And there it is, dressed up and walked to the front of the room like a debutante: the thing I came here to make him offer me, offered to me like he thought of it himself. I let myself look pleased, because a girl who got what she wanted would look pleased, and I am a girl who got what she wanted. What I don't let him see is the rest of it—that I sat down at this desk meaning to take more out of him, session by session, than he will ever manage to take out of me. He thinks he's about to study a grimoire. He's going to spend his supplemental hours handingme everything he knows without once noticing whose education this really is.
But I can't leave with only the arrangement. The arrangement is the door; I came for what's behind it, and the only way to learn whether the door opens onto anything is to make him spend something to bring me back.
So I do the last thing, the thing I've been holding: I stand up. I gather my bag. I make it all the way tothank you, Professorand half a turn toward the door, like a girl who's satisfied, like a girl who isn't going to ask the next question—and I let him watch me almost leave.
"Miss Grey."
I stop. I don't turn all the way around. Over my shoulder is enough.
"You should understand what you're walking into," he says, and the warmth's gone thin now, because this is the part he doesn't want to give and is giving anyway, because a man who's just bought a season of supplemental sessions needs the season to start. "The work isn't only mine. The Well has an anchor. The deepest level—the Deep, under all the rest—it's where the whole of it ties off. Everything above it is just the rope."
I keep still. I keep my back to him. Easier for him to talk when he can't watch my face do anything.
"Catalina's been down there for weeks," he says. "Working it in the dark. Not drawing from it. Binding into it. Tying herself to the anchor, root and branch, so that when it's done there's no Well without her and no her without the Well." A dry breath. "Past any undoing. That's the word she used.Past any undoing.She means to finish before the deadline runs out, and she's nearly there."
The words land somewhere under my ribs and stay there, cold.
I memorize every word of it. The Deep. The anchor. Weeks.Past any undoing.I tuck it away whole, the way you carry water in cupped hands, careful not to spill a drop of it before I can set it down where the others will see.
And there's the other thing too, the thing he isn't saying. He's given me Catalina. He hasn't given me the grad students, or the column, or the cage breathing in the corner, or whatever name is at the bottom of his tally this week. He's handed me the one piece it serves him to hand over and kept the rest in his fist, because the rest is his, and a man like Wheeler only trades what buys him my return—not one inch more.
I take it anyway. I despise that I have to. He's the worst kind of man in the worst kind of building, and I just struck a bargain with him for the privilege of being studied across his desk. I'll have to come back here and sit in that chair and let him think he's reaching into me when it's the other way around.
The part of me that kept four men alive across half the country knows that this is exactly the kind of thing that keeps people alive. Knowing it doesn't make my skin sit right.
"Thank you, Professor," I say again, and this time I mean a different thing by it, and we both know which thing, and neither of us says so.
I'm at the door, my hand on the cold brass of it, when he speaks once more, and his voice has dropped the role entirely now: no warmth, no scholar, just a man telling another animal in the building where the danger is, because the danger is coming for him too.
"She'll move faster now," Wheeler says. "She knows someone's been in the building. The wards came back wrong twice and she doesn't believe in twice." He's already looking back down at the notebook, already a man alone in a room with a thing that breathes. "Whatever you and your boys are planning—and don't insult me, I know there's a plan—you don't have until the deadline. She'll force it before then. Weeks. Not months."
I open the door.
"Weeks," I say, to the corridor, to myself, to the count of names I keep, the one that started with Enya and has only ever grown.
Then I close it behind me, soft, and I go down the back stair the way I came, past the room where the cat works the ground-floor hall, out into the long manicured dark of a campus that measures everything it can reach and has never once been able to measure me. My hands are shaking by the time I hit the cold air outside. I let them, now that there's no one left to see. All the way home to my own watched room, I carry the word in my cupped hands and don't spill it.
Weeks.
21
BRITTANY
There's exactly one corner of Callister House that's mine, and I'm sitting in it with the door shut and the music low: a doom record I've had since I was sixteen, a single chord taking nine seconds to finish arriving. Loud would sayBrittany is upset.This volume says nothing.
Herbert's working a web across the top corner of his tank. I watch him for a while because watching him is restful and because the alternative is the summons on the desk.
It's the same summons Ren warned me about.You are required to appear before the review board.The seal, the soft phrase—failure to demonstrate progress consistent with placement—dressed up nice, like something a person could survive walking into. I know better now. I know whatroute to Well Authority intake, same disposition as the othersmeans, because Ren told me what it means, standing in this kitchen with a form he'd already rewritten in his hand. I know where the others went. I've felt the empty place in this house where Enya Halstone used to hum over a kettle, same as everyone in it has, and none of us said her name out loud until Ren finally did.
He fixed the record that same night. As far as the school knows, I'm already reviewed. Already closed. A finished matter nobody looks at twice. That's supposed to be the end of it.
I unlatch the tank and let Herbert climb onto the back of my hand. He settles on my knuckles, slow and deliberate, an ounce of certainty parked on my skin—about as close to comfort as I let myself get.
"Don't," I tell him, because he hasn't done anything yet, but I can feel him about to be right about something.
Here's the thing I keep turning over. Catalina wants Everly. Everyone in this house knows it, even the people who won't say her name for it. But Everly's watched, and warded, and surrounded by four men who'd take this campus apart stone by stone before they let anyone near her, and Catalina hasn't found her way through that yet. So she takes what she can get instead. Enya. Whoever got logged before Enya that nobody thought to grieve because nobody knew to look. Me, maybe, if Ren hadn't gotten to that drawer first. Small takings, while she waits for the real one. Consolation prizes. I'll be ugly about it and call them what they are: snacks, taken off a girl nobody would miss, because the review board sounds so much better than that.
That's the reason I'm not sleeping tonight. Not my grade.
