Above us, the ceiling wears the twin of it, the same ring etched into the vault directly over the platform, so that the woman between them floats in the exact dead center of the working like an insect pinned through both wings.
The penny taste ghosts up the back of my throat before I've decided to reach. My grimoire knows this. Not the way you know a fact—the way you know a smell from a house you lived in as a child. It recognizes the binding the way a key recognizes the one lock it was cut for, and it wants, very badly, to turn.
"Everly." Callum's voice is low and even and meansstop."You don't know what undoing it does to her."
"No," I say. "But I know what leaving it does."
A body held in the air with its head wrenched back, its eyes aimed at a ruin in the ceiling, its fingers moving the way they've moved since before my grandmother was born, however long that's actually been. I'm not going to be the next person who looks at her and decides it's easier not to see.
I set both hands to the stone and reach.
It doesn't come out of me like one thing. It comes out braided.
The storm goes first, because the storm is the part of me that wants to hit something, and I've learned to let it lead when I need a door. It runs down my arms in a current that leaves the hair there standing, into the floor, and finds the iron the sigils are fused into—solid, old, no chisel on earth getting through it—and I don't try to get through it. I bring the storm down the way Atlas brought it down on a frat-house lawn the night I learned what he was: not as a flicker but as a strike, a single white line driven through the iron at its weakest grain, and the metal splits where nothing should be able to split it. The sound goes throughmy teeth, and the sharp smell of ozone floods the dark. The whole floor flinches.
Then the blood, and the blood is the part I hate.
Because this floor isfullof it. A century of it, soaked down into the stone the way the cold is soaked into the walls of Callister House, old sacrificial blood, the kind that was given here unwilling, by people who didn't get to keep their names. I don't want to touch it. I touch it anyway.
I call it up out of the floor the way Ren calls a pulse up to the surface of a wrist, and it answers, and it is so much, and for one terrible second I can feel all of them at once—every person who bled into this room to keep her hanging in the air—and then I turn what they gave into the thing it was always going to be turned into, and it comes up through me as power, and I have to swallow against the back of my throat to keep from being sick.
I'm sorry,I think at them, whoever they were.I'm using you to undo it. It's the only kind word I've got.
Third is the shadow, and the shadow is patient. The storm split the iron; now the cracks are thin and want to close. So I pour the dark into them the way Callum pours his into a doorframe, and I hold them open—not forcing, just refusing to let them heal—a wedge of nothing keeping the wound from sealing.
And last, under all of it, the chaos. Felix's color. I don't strike with it and I don't force with it. Ilean.Somewhere out in front of me are a thousand versions of this moment, and in most of them the binding holds and she hangs there for another century, and in a very few of them it gives, and I find the few, the way you find the one loose stitch in a hem, and I push the whole moment toward them, gentle and steady, the smallest pressure in the world laid against the part of chance that can still be moved.
The sigils start to go out.
Not all at once. One at a time, in a slow circle, dying outward from where my palm meets the stone, the nearest first, the light going out of it like a coal stepped on, then the next, then the next, the ring unmaking itself in order, like tumblers giving way inside a lock. The old metal floods so thick across my tongue I can taste nothing else.
The pull lands low in my belly and stays there, hooked, dragging,good—and that's the part I'm not going to say out loud to anyone, not ever, the part where it feels good. Where every discipline in me is doing the one thing it was made to do, all four at once, and there is not a single other person alive who could stand in this room and make this floor let go.
I watch it happen. I have to. They're my hands.
Somewhere behind me Atlas says my name, low, a question—Everly—the way you say it when you can see somebody carrying more than they should and you don't have any way to take it off them. I don't answer. I can't spare the breath.
The four strains are running through me at once and the place where they cross, just under my ribs, has started to ache like a muscle worked past where it wanted to go. Sweat at my hairline. My knees on cold stone. The taste so thick now I'm breathing it.
One more,I tell myself, the way I tell myself everything when it's bad.Just the last one. You can do the last one.
The last floor sigil dies under my palm. And in the same breath—the very same one, like the two were never two things—the ruin in the ceiling goes dark, the whole twin ring above us guttering out at once.
The air lets go of her.
She drops.
She falls like a dropped coat, like there's nothing left in her to fall—and Ren is already under her, catching a body that weighs almost nothing now, her head lolling down off the crank herneck has been set in for a century, her bare feet swinging. She makes no sound at all hitting his chest. No gasp. No cry. Like her body forgot decades ago that falling is supposed to hurt.
Her palms are dark. I see them go past his arm: the old scars on them split and weeping again, blood smeared across his sleeve where he holds her, and Ren doesn't say a word about the blood on him, just adjusts his grip and takes her weight and lets her be carried.
Her eyes are open.
They drag down off the ruined ceiling—slow, like the muscles forgot the way—and travel across the four of them, and find me. Up close she is the most wrong thing I've ever seen and the most awake. Young the way a photograph is young. A hundred and twenty-some years old behind eyes that look maybe twenty-five and have not blinked enough.
She can't stand. She doesn't try. She looks at each of us in turn, taking inventory the way I take inventory, and I recognize the habit and it makes the hair go up on my arms. Then she looks at Callum. Just Callum. And she says his family's name the way you read a verdict off a page.
"Bolingbroke."
