The campus was too quiet.
That was the first thing Thorn noticed after breakfast, and under any other circumstances, it might have been a relief.
Instead, it made her uneasy.
For weeks, Reichenbach had felt like a living thing beneath their feet. The walls hummed. The lights trembled. The floors sometimes answered a step too late, as if the stone itself had to remember what weight was supposed to feel like. Even silence had been crowded lately, thick with old magic, warped music, and the low, constant vibration of anchors straining beneath the academy.
This morning, however, everything felt restrained.
As though the entire school had drawn in a breath and decided not to release it.
Students moved through the corridors with the exhausted caution they had all developed, books clutched beneath their arms, and voices kept low. Their eyes flicked toward corners, windows, and places where the shadows gathered too heavily. Faculty stood in their usual positions near stairwells and archways, yet even they seemed subdued. There were no clipped instructions, no suspicious glances lingering longer than necessary, and no sharp corrections echoing through the halls.
Only a quiet, deliberate carefulness that Thorn distrusted immediately, but her shadows distrusted it more.
They stayed close to her boots as she walked, refusing to spread across the floorboards or curl curiously toward patches of dim light the way they ordinarily did. Instead, they shifted in small, restless movements, unnaturally tight and obedient.
Obedience from her shadows had never felt like control; it had started to feel like fear pretending to be discipline.
She used to be able to control them with ease, though that certainty felt as though it belonged to another lifetime.
Thorn tried to focus on that instead of the other thing occupying far too much space in her mind.
She had kissed Xavier, and Xavier had kissed her back.
No matter how many times she repeated the fact to herself, it remained faintly unreal.
She had woken that morning with the memory already waiting for her, vivid enough that she had spent several embarrassing seconds staring at the ceiling without moving. She could still remember the warmth of his hand at her waist, the cautious way he had leaned toward her as if giving her every opportunity to stop him, and the quiet disbelief that had followed when she had kissed him back.
It had not been the dramatic show romance novels made it out to be. There had been no swelling music, no catastrophic magical event, and no immediate argument afterward to help her bury the meaning beneath irritation.
It had simply happened.
And now every time Thorn thought about seeing him again, something warm and nervous turned over beneath her ribs.
She hated how much she wanted to know whether he had spent the morning thinking about it too.
She hated even more that she suspected he had.
Pippa noticed Thorn's shadows before Thorn could decide whether to mention any of this as they crossed the lower corridor outside the east stairwell.
Danny walked on Pippa's other side with a half-eaten butter roll in his hand, because apparently near-death magical corruption had done nothing to improve his breakfast habits.
Pippa glanced down at Thorn's feet.
"Your shadows are being weird."
Thorn did not look down. She kept her gaze fixed ahead, toward homeroom.
"My shadows are always being weird."
"No," Pippa said, pushing her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. "Usually they're dramatic. This is different."
Danny looked down as well, his chewing gradually slowing.
The shadows drew even closer.
He stopped chewing altogether.
"Okay, yeah. That's creepy."
"Oh, yes. Thank you, Daniel," Thorn said flatly. "I was really hoping someone would narrate that for me."
"I'm just saying they look like they know something we don't."
"That is not comforting."
"I wasn't trying to comfort you. I was making an observation."
Pippa cut him a look. "Maybe stop observing."
Danny lifted both hands, the butter roll still trapped between two fingers.
"Sure. Great. I love not participating in the group conversation. It really makes me feel like part of the team."
Thorn almost smiled, but the expression never fully formed.
Somewhere above them, faint and distant, a single note rang through the corridor.
It was quiet enough that half the students around them did not react at all. They continued walking, whispering, and pretending they were not all one strange sound away from losing their minds.
Thorn stopped.
Pippa stopped beside her.
Danny's humor disappeared as his sharpened hearing caught the sound too.
The note was not loud, but it traveled incorrectly. It slid along the stones overhead, down the walls, and beneath the floor, thin and bright and sharp enough to make Thorn's teeth ache.
Pippa's hand closed around Danny's sleeve.
"Did you hear that?"
Danny nodded once. "Yeah."
The note faded slowly, leaving a silence behind it that felt even worse.
Thorn's shadows twitched.
Then someone laughed from the far end of the corridor.
