"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?"

To the enclavers: "Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen."

To Wilbur and Niki: "Yes?"

"Eret, what happened? You were our friend."

"Got a better offer. Nothing personal."

"You betrayed us."

"I took something I made and owned, and then I sat with a different group at dinner."

"There was a mal! We could have died because of you! We trusted you and you betrayed that trust! We were, we had a mission, we were like a family. I believed in you."

Eret shrugs, spreads out their hands. "It was never meant to be."

(Wow, he's never seen Niki like this before. It's kind of incredible, or would be if it didn't also break his heart a little.)

"Let's go, Niki. We don't need to talk to this-- this traitor, any more."

Time passes.

He tells Nick that they won’t be selling to him anymore. Fuck him, and fuck Tampa, and fuck Eret, and fuck all the enclavers. Fuck them for wanting Eret to give them everything so that he can have the privilege of being their meat shield. Fuck Eret for taking them up on it and leaving him and Niki to die. Fuck them for thinking they won’t have any consequences for it, that they can still get whatever they want from him, that he’ll be grateful for the opportunity. Fuck Nick for thinking he could still trade with them after getting Eret to betray them and fuck Clay, Clay and his stupid fucking smirk and how fast he can go when there’s a mal attack, leaving everyone else behind, and fuck the obvious metaphor of it all, and fuck George for never trying and living anyway because of his enclave spot and his friends, and fuck Tampa fuck enclavers fuck them all. Wilbur will survive this year and he’ll do it without a power-sharer for mana and without Eret on his side and without giving a single goddamn thing to Tampa. 

He spends a lot of time staring into the void. Phil went in once, to see, he knows that. Nothing more—he didn’t like talking about it—but it’s tempting. And he knows the stories of people who get actual momentum, who come out messed up. He wonders if being messed up like that would make everything hurt less. 

It doesn’t matter. Tommy and Toby are coming in soon, and he has to be there for them, he has to be fine and alive and not messed up. Just for a little longer.