"Gregory." I catch the door before it swings shut behind me. "Can I ask you something?"
He doesn't stop walking. "I have a seminar."
"You don't." Ren's voice, quiet, from just behind my shoulder. He's followed me out, and Callum and Atlas are rightbehind him, and Felix brings up the back with the deck gone still in his hand instead of moving, which is its own kind of warning if you know to read it. "There's no seminar on this floor before noon. We checked."
Gregory stops. He looks at the four of them, and something in his face works it out fast—four marked hands, one grimoire, and nowhere left in the hallway to keep pretending he doesn't know exactly what this is.
"I can't," he says, quieter now, and it isn't refusal, it's fear, and the difference matters. His eyes go to the window at the end of the hall like he's checking whether the fox on the sill is looking back.
"Enya's room got scrubbed floral in three days," I say. I keep my voice down. I don't reach for him, don't crowd him, because I remember exactly what it took to get anyone in this house to say a true thing to me, and it was never force. "I'm not asking you to fix that. I'm asking you to tell me what you already know, because I think I know exactly what you're scared of, and I'd like you to say it out loud to someone who isn't going to write it down in a folder."
He looks at Callum first, which surprises me, until I understand it. Callum's the one whose mother runs this whole machine, and the grad student needs to know exactly how much danger he's standing in before he decides whether to speak at all.
"He doesn't report to her," I say. "None of them do. Not for this."
A long silence. Somewhere above us, a floorboard gives under Wheeler's weight, unhurried, climbing.
"There's a thing he keeps." Gregory says it all in one breath, like if he says it fast enough it won't have been him who said it. "In the study. Under a cloth. Nobody's supposed to know it's there and everybody knows it's there, because you can hear it some nights if the house is quiet enough, and the ones who go infor the long sessions come out different, and it isn't the sessions that do it, it's—" He stops. Swallows. "We call it Torment. Nobody knows why. It's just the name that's there when you think about it, like it came with the thing instead of from us."
"Torment," I repeat, and the word sits wrong in my mouth, too easy, like something that's been laid down a long time, waiting for someone to pick it up.
"I have to go," he says, and this time when he moves I let him, because I've got what the ten minutes bought me, and pushing further would cost him more than it's worth. He doesn't look back. His footsteps go fast and uneven on the stairs, a man outrunning his own honesty before it can catch up and cost him something.
Nobody says anything for a second. Then Felix, low: "Torment."
"That's what he said."
"That's not a word a grad student makes up for a pet project." Ren, flat behind me, and I don't have to turn around to know his jaw's gone tight. "That's a word that gets handed down. A word that already existed before anyone here started using it."
Atlas's hand finds the small of my back, warm, grounding. "We're out of time," he says, low. "Wheeler's coming back down."
We are. We scatter the way we've learned to scatter, unhurried on the surface and moving fast underneath it, and I carry the word back to my own room like a stone in my pocket, turning it over the whole walk home.
Torment.
***-
It's two in the morning and I can't sleep, so I do the reasonable thing and break into Wheeler's study.
Reasonable is a stretch. But I've been lying in my bed in Callister House for three hours with the bond aching low in four directions and the gouged words from the Reliquary burning behind my eyes—H. GRIMOIRE—1930—and every time I close my eyes the cold from the tomb comes up behind my sternum and sits there, patient, waiting.
You can't sleep with a thing like that waiting on you. So at some point lying still stopped being something I could do, and now I'm on the third-floor landing in my socks with my shoes in my hand, counting the cat.
The cat keeps the ground-floor corridor at night. I've watched it long enough to know its circuit, the slow figure-eight it walks from the front hall to the kitchen and back, glass eyes catching the dark. It doesn't come up here after the grad students go quiet. So the third floor is mine for a window, if I'm fast, and I am always fast now. The summer taught me that. You learn to move in the gaps or you don't get to keep moving at all.
Wheeler's door isn't locked. That's the thing about Wheeler: the door is just for show, so he never bothers locking it. The protections go on the things inside that matter, and anyway, he doesn't think anyone like me would dare.
The handle is the one clean thing in here. Everything else wears a coat of dust, the amber jars on the shelf and the books with their iron clasps and the covered cage in the corner that I am not looking at, that I will never look at, that breathes once while I'm standing there and makes the hair stand up on my whole body.
I'm not here for the cage. I'm here because I've been in this room before and I didn't finish, and finishing is the only thing that gets the cold to stop waiting.
I go to the shelf. Behind the textbooks—real ones, props, the kind a man buys by the foot to look like a scholar—there's a gap, and the gap is blocked by the amber jars, three of them, heavy and full of something I don't let my light land on.
I move them one at a time, slow, my heart going hard, setting each one down exactly where it stood so the dust ring matches when I put it back. And behind the jars, rolled and yellow and soft with age, there's a paper.
I take it to the desk and unroll it under my hand, and I forget, for a second, to be afraid.
It's a map.
