They carried her into the forest like a secret—soft-footed and silent, as if the trees themselves were complicit. Mist clung to the ground, coiling between gnarled roots and the trunks of pines so tall that their crowns vanished into the night. Moonlight sifted through needles and left the world in patches of silver and ink. The smell of loam and wet bark hung heavy; every footfall sank an inch into the damp earth.
A cloaked figure moved ahead, shoulders hunched beneath the hood. The cloak swallowed light and shape; when he paused beneath a hollow of root and rock, he set the limp weight of Evelina Petrovna down on a bed of moss as if she were a fragile crate. Her hair—black as river oil—fell over her face. The faint rise and fall of her chest was shallow, nervous; blood had marbled the cuff of her sleeve where she'd been handled.
From the trees, another man emerged like a boulder taking a step. He filled the moon with presence—broad-shouldered, a torso like sculpted iron beneath sleeveless leather. Scars scored his skin, pale roads across tanned flesh. His jaw was square, his short dark hair tied back by habit. He blocked the path like an immovable sentinel.
"Did it work?" The voice rolled out, deep and flat as a stone skimming a lake.
The cloaked man removed his hood enough for the moon to catch the nape of his neck. The spider tattoo there pulsed a dull ember-red. He smiled without humor. "Yes," he said, and his voice narrowed. "But she couldn't handle the dose."
The giant crossed his arms. "Then we dispose and find another?"
The cloaked man's smile sharpened. He crouched and laid a finger lightly against Evelina's temple, feeling for the subtle ebb of reaction. The spider mark at his throat brightened, a vein of light in the ink. "Not yet," he murmured. "Experiment first." He rose and turned, stepping toward the shadowline where trees swallowed starlight. "Carry her."
The muscular man bent and lifted with the slow efficiency of someone carrying weights for a living. The cloak's hem disappeared into the dark as they moved deeper. From where the two had stood, a faint glow pulsed along the spider tattoos—one on the cloaked man's neck, one just visible at the big man's nape—like two complicit hearts beating in red.
Then the night closed over them.
———
The room they brought Wads into later could not have been more different. The Zheno Academy Order's chamber smelled of ink and polished wood; a low shelf of ledgers and scrolls lined one wall, and a tall window framed a distant view of the capital's softened silhouette. Sunlight slanted through blinds, throwing neat bars across a wide, black desk where the crown prince sat—Razkar Gyalt Wrey Ravenscroft, president of the ZAO. His long black hair fell slightly messy over his shoulders; his indicolite eyes were keen as glass. He leaned back in the black swivel chair like a man who weighed consequences for breakfast.
A woman with short green hair perched across from Wads adjusted her oversized glasses and folded a parchment. Frenta—secretary of the Order—moved with a quick, efficient air; her black eyes missed nothing, and the small stack of notes in front of her looked like a map for interrogation.
Wads had never liked official rooms. They smelled like judged footsteps and guarded words. He sat straight, hands folded politely in his lap.
"Wyxro Waxzi?" Frenta asked, voice crisp with practiced neutrality.
"Yes." Wads tilted his chin just enough to be formal. He could pinpoint her breath at the edge of the question. She was already tagging a line on the paper.
Razkar's tea steamed in a porcelain cup; he sipped once and set it down. "Anything else you remember from yesterday's incident?" His voice was smooth—an ocean with a hard shoreline.
Wads closed his eyes for a half-second, trading the present for the loop of the arena in his mind: the sand kicked up, the sudden shadow, the hooded man. "He was covered. I didn't see his face," Wads said slowly. "But I saw a tattoo. Spider-shaped. It glowed red."
Frenta's pen paused, then moved. Razkar's expression sharpened. Kaizer—sitting beside the prince, still warm from the arena—stretched and flashed a grin that did not reach his eyes.
"Oh—me?" Kaizer interrupted, theatrically. "I was on guard duty around Waxzi, protecting the fellow—very heroic of me." He exaggerated a bow, then winked. Wads suppressed a small twitch of amusement; Kaizer's grin was sticky with showmanship, but his shoulders had the set of someone who'd actually lasted a fight.
Frenta shifted, the page scraping. "You've seen that mark before?" she asked Wads.
"Yes." He thought back, fingertips scraping the underside of his memories—sharp images, fragmented. "At the class flag fight. A different man—lizard tattoo. It glowed red when he used his power." He watched their faces for the reactions his words would draw.
Razkar set his cup down. The placid tilt of his posture turned urgent. "Lizard…and spider." He pressed his fingertips together, thoughtful. "Find out who this intruder is," he said abruptly to Kaizer.
