Pure dark. The two of us, breathing, wrecked, the whole of my inheritance guttering down off the walls and pooling quiet at last around the place where we're tangled on the floor.
The dark settles.
The shadow comes home slowly, the way it never does—reluctant, like it doesn't want to leave the warmth of her—and I let it take its time. My hand is splayed over her breastbone. I can feel her heart going under it, fast, then slower, then steady, and under that, fainter, a second beat that is not in her body or in mine but in the thread strung between us, running full again for the first time since Wheeler stripped the four of us down to nothing.
She turns her head on the dusty floor and looks at me.
"That's not the version you give people," she says.
"No."
"Why me?"
I think about the door I sealed this afternoon. The lockwork that knew my hand. Twelve generations who kept the world afraid of the name, and me, the last who'll ever answer to it,locking my own blood out into the cold for her, glad of every second it cost.
"Because you're the only thing I ever chose," I tell her. "Everything else I ever was got assigned to me before I could talk. You, I picked. In a room built to make sure I couldn't. That's the only free thing I've ever done, and I'm not giving it back."
She's quiet. Her hand finds mine on her chest and holds it there. And then, in the dark, in a small voice with no armor left on it anywhere, she says the thing none of us has dared say yet, the thing I've felt running between us like a live wire all year and never once let myself name:
"I love you so much it scares me."
The shadow stills completely. Every thread of it gone motionless on the floor around us, the way it only goes when something reaches all the way in. It is the most honest part of me, and it has stopped dead, listening.
I turn my hand over under hers and lace our fingers and bring her knuckles to my mouth.
"Good," I tell her. "Fear me less when I'm with you."
38
EVERLY
Three days free of the mark, and the school's first move is to evict us in writing.
The writs came within hours of the marks going gray. Five of them, heavy cream stock, the seal pressed deep into wax the dried-blood red the school loves so much. One for each of the men, one for Brittany. A sixth, folded smaller, that I knew was mine before the warden finished holding it out. Mine lives in my back pocket now, gone soft at the creases, and I keep taking it out to read the line that gets me.
Endangerment of the student population.
That's us. The five who went down past the Reliquary and the Sepulchre and the Hollows into the Deep, and dragged the thing that was eating the school back up into the light behind us, still bleeding. Endangering the student body. I couldn't get one sorority to save me a seat at lunch the entire year, but apparently I'm a danger to all of them at once now. Moving up in the world.
The rest of the page is the kind of bored a lawyer has to work at.Unauthorized research into restricted disciplines. Trespass against the body and grounds of the school.She had these written in September. I'd put the last clean thing I own on it:drafted and sitting in a drawer the same week she carved a mark into her own son's hand and called it accountability. Catalina doesn't react to people. She waits for them to walk into the story she already wrote.
The story she's handing everyone else is cleaner than the writs, and I get it the way I get most things now. Off a pigeon.
She's on the gallery sill when I wake, feathers all wrong, and the words come off her the way fear always comes off a bird—not words, a pressure behind my eyes I have to turn into language.Bad ones. The ground's gone wrong. Men with paper, and a story.It's the same story the maintenance guy's terrier gave me yesterday, the same one a magpie keeps trying to trade me for the shiny button off my coat. Five rogues went bad. The school is keeping everyone safe.
No Well in it. No Wheeler. No grad students walking around with a Tuesday scooped clean out of their heads. Just a tidy expulsion and a school that loves you enough to lie to your face about why the lights died all year.
People are going to be grateful for it. That's the part I can't swallow.
Here's what she didn't plan for.
Torment's gone. The thing that did the wiping—reached into a person, took the day they saw too much, left the place smooth—got its ending from Ren's steady hand in Wheeler's study, and the wipes stopped when it did. And everything those wipes were built to bury, every scrap the animals dragged out of the buildings all year and stuffed into nests and gutters and the cracks under the stone benches, because it never once occurred to anyone to wipe a crow—it's all coming up at once. A year of buried proof surfacing the same week the paper comes down to bury us.
So I finally have proof. A year too late to save the person it's about. But I have it.
The trouble with proof is it surfaces for everyone. Catalina spent a year putting this in the ground, and now it's back in the light, and she has to get it under again before anyone who matters goes looking. She isn't slower than me. She's got wardens and a head start and a story people would honestly rather be told than mine.
***-
