I greeted the raven. We have an understanding.
you didn't name it
I didn't name it.
good. Herbert says don't name it.
Tell Herbert I appreciate the input.
he's a spider. he doesn't have input. he just looked at me when I said your name.
A pause. Then:
Catalina came by Bellamy Hall this morning. Asking about summer.
I sit up straighter.What did you say?
That I hadn't heard from you since June. She seemed to believe me.
Did she?
She smiled,Brittany sends.Which means I've no idea.
I put the phone face-down on the mattress.
Above me: footsteps. Slow and deliberate, one end of the room to the other. A stop. Then the same path again, the same length, the same pause at the same spot. Back and forth, back and forth, like someone who is haunted or hunted by something, maybe both.
After a while, it stops.
I get up and go find the kitchen.
Worn countertops, dusty open shelves, and a beaten up kettle grab my attention. The room smells like gas and burnt toast and the cold that lives in stone floors, the kind that finds you straight through your socks. I'm filling the kettle at the sink when a door opens behind me.
One of the grad students walks through. He has dark circles under his eyes and a thick notebook wedged under one arm. He crosses to the tap without looking at me and fills a glass, and his hand isn't quite steady doing it, the water trembling at the rim. He drinks it standing at the sink, slow and careful, like he doesn't trust himself not to drop it if he walks away.
"Hi," I say.
He looks over. Something behind his eyes takes a second to find me. "Oh. You're the new one."
"Everly."
He nods at that the way the girl on the stairs did. "They keep the good kettle in the third cabinet."
"There's a second kettle?"
"Wheeler brings equipment sometimes. For the sessions." Something moves through his face. His brows tense and then relax, like he was confused for a moment only to forget why. "Anyway. Third cabinet."
He goes back upstairs without finishing his water, one hand riding the rail the whole way, taking the steps like he's not sure he'll make it up them.
I find the newer kettle in the third cabinet, an electric one instead of beaten stainless steel, so I plug it in and turn it on. I try very hard not to think about living in a house full of people who seem uninterested or even incapable of standing up straight, much less socializing or, dare I say it, becoming new friends and allies. I stand at the window over the sink while the water heats, and I look out the window at the building next door.
Three stories of stone, the same Victorian gothic bones as Callister House but older, more deliberate, like Callister House is the copy and that's the original handwriting. Arched windows, all of them dark. A door banded in iron. Carved stonework over the lintel, geometric and old. The gap between the buildings is narrow enough that from this sink I'm closer to it than anyone out on the path will ever be.
The kettle clicks off. I make my tea and carry it to the front window, because I don't remember that building being on the map.
The afternoon foot traffic makes me realize something about the building: no one else seems to be able to see it. Three Mors sophomores pass first, silver-threaded jackets, deep in conversation, and as they come alongside the annex, their eyes focus past it. Two Tempest students do it next. Then a mixedgroup of four. A freshman on her own, earbuds in, drifts to the far edge of the path and around the building without ever once looking at it.
No one walks into the building itself. No one stops at its doors, or is looking out of its windows, which are dark. And of all the students who walk past it, none of them take the short way past. They all take the path, and as I watch them, I catch the slide of chaos magic at the corner of my eye, changing the odds as they walk past, glimpsed and gone. None of them see it.
