The message came through an encrypted app I didn't know I had on my phone, appearing forty-eight hours after Julian's gala apocalypse had destroyed whatever remained of civil elite relations at Ashwick Academy.
"Meet me in the old observatory. Midnight. Come alone. We have mutual enemies now. —E.V."
Ethan Voss. The same person who'd tried to poison me, who'd orchestrated financial theft against my family, who'd been expelled after Julian's dramatic Founder's Day revelations about his family's schemes.
Meeting him alone at midnight seemed like objectively terrible decision-making.
I went anyway.
The old observatory was a forgotten building on academy grounds, no longer used for astronomy classes and generally avoided by students who preferred functional facilities. I arrived at exactly
