"They were fine yesterday when I saw them. Just busy with a project."

"This group is important."

"I know, Wil."

"At least you get it. Everyone else will--they'll come around. I promise. Getting people to agree with you is easy, starting a movement is hard. But that's what's going to bring change here. Alex, Schlatt, they're not looking for change, they're just looking for an attractive idea. And then they'll be able to say they were here from the beginning. But we'll know, we were the ones showing up every meeting, we're the ones who changed things.

Do you have any homework in your other classes?"

"Yes but I don't think you can help with it, it's in Swedish."

"Damn. I guess we were bound to get stuff in the languages we don't share sooner or later."

And then Eret's empty chair stops pretending to be a chair. Niki sees it first, letting out a scream before clasping her hand over her mouth, but Wilbur's closer to the gray mass that is not a chair.

He doesn't have any mana. He runs, pure adrenaline, flight response kicking in full-force. "Niki! Do you have anything!"

"NO!"

"Come on, a spell, you have to have a spell-- why didn't the alarm go off--"

"You're the creative writing major!"

"I don't have enough mana!"

He can see the thing out of the corner of his eye, and it's not just dull gray anymore, there are flashes of metallic silver and bone-white, and he can't breathe, and this is where he dies. He has a knife and nothing else, there was supposed to be an alarm--they would have had time to leave--there isn't anyone else in the area, everyone else hadn't been relying on the alarm, they had checked, and now that he's looking he can see scuttlers near the vents, the area's blatantly unsafe, and he hadn't checked, he had been stupid and now they're going to die--

"Okay, okay, um, keep it distracted--" She's running too, but she starts chanting, trying to keep her voice steady, and it's hard because she's terrified and out of breath but it's just a cooking spell, she knows cooking spells, she's done this spell a thousand times while out of breath, preparation for this exact situation. They have to live, they can figure out everything else that went wrong after but they have to live--

--People, he sees people in the distance--if they can just get to them--they'll probably be pissed at having to take out a mal for a couple of freshmen who were being stupid but they'll probably be alive--the mal's flesh is burning and bubbling, a terrible smell to it, but it's changing, becoming more and more metallic, and red-hot metal kills you just as thoroughly as cold metal, and they're going to die--

"Do you have any weapons?" Niki calls, and switches spells, something simpler, just blunt force. Buying them time. Come on, come on.

"Just a knife, I-- Eret--"

And at last they reach other people. They don't stop running but now there are upperclassmen running with them and casting and eventually it's dead enough that they can stop and breathe.

"We have to go back."

"What? Why?"

"I have to know if-- I have to know. Come on."

He grabs her arm and starts running again, back the way they came.

Nothing to do but follow.

And Wilbur stops, breathing hard, almost bent double from it, in front of the box where the alarm should be. There's nothing visibly wrong with it from the outside; as far as he can tell, neither alarm is tripped.

If he tried to brute force opening it, it might take his hand off. Assuming the trap is still working, at least.

But he doesn't have to brute force it. He knows the opening sequence--slide, press, turn, click--even if he has to pause halfway through because his hands are shaking too badly. He takes a deep breath, and another, and another.

He opens it.

It's empty.

He slides, slowly, to his knees. It wasn't really a surprise.

"Eret," he whispers, "how could you?"

"Wilbur." She tugs on his arm, this time. "We can't stay here. We just saw, it's not safe."

"Right. Sure."

The next time they see Eret is at dinner.

Eret is... sitting with the Tampa enclave.

What the fuck.

"Eret?"