Miri's Pov
I couldn't get that rogue's words out of my head.
Someone who wishes Velka had won the war.
At first, it had sounded like the usual cultish nonsense—desperate rhetoric from someone clinging to old grudges. But the more I sat with it, the more it clawed at me. I kept circling back to that trial earlier in the semester, the one Caius, Riven, and I had ended up in together as part of Riven's plan to fix me and Caius' relationship. That last stage. The one that had gone horribly wrong.
It wasn't just the glitch. Everyone said it was a glitch. Professors, counselors, even the principal had repeated the word like it explained everything. "A glitch in the trial system." As if that could account for the thing we had faced—the thing with claws sharper than knives and shadows spilling around it.
