“Of course I am!” you lie.

(The small irritating inescapable voice at the back of your mind thinks, very clearly, You are burning down my school. Go fuck yourself.)

And then there is a ringing crash through the heart of your world, a shuddering and shattering, a system unravelling. On the other side of the road, in the high room that houses the thaumic engines, Todd has finished carefully unscrewing the fine walnut panelling—They just don’t make it like that anymore, he’d say. He has given the array of polished gears and fine glassware a thoughtful look, noting the strangely flickering glow-lights, those balefire reflections cast from nowhere. He has selected from his toolbox a hefty, reliable hammer.

Smash.

Glass and brass in tinkling disorder across the parquet floor.

You are shuddering. You are reeling. You are very big and complicated and you need big, complicated systems to live in. You just lost a substantial foothold in the world.

(Get her, Laura! Walden imagines shouting. Now!)

And worse—worse—

Those engines were old and ill-conceived and not fit for purpose and stupid, but they were also foundational. Chetwood needed them. This school site has been home to a lot of magic for a long time. It is uniquely vulnerable.

The Great Key around Laura’s neck almost immediately starts to glow white. It does its best. But the protections it anchors were designed half a millennium ago, by less skilled magicians, for a school that was several acres and several hundred people smaller. That school was burdened with mere decades of adolescent wild magic, instead of the centuries-old weight of power now loose on the world. When they decided to go after the thaumic engines, neither Todd nor Laura had the theoretical grounding, the expertise, to perceive what you and Dr Walden understand instantly: The whole bloody site is about to go sideways into the demonic realm.

This isn’t a demonic incursion. This is, technically, the precise opposite of a demonic incursion. The world of demons is not coming here. We are all going there.

Every inch of the school grounds is slipping, slipping, into the hell you came from. Even the marshy rugby pitches are browning now, and the cricket green is past hope, while the fires are spreading up towards the bluebell wood where the sixth formers congregate for traditional rebellion. Every adult, every child. Every classroom and corridor, every memory and hope that a school represents. Even Walden, master-magician though she is, could not stop it now.

(I want, wails something that Walden knows is not herself. I want! I only wanted! And I tried! I learned!

Walden has carried a higher demon with her through the world for more than a decade, the ravenous hunter bound and quiescent. She always assumed the whole thing was her own idea.)