Everywhere else on campus the wardens' working runs under everything, that low red tang laid into the stone, the penny taste running out through the leashed animals and the marked hands and back again. It's always there. I've stopped tasting it the way you stop tasting your own house.
The building has none of it. A blank, quiet place in the middle of all that watching, the one stretch of ground where the marks on four hands would go dark the instant they crossed into it.
The end of the year, she said. And a frightened face I can't put a name to, waiting somewhere on the far end of it.
I close my hand around the cut on my palm and keep walking, and somewhere underneath me, under all of it, something turns over in its long sleep and knows my name.
13
EVERLY
It takes three disciplines and a lie to get four marked men into one kitchen.
Ren's blood is telling the wardens he's asleep in his bed at Sanguis. He showed me how this morning, two fingers pressed to the inside of his own wrist, his eyes going distant while he taught his pulse to keep a story without him. Callum left a piece of himself at Ossium, a shadow that turns pages and crosses a lit window and looks, from outside, exactly like a man who never went anywhere. Atlas has a storm sitting low over the whole east end of campus, thick enough that the wards lose the edges of things underneath it.
And Felix is somewhere in the odds, walking the night down a branch where five students don't gather in a house they're forbidden to gather in, holding that branch open with both hands so the rest of us can stand in it.
It still costs them. I can see it costing them.
The marks are burning. All four, low and constant, the whole time—Callister House doesn't want them here and says so against the backs of their hands, a heat that doesn't stop because they walked through the door anyway.
Callum keeps his on the cool marble of the counter like that helps. Atlas hasn't acknowledged his once, which is how I know it's bad. They came anyway. They sat down at my kitchen table with the wards screaming into their skin and they're waiting for me to talk, and the least I can do is talk.
So I put it on the table.
The photographs first, fanned out the way Felix fans his cards, four of them, edges overlapping. Then the map, unfolded along creases gone soft. Then the last one on top of everything—the building. Brick the color of a healed bruise, three windows dark, a door that doesn't match the rest of it because it was added later, when whatever they do in there needed a stronger one.
"This is where it happens," I say. "The marks. The deaths. All of it goes back to this."
And then I tell them. All of it. The part I've been carrying alone since the night I found the first thread and pulled.
I don't dress it up. I just lay it down, piece by piece, the way you set out something heavy you've been holding too long and your arms are shaking by the end: the dates, the names, the way the school's tidy little record of accidents and overdoses and girls who simply withdrew stops looking like bad luck the second you stack them against each other.
How the grimoire girls don't die at random. How somebody is keeping a count.
When I finish, nobody says anything.
Four men, and not one of them reaches for a quip or a counter or a reason I'm wrong. The kitchen is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator and the rain Atlas is holding overhead and the small sound Ren makes when he breathes out slow. They're taking it in.
I can watch it land on each of them differently: Callum going still in the way that means he's already three moves downa board I can't see, Atlas's jaw working, Ren's eyes moving over the photographs like he's reading something written under them, Felix not looking at the table at all, looking at me, because Felix already knew the shape of this and was only ever waiting for the rest of them to catch up.
I should feel lighter. I've wanted to set this down for weeks.
Instead the other thing comes up, the thing I've kept folded smallest, and I make myself feel it because hiding from it would be worse.
Enya.
If I'd put this on a table a month ago—if I'd trusted any of them with it when I first started to suspect—there'd be a fifth chair that wasn't empty.
Enya laughed with her whole face. Enya lent me a sweater the first cold week and told me to keep it. Enya is a date on a list now, in my own handwriting, because I was so busy being careful that I was quiet right up until quiet got her killed.
The lump comes up hard in my throat and I let it sit there. I owe her that much. I don't get to set this down and feel relieved. Keeping it quiet cost something, and what it cost was Enya, and I keep my eyes on the photographs until I can breathe around it.
"Everly." Ren says it low. He's seen it cross my face. He doesn't tell me it isn't my fault, which is the kindest thing he could do, because we both know I wouldn't believe him and he won't insult me by trying.
"I know," I say. "I'm okay. Keep going. We have to keep going."
Callum stands up.
