They slammed into the eastern flank of the Assembly mages and there was screaming. Call looked in horror for Tamara and Jasper, but he couldn’t see any students among the fighters. He hoped they’d been pushed to the back of the lines, where they’d be protected.

There was no longer any cleared earth between the two lines of fighters. There was only pandemonium — Jasper’s father exchanging bolts of sharpened ice with Master Rufus. Master Rockmaple fending off several Chaos-ridden with a curving alchemical sword. It sliced into their bodies and they collapsed and lay twitching.

Ravan hovered, wreathed in smoke, in the air above the Assembly mages, trading bursts of fire with Anastasia. Part of Anastasia’s uniform was scorched black, but she was holding her own.

“Call!” It was Alex shouting, furiously, over the smash and crash of the battle. “Call, attack!”

Call took a deep breath. He knew what he had to do. With the Chaos-ridden under his command, Alex’s side might be able to overwhelm the Assembly’s mages. Without them, it would be much harder for Alex to win.

Call drew on the magic of the void to bind his will to the Chaos-ridden under his command so that they would understand his wishes fully. “You, who I have created!” he called. “Dance!”

Immediately, like a flash mob, they carried out the synchronized moves Call willed. They kicked up their legs and spun around, moaning in time to a melody no one else could hear. They threw their hands in the air. They boogied. They got down.

It was totally ridiculous. It was so ridiculous that for a moment, everyone else paused. Even the elementals seemed curious.

A few mages even laughed.

But Alex wasn’t laughing. He looked absolutely furious.

“You idiot!” he shouted, flying toward where Call stood. “You’ve made a fool out of me for the last time!”

The silver mask caught the light and Call saw his own reflection in it. Then Alex pulled it off. Underneath, his face had gone red with rage. The Alkahest gleamed on his other arm and Call had no doubt what he was planning.

At least Call was sure his Chaos-ridden were occupied and would be for a while. He had willed enough magic into his commands that they would be hard for Alex to disrupt, but it had left Call depleted even before the fight started. And given how his magic drained faster since he’d given away part of his soul, beating Alex wasn’t going to be easy.

Still, he didn’t need to survive to win.

Using his power, Call ripped a hole into the void. He could feel the Chaos there, cold and oily and pulsing with the promise of enormous power.

Alex brought up the arm holding the Alkahest and pointed it straight at Call. Call tried to draw on chaos, to send it at Alex, but he was too slow.

Havoc got there first.

The Chaos-ridden wolf leaped at Alex, biting down on his metal-covered wrist. The beam that should have hit Call hit him instead.

“Havoc!” Call shouted. But the beam had smashed into Havoc’s chest, lifting the wolf into the air. Havoc’s body went limp and he hit the ground hard.

Call stopped thinking about magic, about wars, about anything. Pushing past the pain in his leg, he lurched toward Alex and punched him in the face.

The older boy staggered back. His lip was split and he looked more surprised than anything else. Call’s knuckles hurt. He’d never hit anyone before.

With a sneer, Alex slammed the Alkahest into the side of Call’s head, sending Call sprawling in the grass of the field. He could see Havoc’s body, sprawled in the field a little distance from him. The wolf wasn’t moving.

Call stood as Alex aimed the Alkahest again. And then Aaron was there, wrenching it off his arm. The two of them struggled, hanging on to opposite ends of it.

“Chaos-ridden!” Alex shouted. “To me!”

Crawling to Havoc, Call covered his wolf’s body with his own and called on chaos again. It spiraled around him, dark with promise.

He fed it with rage. Rage at Master Joseph for taking his choices away, for kidnapping him and forcing him to be Constantine. Rage at death, for taking away Aaron. For taking away his mother. For taking Havoc. For leaving him with a torn black gaping hole of loss in the middle of his heart.

He fed the chaos with rage and loss, with grief, and finally with fear, the fear of his own death, fear of what lay on the other side of his sacrifice.

As he fed the chaos, he felt the energy pour out of him. Everything inside him was going into spilling out the power of nothingness. Alex was screaming as the heavy black coils circled him like the coils of a snake.

Call gasped. He felt the gravity of the earth pulling him down. He was weakening. He could see Aaron standing alone on the battlefield. The Chaos-ridden ignored Aaron’s presence: He was nothing to them, not a mage, and maybe, like them, not even really alive.

Aaron was staring at Call. He was shaking his head, and Call knew that it was because Call ought to be reaching for his counterweight right now. But Call didn’t have a counterweight — and even if he had, he wasn’t sure he would have reached out. This was too much magic. It licked at his soul.

Alex sent chaos back at him, a coiling choking cloud that drew him into it.

He thought of Ravan, of how she must have felt using so much fire magic that she became a Devoured of fire. He saw her now, flying through the air in a spray of sparks. No longer human. He didn’t want to become a creature of chaos. And so, with the last of his magic, he pushed the chaos away — thrust it all back into the void and thrust Alex with it. Alex fought, sending spiraling arrows of nothingness at Call, but Call scraped the very bottom of his own soul for power.

Alex’s face contorted as he realized what Call was doing. Before he could so much as scream, he was gone, pulled into the void. All across the field, his Chaos-ridden howled for him — one long horrible sound that hung over the battlefield. Then they clattered to a stop, like toys whose batteries had sparked and died.

Call glanced toward where Aaron had been, but he was no longer there. He turned to find him, to find someone, but he was having trouble focusing. He felt dizzy and his vision had gone blurry. Slumping down, he felt darkness close in at the edge of his vision. He wasn’t sure if he was falling into chaos or into something far deeper.

Stay awake, he ordered himself.

Stay alive.

“Callum!” Master Rufus was saying. “Callum, can you hear me?”

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed.

“Call. Please be okay. Please.”

It was Tamara and she sounded like she’d been crying, which didn’t make sense, since she’d been so mad.

Call tried to speak, tried to tell her that he was okay. He couldn’t do it. Maybe he wasn’t okay after all.

He cracked his eyes open slightly. Probably too slightly for anyone to notice. His vision was blurred, but he was right: Tamara was leaning over him, and she’d been crying. He wanted to tell her not to cry, but maybe she wasn’t crying over him. Maybe she was upset about Havoc. That made more sense. If he’d told her he was okay and she was crying about Havoc, it would have been embarrassing for both of them — especially because he’d probably start crying about Havoc, too.

“You did it,” she whispered to him. “You saved everyone. Call, please, please wake up.”

At that, he tried harder to move, but he still couldn’t. It was as though every part of him was weighted down and even opening an eye fully felt like fighting against that heaviness.