"The building won't tell you," she said. "The building's the thing that took them."
"So we don't ask the building."
"We ask the missing." She didn't look up from the spider. "Forgetting isn't clean. The chimera eats what they leave behind, but it doesn't lick the plate. There's a stain in the stone where a person used to be." A beat. "And a stain can be read. If you know the shape of the working that smeared it."
"And you know the shape."
"I've read things I wasn't supposed to." She finally looked at me. "Don't ask me how it felt to learn this one."
I didn't. I've stopped asking. She comes back up from the records nobody's meant to read with a smell on her now: old paper, and under the paper, something like a cellar that floods.
So we do it the only way that's left to us.
By candlelight, deep enough in Concordia that the marks die at the threshold and a working this size won't light up every tether on campus like a struck match. Down into the Reliquary, past the archive, where twelve generations of the dead are logged in a hand too close to Callum's. Down past interment, where the recent blood is soaked so far into the walls that Ren stopped on the stair and put his palm flat to the stone and didn't say what he heard.
Into a low room off the Hollows.
The air tastes of cold tallow and older dust. And the wardens' hum—that low red line laid through the whole school, the flat penny taste I've learned to stop noticing the way you stop hearing your own house—just isn't there. No hum down here. No taste. A silence with edges to it.
The dark sits against the candlelight like water against the hull of a boat. Waiting for the light to lose.
Five of us in the circle. Two at its edge.
Ren on my left, his hand near mine and not touching, his blood sense already gone out ahead of all of us into the stone. I can feel the edge of what it costs him, a tightness coming down the thread, his pulse a half-step too quick.
Felix on my right, the deck flat on his knee. Still. Actually still, which frightens me more than anything the dark is doing, because Felix is only still when the odds in front of him have stopped being a game.
Brittany across from me, building the structure low and even, the Mors shape of it recited like a grocery list. A grocery list is the only voice she'll let a thing this heavy have.
And Helena at the rim of the light. A hundred and twenty years old in a dead girl's sweater, the sleeves shoved up over scars that never closed in a century, guiding the whole of it with two fingers.
Atlas and Callum hold the door, one at either side of it, because Helena wouldn't let this happen without someone watching the only way out. Atlas hasn't moved in ten minutes, not a shift of weight, not a breath I can hear. Callum's shadow lies flat and thin along the threshold, listening for the house the way the rest of us are listening for the dead.
"You hold," she says. "You do not reach. The reaching is hers." A tilt of her head at Brittany. "You are the door, child. Doors do not walk through themselves. Tell me you understand the difference."
"Hold it open. Don't go in."
"Don't go in." Something in how she says it puts a cold finger to the back of my neck.
"You went in. Once."
"I did." She doesn't soften it. "It cost me the next ninety-six years, four feet above the thing you're kneeling on. So when I tell you to hold and not reach, I am not being careful. I am being specific."
I tuck the fear somewhere I can't get to it, because I need my hands steady. I set my palms inside the ring Brittany scored into the floor.
And I let the grimoire come up.
It arrives the same as always. Four colors braided to one cord at the back of my throat. The cold-coin taste flooding under my tongue: blood and metal, and something below metal. A pressure in my chest like a held note that's gone on too long.
I pour it into the circle. The circle drinks. Every candle leans its flame toward the center at once, all of them bowing to a window that opened somewhere none of us can see.
"Good," Helena murmurs. "Now hold."
Brittany's voice drops a half-step. The structure catches. Holds. Pulls.
The cold comes first, thinner than the room's cold, with intent in it. It goes past skin and into the teeth and moves in. I feel it arrive and don't flinch.
Then Ren's reach comes back over me, copper blooming bright on my tongue. I'm close enough that I get the overflow of what he's getting, and what he's getting is grief soaked into mortar. A dozen people scrubbed down to smudges. Names worn to a grease mark.
