Felix comes with me to Wheeler's office.
He comes because he's the one who caught what Wheeler was back in the summer—saw, in that flat way Felix sees, the place where somebody had already paid for him—and because I've stopped going anywhere alone if one of them can come instead. The mark that kept all four of them a green's width from me the whole year is dead on the back of his hand now. He keeps that hand at the small of my back the entire walk over, light, like he's reminding us both that he's allowed to.
The campus makes it easy. The gate at the bottom of the quad hangs open on nothing. The lamps along the path have gone out one after the next, and with the wards tearing loose there's no working left keyed to notice two expelled students crossing ground that's stopped watching anyone.
"You don't have to go in," Felix says at the door. A card walks across his knuckles, knuckle to knuckle, the way it moves when he's looking at something the rest of us can't. "I already know what's in there. Have for about a day."
"Then tell me I'm wrong," I say, and go in.
I catch it before I'm over the threshold: a flicker at the corner of my eye, thin, the leftover shiver of a working worked and unworked too many times in one small room. Every time I turn toward it, it's gone. Then I make myself look.
Empty. Not boxed-up, gone-on-sabbatical empty. Stripped. Pale ghosts on the floorboards where the cabinets stood, the shelves bare, the hooks ripped out of the wall and the little wounds left in the plaster behind them. I crouch and press two fingers into the dust where his desk used to sit, and it's thick already, undisturbed, days of it gone gritty under my fingertips. A year ago this room smelled like old paper and a man who reads more than he sleeps. Now it smells like nothing at all, and the nothing crawls up the back of my throat worse than the flicker did.
Behind me Felix has gone quiet, which from Felix is its own kind of alarm. When I look back, he's smiling, but it doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes. He's gone off down some branch of this I can't follow, watching it run.
"He's not coming back," I say. It isn't a question.
"No." The card stops moving. "And the odds on anyone ever laying a hand on him got long the second that door closed behind him. He didn't run scared, Everly. He walked. Took his time. Took the work with him."
That's what gets in under my skin and sets up house. I'd been letting myself believe that when the Well came down, the rot came down with it, that we'd cut the head clean off the thing. We didn't. Wheeler's out past the gate with everything he learned about what the journals can do folded into his coat, comfortable inside the same lie that's expelling us. Dangerous rogues, quietly removed. A man can disappear a long way into a story that clean.
Felix's hand comes up to the back of my neck and turns me away from the empty room, into him. Cool fingers, and the bond goes warm under them from the wrong direction, his pulse turning up faint where his skin finds mine. I let myself put my forehead against his collarbone for the length of one breath, and his other arm comes around me, the deck still in his hand, pressing flat between my shoulder blades. He doesn't tell me it'llbe okay. He's walked too many roads to lie to me that cheaply, and he likes me too much to try.
He kisses the top of my head. "Come on," he says into my hair. "You've seen it. Don't stand in it longer than you have to."
So I let him walk me out. But I take one last look at the dust on my fingers—the gray of a desk that was here and isn't—and I mark it, tuck it away with the rest, because one day I'm going to find the end of this, and I want to remember exactly how much of it strolled out a door while we were busy staying alive.
***-
I can't sleep in the new house.
It isn't the house's fault. Concordia decided days ago that it could stand all six of us, which is more than anywhere else on this campus has managed in a year. There's just no real kitchen in it yet, and when I can't sleep I bake, and you cannot bake the grief out of yourself with no flour and a stove that won't light. So I walk it instead.
The cost doesn't line up and wait its turn. It comes at me sideways, one ambush at a time, in the dark.
Coffee, first. I pass the foot of the stairs and thinkcoffee,and coffee is Enya.
Enya, who hummed over the kettle on the grad floor. Who slid the good coffee down the long table to me my first week without being asked, easy, like I wasn't the state-school nobody the rest of the room had already decided not to see. We found her in the end. A cell off the Hollows none of us knew was there. Not dead—the school doesn't spend mercy like that—but kept. Emptied of every memory and every thread of magic and most of what made her a person, fed just enough to keep breathing. A body with her face and nothing behind the eyes except barelyenough left to know she wanted it to stop. My hands have curled in front of me, cupped around a mug that isn't there.
Callum's the one who stopped it. Folded his shadow soft as he could make it and held it over her mouth and her nose until she went still, because not one of the rest of us could make our hands move, and somebody had to give her the kindness this place never would.
He hasn't said her name since. Not once. He's two rooms away right now and not sleeping either, and the only reason I know what it did to him is that I was standing there when he did it.
Before Enya there were others. Names I never learned. Days I'll never get back for people who don't even know they're short a few. I came in late. I don't get to carry less of it for that.
Nell comes for me at the window on the landing.
Not the girl—the girl is gone, out past the gate the night of the harvest, running the way I told her to. What comes for me is the memory, sideways like all the rest of it: my hands closing on her arms at the lip of the wound, hauling her up out of a place that wanted her, and the cold that poured off her skin straight up into my wrists. Not the cold of cold skin. The cold of the Deep. I told myself that night it was the Well I was feeling. I've stopped telling myself that.
She looked back at me once at the bottom of the stair—one last look I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of my life—and then she was gone into the dark on ragged feet. It was the right call. It was. She had to be anywhere but down there. But I sent a freshman out past the gate with nothing but a head start, and I don't know what went with her.
Ren finds me standing there. He doesn't sleep much either, and his blood sense reaches for me the way mine reaches for a hurt animal, without anyone telling it to. He comes to stand atthe window, close, our shoulders touching, and he doesn't ask what I'm looking at. He knows. He was there too.
"Her blood," he says, so low it's only for me. "When she went past me that night. There was a second rhythm in it, underneath hers. I've been replaying it ever since, listening for a way I heard it wrong—" He stops. He doesn't finish. He's the gentlest of the four of them, and he has never once lied to me about a body, and he isn't about to start now.
"She's alive," I say, because it's the one true thing I can get my hands around. She has to be. We dragged her back from the lip of the place the Well wanted her, and she ran, fast, the way only the terrified run, and I would do every terrible thing in that dark over again to keep her on this side of it.
I just don't know what went out the gate wearing her.
