My nose starts to bleed. Warm on my lip, then my chin. I leave it. Moving a hand means moving the circle, and the circle is the one thing in this room I'm not allowed to drop.
"There," Brittany says. Flat. "Got one."
"Hold it," Helena says. "Don't pull. Let her come to you."
The working narrows. Everything I'm feeding the ring funnels to a single thread, fine as a hair, hunting toward something the stone half-keeps and can't quite hold. The candles gutter low.
Beside me, Felix's breath goes audible. Counting himself through branches I'll never see. It hitches—once—on one he doesn't like.
"Felix."
"Keep going," he says, too even. "Don't stop on my account."
"Steady," Helena says. To me. Only to me.
I'm steady. The blood ticks off my chin onto the stone—once, twice—loud as a clock in all that silence. The thread draws tight.
And I follow it down. Not with my body. With the part of me that holds all four colors. Down toward the smudge that used to be a person, reaching the way you reach for a name on the tip of your tongue, almost there, almost?—
—and the floor reaches back.
It isn't the thread that wakes it. It's me. The warmth I've put into the stone.
I feel the Well find me through the very magic I built to question it. A pull from below. Vast, unhurried, coming up through the open circle like water through a crack you didn't know was in the hull.
No chains yet. Just attention.
The enormous, patient attention of the thing I've been sleeping above since September—turning over in the dark, finding the heat I've spilled into the floor, knowing me by it.
It comes up the cord at the back of my throat. Up through the soles of my feet, through my wrists where they press the ring, into the held note, one low all-consuming tone singing just behind my ear now. And the note becomes a hand. And the hand closes around something low in my belly, and pulls.
My knees go soft first. I don't decide that. They just do, an inch of give at the joint, my weight tipping toward the floor before I catch it.
Gently. Like coaxing a child onto a step.
Down is easy. Down is deep. Come and see.
And here is the thing I'll carry out of this room and never put down:
I want to go.
It isn't a want I chose. It's the pull your body gets leaning off a high ledge, nothing to do with what you'd pick, if picking were the part of you in charge. It lives in the meat under choosing, lower than thought, lower than fear.
My breath's gone shallow and fast, four quick pulls that don't reach the bottom of my lungs. My jaw's unclenched. I didn't do that either.
The Well opens beneath me, and it's cold, and it's endless, and it knows my name. And the part of me that's been alone since September—in a house that counts my breathing, four men hung off my sternum that I can feel and can't touch—that part leans toward it before I can tell it not to. My spine curves withit, an actual degree of lean, my weight coming forward onto my palms.
It would be so easy. The cord goes where the cord is pulled. I'm already pouring into the circle. It would take nothing—less than nothing, a loosening, ayes—to pour into the rest. To stop being the one who holds. To be held instead, all the way down, forever, by something that finally wants the whole of me at once.
My hands slide toward the edge of the ring.
I feel my own fingers do it. I try to stop them. I tell them to stop, a command that has worked every single time I've ever given it, my whole life, and it doesn't reach past my wrists now. Some far-off part of me is screaming at the rest of me to grab the floor, grab anything, and nothing answers. My fingers keep going. An inch. Another.
"Everly."
Ren's voice, from the far side of a great distance. His hand clamps over my wrist, hard enough to bruise, and I'm grateful for the ache of it before I even feel the sting, because pain is at least mine. He hauls back. I feel him put his whole weight into it, feel his boots find the stone, and my arm doesn't come with him. Not all the way. Like pulling against something bolted to the floor.
"Ren—" Felix's voice, wrecked. "Ren, she's not stopping?—"