It was a girl's laugh, too bright and cheerful for the atmosphere around them.
Pippa went rigid. Thorn turned slowly, and Danny nearly dropped what remained of his breakfast.
The corridor behind them had emptied enough that Thorn could see all the way to the bend near the old trophy alcove and the narrow stairwell leading toward the unused practice rooms and forgotten storage levels.
No one stood there.
The laugh came again.
This time Thorn recognized it immediately.
It was Pippa's.
Not the voice of the Pippa standing beside her, whose face had gone pale behind her glasses, but an imitation so precise that Thorn felt cold spread down her spine.
The sound echoed again from the stairwell before a voice followed it.
"Danny? Are you there?"
Danny's entire body tightened as Pippa's grip on his sleeve became a fist.
The voice came from below, small and frightened.
Still unmistakably Pippa.
"Danny, help me."
For one terrible second, none of them moved.
Then Danny stepped forward.
Thorn caught the back of his jacket and yanked hard enough to make him stumble.
"Do not."
Danny twisted toward her, anger and fear flashing across his face at once.
"That sounded like her."
"I'm right here, Danny," Pippa said, though her voice shook around the words.
"I know."
His eyes remained fixed on the stairwell.
"I know that," he repeated, but the second attempt sounded flatter, almost as though he was trying to convince his own body.
The false voice called again.
"Please, Danny. Help me."
The final word stretched unnaturally, thinning into a pitch too high to belong to a human throat.
Thorn's shadows spread sideways along the wall, searching for the source. The instant they touched the stairwell's first step, they recoiled.
That was enough proof for her.
"We're leaving," Thorn said.
Danny swallowed, still staring toward the darkness below.
Pippa tugged him backward. "Now. We need to go."
They turned together, but the corridor was no longer the same.
The hall that had been nearly empty a moment earlier appeared longer than it should have been. The archway at the far end seemed farther away, while the space between them stretched into repeating rows of stone Thorn was certain had not existed before.
Reichenbach could not rearrange itself like that.
Reichenbach could not rearrange itself like that, at least not physically. Illusion magic had been banned at the academy for decades, long before any of them enrolled. According to the old disciplinary records in the library, it had become impossible to regulate after several students were injured by manufactured corridors, false staircases, and fabricated faces. Even faculty required special Board authorization to teach its history, let alone perform it.
Whatever was happening now was not supposed to be possible.
Thorn swallowed as she looked toward the lights.
They flickered once and then steadied.
No.
The sound was distorting their perception. It had to be. The corridor had not changed. The stones had not moved. Something was reaching into the space between sight and understanding and making them doubt what they already knew.
When Thorn looked forward again, a student stood at the end of the hall.
A boy she recognized vaguely from one of her lectures. Messy dark curls, a black tie loosened at the throat, and books held tightly against his chest.
He looked terrified.
"Thorn?" he called.
Pippa inhaled sharply and reached for Thorn's wrist, either to stop her or ground her.
Thorn did not answer.
The boy stepped closer, his eyes wide and pleading.
"You have to come. Xavier's hurt."
Everything inside Thorn went cold.
For one vicious second, she was no longer standing in the lower corridor with Pippa's fingers wrapped around her wrist and Danny's breath catching beside her.
She was back in the Great Hall, watching Xavier's body strike the floor after he had thrown himself in front of her. She saw the shard of glass embedded in his side, the blood against his pale skin, and the tremor in his hand as he tried to reach for her.
She remembered the impossible weight of him attempting to stand between her and danger as if his own body had ever been enough armor against the school.
The boy took another step.
Danny cursed beneath his breath.
Pippa immediately said, "No."
Thorn kept staring at the boy's hands and the way he held his books too carefully against his chest.
Hearing Xavier's name had struck precisely where it was meant to.
It was worse because of last night.
The boy moved closer.
"He's in the old music corridor. He said your name. He said—"
His voice slipped, only for a second.
The distortion might have been too subtle for anyone else to notice, but Thorn heard it.
The flaw dragged her free from the fear the music had woven around her thoughts.
"How did he get into the old music corridor?"
The boy blinked. "What?"
"It's been sealed since sophomore year." Thorn stepped forward. "Faculty locked it down after the flooding."
Uncertainty flickered across his face for the first time.
"He found a way in."