"On it," Kaizer said, half-saluted and grinning. He rose like a man whose feet were already on the road.
Razkar's calm returned. He rubbed the bridge of his nose once, then looked back at Wads. His indicolite eyes were unnervingly direct. "Anything more, Waxzi?"
Wads shook his head. "No. He moved like shadow. He vanished." He tried for silence, but the images kept turning: the spider's ink, the lizard on the other man—threads he couldn't yet knot.
"Good. We'll press this," Razkar said. He bent to the ledger and began scrawling notes in an economy of strokes as Kaizer left the room, already shouldering the task. Frenta stood and gathered the papers with hands that never trembled.
Wads rose and bowed, "Thank you, Your Majesty." He wanted to ask questions—who were they, why the tattoos, what was the motive—but the prince's stern focus and the late sun on the desk told him there were better moments for interrogation. He left the chamber under the gaze of indicolite eyes, the weight of the moment settling around his shoulders like ash.
Outside, the courtyard's air felt like an ocean returning to shore—familiar but trembling beneath a distant storm. Wads exhaled and let the breath go out slow. He walked toward the East Wing's training yard without direction, only the long stretch of afternoon to accompany him.
———
The East Wing's yard was a cadre of purpose: target posts lined with arrows, wooden dummies knotted with straw and leather, tattered banners that snapped softly in a warm breeze. Sand grated underfoot where students practiced footwork, and the scent of oil and sweat—boots and sparring leather—hung pleasantly in the light. A bronze statue of the Academy's founder caught sun on its shoulder like a watchful eye.
Wads sank onto a sun-warmed bench and let the sand's heat seep through the soles of his boots. His mind, as it always did, began to spool—calculations, open threads, questions that had no end. He watched ants braid paths across the grain of the bench. Small things were brave.
A shadow eclipsed the sun.
Wads tilted his head up, and his storm-colored eyes caught Reiyell's. For a moment, he just looked at her—studying the way her light-blue hair shimmered against the brightness, the way her presence carried a composure sharp enough to still his spiraling thoughts. His gaze lingered, searching, unreadable.
Reiyell arrived like a compositional note—impossibly poised, carrying the quiet that made conversations fall into shape around her. She leaned over and, with an almost affectionate flick of her finger, tapped Wads on the forehead. "Ow." He blinked.
Her posture softened as she sat at the edge of the bench: precise, distant, but not unkind. "Did you have questions?" she asked. Her voice carried a tinge of aristocratic cadence, a single, unadorned corner of royal polish without iambs.
Wads scrubbed his palm over his brow. "Yes." He winced in a mock severity and then gave her his attention.
Reiyell's gaze drifted toward the yard; the sun sliced across the practice dummies. "What do you think of what's occurring?" she asked, not looking at Wads but at the empty distance beyond the archery posts, as if she was scanning for ghosts.
"A bit strange," he admitted. The word tasted small to name the roiling. "Incomplete."
She laced her fingers together. "Sometimes I think—" she said slowly, as if she were trying on the sentence—"I'm missing something." Her voice had a private, weary weight. "There is a void in me I cannot fill."
Wads glanced up, meeting her indicolite eyes in a way that made the afternoon glance back like a mirror. "A void, hm? Cliché," he offered dryly.
She let out a small laugh, a sound like beaten glass. "Probably my title," she said after a second, and it held no complaint—only the observation of a fact. She studied him with something like curiosity. "Do you have a sibling?"
"My little sister. Ariel." He watched the sand at his boot again. "She takes after my mother's face and my father's temperament. Dark hair. Blue eyes."
Reiyell's smile was almost imperceptible. "Blue.."
They talked until the sun leaned toward the west and long shadows pooled at their feet. The words were small and ordinary: voices softening after shared danger. It was a calm that felt like a breath between storms.
Then Kaizer's voice came, buoyant and unavoidable. He was a red smear at the yard's edge, practically humming. "Wyxro Waxzi!" he called, cheerfully ceremonial. "Order from the ZAO pres. Your presence is requested." He looked at Reiyell and added with that ridiculous grin that always shifted the air, "And so are you, Your Highness."
Reiyell rose with the same smoothness that had carried her across the Academy, a small bow of acknowledgment to Kaizer, then to Wads. Wads felt a prickle across the back of his neck—the kind of premonition that sits cold and patient in the base of the skull. He had the sense, sudden and unwanted, that whatever the day's interrogation was about, it would not end cleanly.
When they walked toward the ZAO chambers, the West wing's banners rustled like a whisper of warning.
Wads let the wind carry his thoughts for a moment, and for the first time in hours, he admitted a private thing to himself: he was not ready for what the next threads would pull loose.