"Does it?—"
"It's fine." It's not nothing, but it's not worse than I can handle. I've had a lot of practice. I make a fist, open it. The mark pulses once more, settling.
The charge drains off slow, like thunder moving out. Outside, the rain keeps going because I haven't stopped it.
She's standing two feet away with her shirt pulled back down and her hair a wreck, and she's breathing, and she's looking at my hand, and she's not apologizing for any of it. She knows better than to apologize for something the mark did. That's the thing about Everly—she figures out what the right shape of a moment is and she holds it, even when the shape is hard.
"I don't know how to do this caged," I say.
It isn't a new thought. It's just the true one, and this is the first time I've said it out loud, and if I'm going to say it I'd rather say it to someone who walked through the rain in the middle of the night and doesn't need me to soften anything.
She's quiet for a moment.
"I know," she says. "I'm working on it."
She didn't sayI'll fix it,orit's going to be okay,or any of the things that would mean she doesn't understand what this is. She saidI knowandI'm working on it,which are both just accurate, and she said them in the tone she uses when she means them completely—nothing put on, no comfort she can't back up.
I almost believe her.
My hands go quiet in my lap, no spark anywhere in them, which is as close as they come to believing anything.
The storm's still mine, still crossing the campus and darkening the quad and going on the weather reports as a freak summer squall. I could stop it. I don't. I pick the conductor up from the bench instead, just to have something to do with my hands, and turn it once in my palm.
The mark pulses again—quieter, settling back to its usual coal—and I'm thinking, almost without meaning to, that there has to be a gap somewhere in what it can track. Some frequency I can jam. A storm over the whole campus, maybe, loud enough that the mark reads me everywhere at once and can't pin me down to any one location. If I threw enough weather at it—the whole campus, one continuous output?—
I think: I could figure that out.
I don't say so. Instead I say: "Go back before the watchers start their round."
She bends down and picks up the wrecked coffee cup. Looks at it for a second. Sets it on the bench beside me instead of taking it, like she's leaving something.
"Tomorrow," she says.
"Yeah."
She goes. The door clicks, and the bond stretches taut in my chest as she moves across the dark campus in the rain I made, and I hold still until the warmth settles back to the low background hum it keeps between us. Then I pick the bar back up.
The scorch mark on the ceiling is still there.
I work until the rain stops.
4
EVERLY
Sitting in the Nyxhaven dining hall with a tray of acceptable eggs and the full, burning attention of three rival sororities is, I'm discovering, as good as the morning gets.
It's the prettiest room I've ever been afraid in. Three stories of vaulted stone, the long windows throwing bruised reds and blues down across the tables, the ceiling lost somewhere up past where the iron chandeliers bother to light. It smells like coffee and cold rock and the old must of a building that's been standing longer than my whole family's time in this country. A hundred forks find a hundred plates and the sound climbs up into the dark and doesn't come back down.
Four hundred people eat breakfast in here every morning, and a couple of weeks in I have not learned the name of a single one who'll say mine back.
I have a seat. That was the easy part. The harder part is everything the room is saying without saying it, in a language nobody handed me a textbook for, and pretending I'm not straining to keep up. They didn't cover this at my state school.
The Ossuary Sisters hold the long table by the east windows, Mors girls in silver and white, the kind of pale and poised thatacts like having feelings is something that only happens to lesser people, and who've spent the last few days making sure I know exactly what they think of me: cold looks, stares held too long across the quad, the works. Catalina's loyalists. I already know the story they're telling about me: that the four house presidents were corrupted by something that arrived wearing a grimoire where its magic should be, which?—
Okay. To be fair. I'm not not a factor.
The Storm Daughters are more complicated. They've split, which Felix mentioned last week in the kind of offhand way he delivers important information, and I can see the fracture from here: half of them along the north wall, half near the door, and a current of something taut running between the two clusters that prickles faintly along my forearms. Like a storm front that hasn't committed yet.
