And he can't be here to tell me so. None of them can. That's the trap I live inside now: Callum, Atlas, Ren, Felix, every one of them with a mark on the back of his hand that catches fire if he comes within a stone's throw of this house outside the nine-o'clock hour. They'd burn for this room. Literally.
So it's me, alone, on the wrong floor of my own home with a stolen hour and a phone full of evidence, because I'm the only one of us the leash forgot to hold. Catalina meant it as a punishment, keeping them away from me. She forgot that it also means I go where they can't. Small victories. I'll take them where I find them.
The first time through, it's just a beautiful, terrible thing. Wheeler writes edge to edge in a cramped slanting hand, ink only, no pencil, like a man who has never once doubted a word he set down. The margins are alive with drawings, and—here's the part that turns my stomach before I even get to the words—he'sgood.Good enough that I want to look.
A sketch of the expensive chair, except in the drawing it has straps the real chair doesn't, which means he either added them or takes them off between guests. The brass instrument, exploded into parts, labeled in Latin I can half-follow from family trivia night.Vena. Radix.The vessel. The root. And lower, smaller, half-hidden behind an arrow pointing off the page: a cage. Domed. Covered. One line for the bars beneath the cloth.
Cool. Normal. Love that for me.
I keep turning, and on the fourth page the drawings stop being the point and the columns start, and that's when I read it right.
It's a tally. Three columns, dated week over week in that even hand. First column, names. Second, what he takes—a little mark like a dropped stitch, sometimes once, sometimes a whole crowded row. Third, what's left.
What he draws. What he draws it from. What each one keeps after.
I read down the third column and my body goes cold a full second before my brain catches up to tell it why.
The numbers fall. Not all at once. That's the part that climbs into my chest and sits there, thepatienceof it. Name by name, week by week, the third column gets smaller. Somebody walks in full and walks out a little less, comes back the next week a little less than that, and Wheeler writes it down each time like a man tracking a debt he fully intends to collect.
A little less. A little less. His hand never wavers. Never crosses a thing out. Because to Wheeler this isn't cruelty—it's bookkeeping, and it's the steadiest handwriting I've ever seen.
He has a heading on that second column. I almost don't parse it, it's set down so calm.Yield.That's his word. Nottaken.Notdrained.Yield, like a harvest, like a field doing what a field is for, the word a man reaches for when he's decided, all the way down, that the thing in the chair was grown for him.
There's a name for the hour these people spend up here, too. I've seen it on the little cards in the brass door-frames downstairs.Graduate Independent Study.Independent. Sure. As if anyone in that chair got a say in it.
Forty minutes. I've got thirty-one left and I'm shaking, so I do the thing I do. Breathe. Chin up. Keep going.
I almost miss her, because I know her by the wrong name.
I'm hunting the names column for anyone I can put a face to—anyone who'll make this real instead of a horror I get to hold at arm's length—when one snags.E. Halstone.And it takes me a stupid second, because in my head she isn'tE. Halstone, graduate cohort.In my head she's the girl who hums.
Enya. She hums while the kettle heats in the shared kitchen, always the same few notes, the front edge of a song she never quite gets to. My second night in this house I came back hollowed-out and found a cup of tea outside my door, gone cold, no note. I never asked. She never said. Next morning she just hummed at me over the toaster and that was the entire conversation, and it was kinder than anything anyone else in this place had managed all week.
E. Halstone.
I find her in the dates. I make myself read across.
Her numbers fall fastest of anyone's.
Not the slow patient slope of the others—hers drop in long ugly steps, week to week, like whatever he's pulling comes upeasier in her, like she's got more to give and he's found that out and helped himself. Name. Yield. Keeping. And in that third column, next to the girl who leaves cold tea outside the doors of strangers, the number's so far down from where it started that I have to flatten my hand on the desk and wait for the room to quit tilting.
It stops being a tally. It becomes Enya. A cold cup of tea and a song that never gets where it's going.
I take the picture. My hands aren't doing a single thing I tell them, but the picture doesn't care if I'm steady. That's the whole point of the picture.
I've been not-looking at the corner of the room the entire time, and we both know it.
I knew the cage was there before I walked in—I drew it behind my own eyes the second I saw it in his margin. Domed, covered, a cloth thrown over the top the way you cover a thing that sleeps. Or a thing you'd rather not watch while you work. It sits between two shelves where the light gives up, and I've kept it in the corner of my eye for twenty minutes like a spider I don't want crossing the floor toward me.
Something inside it is breathing.
I hear it now that I've stopped turning pages and the room's gone quiet enough—a slow draw, a slow release, under the cloth. Even. Wrong, somehow, in a way I taste before I can name: the penny on my tongue goes thick and old, older than Wheeler's leftover blood-work, older than anything that should be on the third floor of a school.
First I square the desk, because I'm not an amateur about the parts I can control. Strap back around the notebook, set on its clean oval exactly where it sat, dust left alone, bright handle left bright—Wheeler has to keep believing nobody comes up here, and I need him to be wrong. Tracks covered. I should go. The cat won't hold the stairs forever.
I don't go.
I cross to the corner before I decide to. Of course I do. That's the whole problem with me, the thing Catalina's counting on, the thing that gets me killed someday: I cannot leave a wrong thing alone.