"No." Her shadows stirred around her boots. "He didn't."
The boy's expression faltered.
Whatever this thing was, it knew Xavier's name.
It knew exactly how much using it would hurt.
But it did not know Xavier.
Her shadows surged around her feet.
Pippa stepped closer. "Thorn."
The boy smiled, but there was nothing natural in the expression. It remained too still, too rehearsed, and empty around the eyes.
"I don't know how he got in there, but he said you would come."
The lights went out before any of them could move. Darkness consumed the corridor for the length of a single breath.
When the lights returned, the boy was gone.
Somewhere beneath them, the note rang again.
This time, the corridor answered.
The stone hummed beneath Thorn's feet, low and hungry, and her shadows exploded outward before she could restrain them. They raced along the walls, spilled across the floor, and climbed the ceiling in frantic black streaks.
Too fast.
Too far.
It felt as though something deep beneath the academy had seized the distant ends of them and begun to pull.
A scream tore through the corridor.
Sharp, raw, and unmistakably human.
Every muscle in Thorn's body locked.
Xavier.
Not because she believed it, but because her body did.
The certainty struck so violently that it emptied her lungs. Thorn staggered backward as every fear she had been carrying since the previous night wrapped itself around the sound.
Danny caught her elbow before she lost her footing.
"Thorn?"
She ripped her arm from his grip harder than she intended.
"D-don't touch me."
The words emerged thin and strained, nothing like the sharp command she had wanted.
Danny froze immediately and lifted his hands in surrender, though both of them knew he could see through the lie.
Pippa's face tightened with fear.
"That wasn't Xavier."
"I know."
Thorn's voice sounded wrong even to her.
Knowing it was a trap did not make her body believe Xavier was safe.
That was the cruelty of it.
The Choir did not need to convince her.
They only needed to aim.
The note came again, louder now, drawing them toward the lower east wing, the unused practice rooms, and the neglected archway most students avoided unless they were trying to escape faculty attention.
Thorn's shadows jerked in that direction.
Pippa saw them move.
"They're pulling you."
Thorn clenched her jaw. "Yes, I noticed."
"Then we go the other way," Danny said, shifting his weight as though preparing to physically drag both of them if necessary.
The air at the far end of the hall folded strangely around the archway.
The corridor did not visibly change, but whispers began rising from the stone, layered over one another until dozens of distorted voices crowded the space.
Some sounded like students.
Others resembled faculty.
None remained recognizable for more than a word or two.
The voices did not call Thorn lovingly. They accused her.
You let him get hurt.
You always do.
He trusted you.
He should not have.
Thorn's vision blurred at the edges.
The Choir had learned quickly.
Xavier's false scream had failed to draw her forward, so now the voices twisted the fear into guilt.
Pippa seized Thorn's hand.
"Don't listen."
"I'm trying."
The shadows pulled harder.
The hallway lurched beneath her.
For one dizzying second, Thorn saw the corridor as it currently stood, then as it had existed years earlier, and then as something older buried beneath both versions. Finished stone peeled away into rough walls carved with unfamiliar lines, while music threaded through the mortar in an ancient, off-key vibration.
The floor shifted beneath her boots by less than an inch.
It was enough.
Thorn looked down.
A narrow seam had appeared in the stone directly beneath her feet, too precise to be damage. Geometric lines began racing outward from it, spreading across the floor in patterns she did not have time to recognize.
"Guys," Danny said quietly.
The seam widened, revealing darkness between the stones.
Pippa's grip tightened around Thorn's hand.
"Thorn."
The fear in her voice came too late.
A section of the corridor collapsed beneath Thorn's right foot, not the entire floor, only a carefully concealed panel embedded in the stone.
A trapdoor.
Thorn's stomach dropped before the rest of her body followed.
"Pippa—"
Her balance disappeared.
Pippa tried to hold on while Danny lunged toward them. Thorn's fingers scraped across Pippa's palm and caught for one impossible second before slipping free.
The trapdoor opened completely as Thorn fell.
The last thing she saw was Danny throwing himself toward the opening and Pippa's face contorted with terror above her.
Then darkness swallowed her whole.
The hidden door slammed shut, leaving the corridor smooth and unbroken once more.
As though Thorn had never been standing there at all.