We've all been doing it. Slipping the leash one at a time and feeling each other do it. Some nights the worst part isn't the burn. It's lying in Vitae Hall feeling the bond go warm and bright across campus and knowing one of the others reached her and I couldn't follow.
I know exactly what that's like to be on the other end of. So does he. We don't talk about it. There isn't a way to talk about it that doesn't end in the corridor with the air going wrong, and we both know it, so we keep it behind our teeth.
The other heart is steadier. Slow, deliberate, running underneath a quiet that most people read as nothing and is the opposite of nothing.
Brittany's at the table with the summons in front of her, face up. She's the only person I've ever met who put the thing she's afraid of where she can see it instead of where she can't.
"—not the point," she's saying, flat, to Callum, who is standing very still by the counter and losing, though you'd have to know him to see it. "The point is I don't know if it's real. If I'm actually failing. If there's something wrong with my magic that they're right about and I've just been telling myself a story." She turns the summons a quarter inch with one finger, squaring it to the table edge. "I can't know that without going. So I'm going."
"You're not going," Callum says.
"You don't get to?—"
"You're not going." He doesn't raise his voice. Callum's certainty doesn't need volume; it's the coldest thing in any room he stands in, and right now it's cracking, just slightly, in a way only I'd catch—a hair of strain in the pulse under all that frost. He's not winning because he can't tell her why. He knows the shape of what these reviews are. He can't make himself say it out loud to her face, and without the saying, all he has isno,andnohas never once worked on Brittany Leigh.
I cross the room and put the form down on the table next to the summons.
Brittany looks at it. Looks at me.
"If you go to that review," I say, "you won't come back the same."
I don't explain. There's no version of the explanation that doesn't require me to say what I felt thirty seconds ago in front of a covered cloth, and I'm not saying that, not tonight, not until I know more than the shape of it. I just let her read my face, and Brittany is very good at reading faces, because she's spent her whole life being told her own gives away nothing.
She reads it. Her pulse doesn't spike—it slows, which is its own kind of tell, a person going still and careful around a thingshe's just understood is real. She doesn't ask me how I know. That's the gift of her. Anyone else in this house would ask, and I'd have to lie, and she knows that, so she doesn't.
Callum lets out a breath he's been holding since before I came down. The frost loosens half a degree.
Brittany looks at the altered form a long moment. Then she says, in the voice she uses for stating the weather, "This is about Helena, isn't it?"
Nobody answers her.
Callum doesn't deny it. I don't deny it. The silence sits in the middle of the kitchen table next to the two pieces of paper, and the longer it sits there the truer it gets.
Brittany nods slowly, like we've confirmed something. In a sense we have.
Something moves at her wrist. It comes out of her sleeve unhurried, dark and deliberate, and settles onto the back of her hand right over the place where, if she were one of us, the mark would be: Herbert, walking out into the lamplight to take stock of the room. The tarantula turns by degrees until it's facing the two papers on the table, and goes still, regarding them with the flat attention of something that worked out the answer some time ago and has only been waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
Brittany strokes one finger down his back without looking at him.
"Yeah," she says, to no one, to all of us. "That's what I thought."
The mark burns on the back of my hand. Above us, the house feels the shape of things shift in its bones, and something in it doesn't sit right—one matter closed that should still be open, one door locked that never is, and somewhere two floors up a warmth asleep and unmarked that the wardens still can't find a way to measure.
Patient, the house. It's been patient for a hundred years.
So have the things it keeps.
19
ATLAS
The mirror's cracked again. I did it sometime in the last hour and I haven't looked since, because looking means seeing my own face do whatever ugly shit it's doing, and I'd rather not.
Fulmen Hall is a cage they built to fit my worst instincts. Scorch marks up the far wall where lightning I didn't ask for went looking for ground. The ceiling above the rack is black in a spreading bruise. Every Tempest student who passes through here notices how hard I'm breathing and how high the charge is sitting, and reports it the way you'd report a leak, and the mark on the back of my hand does the rest of the snitching they can't. Known, all the way down. That's the cage. Not the walls. The watching. I'd burn the whole building down before I got used to it.
The conductor sits on the bench beside me. My hand keeps drifting toward it—not a threat, a habit. I press my palm flat to the bench instead and wait for the next thing, jaw locked so tight I'll be feeling it in my teeth tomorrow.
The next thing is her.
