I find the real thing to say eventually. It comes out rough and certain. "Okay. That. That's the thing I'm never letting anyone take from me again."
Neither of them lets go. Atlas's arm tightens. Ren turns his face into my hair and breathes out slow, and the threads pull warm at the movement, rope and not filament, healed the only way they were ever going to heal. Not by being careful. By being used.
I lie there in the dark of a house that decided to let us stay, and I let myself have it. The warmth. The weight of them. The bond gone whole and loud and mine.
And far below us—below the room, below the floors I know the names of and the floors I don't, below the Reliquary and the Sepulchre and the Hollows, down in the Deep where the gutted Well sits open like a wound that won't close—something shudders in the stone. I don't feel it. None of us do, wrapped up warm three floors of dark above it.
The Well goes on existing down there anyway. Patient in the dark, a century of taken light packed behind a wounded wall. And for the first time in a hundred years there's no one settledin above it to keep the long watch, no one tending the wound, no one minding the thing that minds us.
We've never been closer. We've never been less guarded.
I don't know yet which of those is the danger.
36
EVERLY
The marks die quietly, which is the part nobody warns you about.
I expect a sound. After all these months of the thing sitting on their hands like a collar—the penny taste of it carving in, the burn that kept the men a green's width from me at all the wrong hours—I expect the ending to come with a snap. A scream. Something.
Instead Atlas just stops talking.
Mid-sentence, in the doorway of Concordia. He lifts his hand and turns it over, and the looping half moon on the back of it is gray—gray as ash, gray as a fire someone walked away from, no dark left in it and no pulse—and even while I watch, the edges go soft, the way ink goes when water finds it.
"It's gone." Atlas flexes the hand, slow, like he's testing a tooth that came out. "I can't—it's not pulling anymore. I can feel that it's not pulling."
"Mine too." Callum holds his out flat. The mark on it has already stopped beating.
Ren turns his over without a word. His blood rose so eagerly to meet the leash back in the fall, and now it's sinking back downunder the skin and leaving nothing behind but a gray smear and brown skin.
Felix doesn't look at his.
Felix is looking at me, smiling, but he's not really here, somewhere three branches down a road I can't see, counting.
"Don't all thank me at once," he says.
"You didn't do this," Atlas says.
"No." Felix walks a card across his knuckles. "But I'd have told you it was coming, if anyone asked. Nobody ever asks."
I taste the dying. Metal at the back of my tongue, thin now, a flat penny held under a faucet and rinsed.
The Well's wound is wider than it was yesterday. I can feel it under everything, a cold seam running through the bones of the campus, a draw pulling low in my belly, and everywhere it passes the old workings give. The green's come all the way back around—gold when they marked us in the fall, then bare, then this, the thin new green of a year almost spent—and out across it a lamp that should be lit isn't. The warded gate at the bottom of the quad hangs open on nothing.
Somewhere a bell that rings on a schedule older than the school is ringing wrong. Off its hour. Off its count.
"Tell me that's not what it looks like," Atlas says.
"It's exactly what it looks like." Felix pockets the card. "The whole place is coming untied."
I should feel relief. We spent ten weeks in a car last summer trying to outrun this place, then a whole school year wishing the distance between us gone, and here it is—undone, four marks dead at once.
I do feel it. A bright loosening in my chest where the bond's been pulled tight since the leaves turned.
But there's something under it I wasn't ready for, and it takes me a second to name, because it has no business being here.
Grief.
