Midnight struck St. Swithin's Academy not with a bell, but with a sudden, suffocating silence. The heavy oak doors of the dormitories were shut, the teachers had retreated to their quarters, and the only sound was the wind rattling the leaded glass windows. The corridors, usually alive with the sound of shoes and laughter, stretched out like the stone throats of a sleeping beast. The shadows were long, sharp, and hungry.
It was time.
Eiden crouched in the shadows of the third-floor maintenance closet, squeezed between a mop bucket and a stack of industrial cleaners. The air smelled of bleach and old dust. He wore black, his movements restricted slightly by the stiff, itchy bandages wrapping his broken ribs. Every breath was a reminder of the fight in the chem lab, a dull ache that spiked into sharp pain if he moved too fast. But his mind was clear. It was the clarity of the hunt.
He adjusted the heavy headset Harry had salvaged from an old tank radio. The metal band dug into his scalp, and the thick wire snaked down to the bulky walkie-talkie strapped to his belt.
"Check," he whispered into the throat microphone, his voice barely a breath.
"Video loop is active," Harry's voice crackled in the headphones, nervous and thin through the static. "I've spliced the feed from ten minutes ago. It... it looks seamless. But the buffer is small. You're a ghost for exactly... seven minutes. After that, the timestamp will jump, and the guard station will know."
"Guard rotation?" Eiden asked, ignoring the time limit. He only needed five.
"Two men approaching the north stairwell," Hazel's voice cut in. Unlike Harry, she sounded cool, precise, almost bored. She was treating this like a chess game. "They are moving slower than usual. Probably tired. You have a thirty-second window before the next pair rounds the corner. Margot, you're up."
Three floors down, in the main hallway, Margot took a deep, shaking breath. She was terrified. Her hands were sweating so much she was afraid she'd drop the glass beaker. She wasn't a Wolf. She wasn't a soldier. She was the girl people forgot was in the room.
But she remembered Eiden's words. You're not invisible. You're vital.
She grabbed the beaker of harmless, but foul-smelling sulfur she'd stolen from the chem lab earlier that day. She uncorked it and spilled it on the floor near the large, cast-iron radiator. The heat hit the liquid instantly. A cloud of rotten-egg stench, thick and choking, filled the hall.
It was disgusting. It was perfect.
Margot ran toward the guards, forcing herself to hyperventilate, letting real tears stream down her face.
"Help! Please! There's a leak!" she screamed, her voice echoing off the stone walls. "Sir Nikal's lab... it smells like gas! It's burning my eyes! I think it's going to explode!"
The guards, tense from the recent attacks and Akuma's new strict protocols, didn't hesitate. They didn't question why a student was out of bed; panic overrode protocol.
"Clear the floor! Move!" the lead guard shouted into his massive handheld radio. "Possible gas leak, Sector 4. Evacuating!"
They ran toward the smell, their boots thudding heavily on the floor.
"Path clear," Hazel whispered over the static. "Go."
Eiden moved. He slipped out of the closet and sprinted down the hall to Madam Cullin's office. He moved on the balls of his feet, silent as smoke. He didn't bother picking the lock; Harry had already made him a copy of the master key from a mold Eiden had swiped days ago.
He slid the key in, turned it, and slipped inside. He locked the door behind him in one fluid motion.
The office was dark, lit only by the moonlight filtering through the heavy velvet curtains. It smelled of expensive perfume and fear.
"I'm in," Eiden said into the mic. "Where is it?"
"Akuma doesn't use safes," Hazel said, her voice buzzing in the headset. "He thinks they're obvious targets. He hides things in plain sight. He relies on people not daring to touch his property. Look for something... heavy. Something permanent. Something that looks like it belongs, but doesn't."
Eiden scanned the room. The desk? Too simple. The bookshelf? Too cliché for a man like Akuma.
His eyes landed on the mantlepiece above the fireplace. There were photos of the school, awards, and a clock.
And there was a bust of William Shakespeare.
It was heavy bronze, staring judgmentally at the room. It looked out of place in Cullin's modern, glass-and-wood office. It was old. It was ostentatious. It was Akuma.
Eiden walked over to it. He tried to lift it. It didn't move. It was bolted down.
He felt along the neck of the statue. There was a tiny, imperceptible seam.
He twisted the head to the left.
Click.
The sound was loud in the silence. The head of the bust popped open on a hidden, well-oiled hinge.
Inside, resting on a small red velvet cushion, was a single, heavy iron key. It looked ancient, pitted with age, nothing like the modern keys of the school.
"Found it," Eiden whispered, pocketing the key. It felt cold and heavy against his leg. "The First Gate is open."
"Get out," Harry said, his voice rising in pitch through the radio. "The video loop is destabilizing. The timestamp is glitching. You have sixty seconds before the screen flickers."
While Eiden was robbing the Headmistress, Emily and Linda were breaking into the library archives. The air here was dry and filled with the smell of decaying paper.
"This is a terrible idea," Linda hissed, holding a heavy flashlight with shaking hands. The beam wobbled over rows of dark shelves. "We're going to get expelled. Or arrested. Or eaten by dust mites. My coat is already ruined."
"Quiet," Emily commanded. She was focused, her eyes scanning the rows of blueprints stored in honeycomb racks. "Rook said —the treasure—was hidden in the foundation. That means it was built with the school. Before the school."
She pulled out a scroll tube marked "Original Schematics - 1920." The paper was brittle, cracking as she unrolled it on the reading table.
She traced the lines with her finger.
"Look," she pointed. "Here. The boiler room. There's a void space behind the west wall. See this double line? That's not insulation."
"So? It's a wall. Walls have spaces."
"It's a shaft," Emily said, her eyes narrowing. "It bypasses the main basement. It goes straight down into the bedrock. It connects the old manor house ruins to the new foundation."
She looked around the library. The west wall was dominated by a massive stone fireplace, big enough to stand in.
"It's behind the fireplace," Emily realized. "It's the chimney sweep's access."
She walked to the fireplace. It was cold and empty, the grate cleaned perfectly. She stepped inside, crouching down, ignoring the soot that smeared her coat. She felt around the brickwork inside the hearth.
"Emily, you're going to get soot on your—"
Clunk.
Emily pressed a loose brick near the back. A grinding sound, like stone chewing on stone, echoed in the quiet library. The iron backplate of the fireplace swung inward, revealing a dark, rusty ladder disappearing into the earth.
A draft of cold, stale air hit them. It smelled of wet earth and things that had been buried for a long time.
"The Architect's Entrance," Emily whispered.
"I am not going down there," Linda declared, shining her light into the hole. It seemed to go down forever. "There are probably rats. Big ones. Mutant ones."
"You are," Emily said, stepping into the hearth and grabbing the cold iron rungs. "Because the only thing scarier than that hole is my father finding out we know about it. And if I go alone, and I don't come back... no one will know where to look."
She looked back at her cousin; her eyes hard but pleading. "Are you coming, or are you staying here to explain this to the guards when they do their rounds?"
Linda groaned, looked at the dark library shadows which seemed to be closing in, and then scurried into the fireplace after Emily. "If I die," Linda whispered, "I'm haunting you."
Eiden stood at the heavy steel door to the main basement, the iron key in his hand. He could feel the cold radiating from the metal.
Harry's voice buzzed in the headphones. "Eiden... the loop is off. You're invisible no more. Good luck."
"We're with you," Hazel added. "Don't get caught."
Two floors above, Emily stood at the top of the dark shaft, the wind from the depths blowing her hair back.
"Don't drop the flashlight," she told Linda. "It's a long way down."