I put two fingers in the deepest of the cuts. The stone's edges are still sharp. A century, and nobody's worn them smooth, because nobody comes down here, because that was the whole point.
It's only when I crouch to look closer, my free hand flat against the stone below the cut, that I notice the thing that's been wrong since I came down, the thing I've been too busy to name.
The blankness.
Not quiet—I know quiet. The campus is never actually blank to me; it keeps a taste in my mouth. Everywhere up there, every hall and every green and every dorm room, the wardens' working lies through the stone in a low copper tang I stoppednoticing weeks ago the way you stop tasting your own tap water, the flat penny of it laid into the foundations and run out in fine bright lines to every leashed animal and every marked hand and back again.
It's always there. It's so always-there that I forgot it was a taste at all, until right now, down here, where it isn't.
I press my palm flatter to the stone and reach, the grimoire reaching with me, the taste rising at the back of my tongue out of pure habit, looking for the tang to push against?—
—and there's nothing.
No tang. No metal. No bright lines. The stone under my hand is dead-quiet, dead in the way that doesn't mean empty but meansunclaimed,the way an unfenced field is quiet.
Whatever this building is, the wardens never got their working into it. Their leash runs everywhere on this campus except here. This is a blank spot in the whole watched world above me, a hole in the net, and I crouch there with my hand on cold unmarked stone and I understand exactly what I'm holding.
Their marks track them by the working in the stone. Down here there is no working in the stone.
Down here the marks would go dark.
I sit with that the way you sit with a piece of luck too good to trust. Then I test it twice. I lift my hand off the stone and set it down a foot over, on the worn lip of the bottom step, somewhere a hundred years of feet would have laid down their own quiet working if anyone's working reached here. Nothing. I press until the cold aches in my knuckles and reach with everything the grimoire will give me, hunting for even a thread of that low copper tang, the way you run your tongue over a tooth that should hurt.
Nothing answers. The blankness isn't a gap in the net. There's no net.
Callum, Atlas, Ren, Felix—every one of them tethered to a thing on the back of his hand that burns him for coming near me, that tells Catalina where he is and how hard he's pulling and whether the bond's gone bright. Every one of them, the instant he crossed the threshold into this building, would simply vanish off the map. No burn. No broadcast. No Catalina at her window watching the distance count up.
There is one place on this entire campus where the five of us could stand in the same room and no one would know.
It's this one.
All four threads flinch in my chest at once, the way a hand flinches back from a stove it hasn't touched yet.
I tuck it away—not in the careful columns of the ledgers behind me, those are for the dead, but in the other place, the one where I keep the things I'm not ready to use yet and can't afford to lose. I'll need it. I don't know for what, not all the way, but I know the shape offor what,and the shape is all five of us and a door that closes.
I start to stand. And that's when the blankness touches me back.
Not the leash—there's no leash down here, I just proved it twice. Something else. Something far under the dead stone and the dead quiet, far under me, the pull I carried down the stair giving one slow answer, so deep I feel it low in my belly before any part of me agrees it's a real thing and not a thing I want. Like the ground turned over in its sleep and found my hand resting on it and decided it liked the weight.
I'm on my feet and two steps toward the stair before I've chosen to move, my heart going hard, already building the case that I imagined it. I've gotten good at catching myself in that lie.
I didn't imagine it. I just don't get to know yet what it was, only that it's down there, and it's been down there a long time, and for one held breath it knew exactly where I was standing.
I climb back up the way I came, counting the turns in reverse, my light finding the dished centers of the steps. At the top I stop and look back down once into the dark I'm leaving.
I keep thinking about the hand that shook. H. Grimoire didn't gouge that name into the rock for the people who kept the dead in tidy columns. She cut it into the one wall on this whole campus the leash never reached, the one place the keepers couldn't get into and tidy away. She wanted to be found.
I stand there with the cold still in my teeth and my phone full of the dead, and I think: all right. I'm a grimoire too.
I found you.
11
EVERLY
The nine o'clock hour is almost up when Wheeler excuses himself to check on something upstairs, and for exactly as long as it takes him to climb one flight of stairs, the five of us are alone in the kitchen with nobody counting.
We don't waste it on each other. There isn't time, and we've learned that the hard way: every stolen minute spent on my mouth or Atlas's hands is a minute not spent finding a way out of this. So I go for the door instead, because I've seen him twice this week already: the grad student from the kitchen sink my first night here, the one whose hand shook on a water glass like it belonged to someone twice his age. Gregory Chastain, third-year Tumult, the little brass nameplate on his door read, back when I still thought reading nameplates was a normal thing to do in this house. He's in the hall now, a folder under his arm, headed for the stairs like he's got somewhere better to be than this house.
