“I don’t care if it recited the goddamn King James Bible.”

Dean Fogg rounded the corner of the L at speed. He didn’t look happy.

“Do you know how many alarms you two set off, blundering around in the subspaces like that?”

Professor Coldwater ticked off on his fingers, silently.

“Eleven?”

“Yes. Eleven.” Fogg seemed perversely unhappy that Coldwater had got the right answer. “What the hell were you doing back there? Purchas?”

Plum flushed. The prank—she’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It was so utterly pointless. Maybe that’s what the ghost was trying to teach her: it’s all pointless. Fate is coming whatever you do, so quit wriggling around, it’s only making you look more ridiculous than you already do. We’re all ghosts here, you just don’t look like one yet.

But she wasn’t having that. If that was true then what was the point of anything ever? She was going to wriggle a bit longer anyway. Who the hell cared how ridiculous she looked.

Plum squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

“I was looking for a secret passage to the wine closet,” she said, loud and clear, “so I could play a prank on Wharton.”

“A prank.” Fogg was unimpressed with her existential courage. “I see. Coldwater?”

“Dean Fogg.”

“You didn’t perform the incursion protocols, any of them.”

“No,” Coldwater said. “I didn’t. There wasn’t much time. The situation was pretty urgent.”

“Did you at least try to terminate the damn thing? Or banish it?”

“I—” He bit something back. “No.”

“Why not?”

A muscle moved in Professor Coldwater’s jaw.

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Professor Coldwater saved my life,” Plum put in.

“Thank you, Purchas,” Fogg said, “and he also put the lives of everybody else at this school at risk. I took a chance on you, Quentin, and it was a mistake. You’re fired. Be out of your rooms by end of day tomorrow. Professor Liu can pick up the rest of your teaching.”

Coldwater didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink, but Plum flinched for him, the way you do when you see somebody else take a punch.

“All right. I understand.”

“Do you?” Fogg was so angry he was spitting. “Do you? Well, you always were a quick one! I would think you of all people would have caught on a little quicker, given that you witnessed firsthand the reason why these protocols were created in the first place. Purchas?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can finish out the last three weeks of the semester. Then you’re expelled.”

Fogg glared at them both in turn, then walked out of the room.