic? Just through Nephthys? What have the two of them been doing?”
“Sacrificing themselves, obviously,” Mike said grimly. “Bau is not a surprise, but what the hell, Leandred?”
The color was seeping from Constantine so rapidly now that I couldn’t even identify a shade that wasn’t gray. I tried to physically tear my hand away, but his grip became steel around mine. I stared at him in incomprehension.
“It’s okay. Your muse will be okay.” With his other fingers, he softly touched my hand that was gripped hard in his. “And forty-five hundred for one is a tolerable trade.”
I couldn’t stop the magic and I couldn’t get out any words.
“No,” said Axer’s voice, without inflection, from behind me at the same moment he grabbed the back of Constantine’s neck with one hand and mine with the other.
And then Axer’s magic reached through mine. I felt it pull hard, taking control and pinching the connection from Neph and campus to Constantine.
The building started to slide again. The techs and mages cried out, useless in these last moments of terror.
“Dare’s stopping the play,” Olivia said grimly. “He’ll get them offsite. We need to see if we can save any of the Awakening mages in or after the fall. Crelussa is going down. Get ready.”
“Understood,” Dagfinn said. “We are going to prime the—”
Then Axer grabbed the entirety of my connections and pulled. The Bandits all hissed.
“That’s not stopping! That’s not moving offsite! That’s—”
He pulled from Constantine, too, but a different pull—he had taken control and was funneling Constantine’s abilities. I knew the feeling of this pull. I knew what Axer was doing. I felt Neph yanked back into full alertness and health. I felt Constantine revive fully on a gasped breath and abruptly flushed cheeks.
Constantine was staring at Axer in shock and disbelief, both of us half-turned to look at him.
“I would still choose to save you. I accept the blame for that,” Axer said quietly. “I always have.”
A combination of incomprehensible emotions overcame Constantine’s expression. Then he closed his eyes, and their connection burst open.
The pulls zinged a hundredfold—bursting outward with added deliberation.
“Do you all feel that?” Will said in wonder while the others shouted.
I felt Neph stroke our connections, then offer up the entirety of her muse community ties.
“How is he doing it from so far away?”
“You know how.”
“Dear Magic. He’s a Bridge. And he’s using Leandred’s magic and the connections he is still holding. He just copied one of my thoughts—I felt it.”
“Not just those connections either.”
I couldn’t look away.