Page 103 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

The young man’s eyes flick behind her, and he pales, scrambling back.

“I took the hybrid to a friend, he’ll be safe,” Killian says, low, just to Chloe. “Don’t worry.”

The Half Demon scrambles at the door in the back of the hallway, flinging it open and fleeing.

Killian touches Chloe’s elbow, gentle, but the calluses on his hand are different now. “Let him go, he won’t harm us.”

“Jesus Christ,” Chloe says, after all of that, completely out of things to say, before giving Killian a hard look.

This body is less tall—still taller than Chloe of course, that’s not hard—and a bit more slender in the shoulders. The eyes, in the brief glimpses behind the reflecting of the light, are a completely normal hazel, and his face is prettier than the last.

The guard must’ve been an absolute asshole, if he looked like that while existing in the college.

And Killian searches through her face, as if attempting to find something as well.

“Did you know this body? Is this weird for you? I could take the other,” he says, gesturing at the other dead guard. “Both will work for a while, it’s no big deal.”

“No,” Chloe says, her voice a bit higher. “Just uh…startled?”

It’s a wholly inadequate way of describing things.

Killian shrugs, one shouldered, and that is at least familiar. “The dissection level is three stories up,” he says, serious, and Chloe needs to get her brain back on track, get her mind back where it needs to be. “The cage will be up there.”

Someone else pokes their head out of the cell but vanishes before Chloe can get a good look at them.

They were also young.

“And you were kept here?” Chloe blurts out, before she can stop herself.

Killian’s jaw tightens, a familiar action in an unfamiliar body, before he consciously relaxes. He pushes forward, waving the brash guard’s fist and peeling open the wall behind them.

“That floor has anti-teleportation again,” he says, frustration sanding down the unfamiliar timber of his voice. “Or else I’d just hop over there and hop back.”

“Makes sense,” Chloe says, shaking out her hands and craning a look behind herself.

Nobody else is poking their head out of their cages. She can only hope that it means there’s nobody else that needs to run.

“It’s new, too,” he says, with an undertone she can’t quite interpret yet. “They just put it up. Less than 10 minutes ago.”

Oh.

Which means they know they’re coming

They know someone’s coming.

Chloe swings the bag around again, then straps the gun to her hip, rolling the pebbles in her hand. They’re a good sort of pebble, just enough quartz to be easy to transform into something, just enough leftover carbon from some ancient fossil that she can make something truly horrendous.

Killian pokes his head into the wall, and she briefly, ever so briefly, wonders about if the height difference in this body bothers him. “I can get us to that beam,” he says, pointing, and Chloe cranes her neck up as well.

It’s barely a ledge.

“It’ll be a three meter climb up to that,” he says, pointing at the internal edging of a floor.

This entire building wouldn’t stand if it wasn't for the magic.

“I can do it,” Chloe says, staring hard into the threads of magic woven into each wooden beam, into each bit of metal scaffolding, and finds nothing in them that would prevent her from making them larger. Some absolutely preventing them from getting shrunk down or bent, but nothing going in theother direction. “How much partner work have you done with alchemists?”

He tilts his head at her. “Just you, in any depth.”

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