The stair she built to swallow me becomes the way the rest of them slip in behind me.
"You walk down for your review," Helena says. "They walk down behind you, in the cover you make. And somewhere on that stair it stops being her trap and starts being ours." She looks at me. "If your nerve holds."
"My nerve holds."
Over the map—the real one, the 1934 one with four levels where the school admits to one—Callum's hand comes to rest on the route, and then it moves, and it isn't the map he turns. It's my hand. He turns my hand palm-up under his and traces a slow circle at the inside of my wrist with his thumb while we both keep our eyes very studiously on the Sepulchre corridor, like the route is the only thing happening at this table. Across from us Atlas watches him do it, and very deliberately, one at a time, cracks his knuckles.
The mark, I think. Three of them sitting here with burns on their hands for the privilege of being jealous in a kitchen. We are going to walk into the worst place on this campus on purpose, the one place none of them can feel me, and they're squabbling over a thumb on a wrist.
I tuck the want of it away—the awful, disqualifying warmth of being fought over—with everything else I'm not going to look at tonight.
From the corner, Brittany sets her too-strong coffee down. She hasn't looked up from Herbert, working a slow circuit across the back of her hand.
"I'm coming," she says.
Callum starts to say something and she talks over it, flat, unbothered, the way she says everything.
"If I get caught, it just looks like I cracked. Failing sophomore, finally lost it, wandered somewhere I shouldn't." She lifts two fingers off the table, the entire shrug. "You can't argue with that. Nobody guards against the girl they've already written off."
Herbert pauses on her knuckle, considering the room.
He, I notice, doesn't argue with it either.
25
EVERLY
The fight has four sides and every one of them is about me.
I feel it before any of them open their mouths: four threads pulled tight in my chest, four kinds of fear pouring up them at once. The awful part is that I can tell them apart now.
The better part of a year ago they were strangers I couldn't have told you the difference between except by which one had most recently tried to ruin my night. Now I could pick each one out blind.
Callum's fear comes cold and close, a hand closing around something. Atlas's prickles over my skin, the charge before a strike. Felix's flickers at the very edge of my sight, gone before I can turn my head to it. Ren's just sinks, low and steady, copper settling on the back of my tongue, and that's the one that scares me.
We're in Concordia Hall because it's the only place left that doesn't tell on us. Everywhere else, the marks burn: the wardens' little half moons sunk into the back of every hand but mine, broadcasting where they are and that they're near me, that thebond is reaching. Here the hall swallows it. Here they can stand in one room with me and not set the alarms off all over campus.
But the marks still ache for the nearness. I can see it in the way Atlas keeps flexing his hand, in the dull throb I catch off Ren's thread like a low tooth-ache. They each paid to be here, and the wardens only take one kind of payment: it hurts. It's hurting all of them right now, just to stand close to me.
And tomorrow we go into the Deep.
The hall knows it, too. I don't have a better word for what Concordia Hall does thanknow.It isn't warded the way the frat houses are warded, with their tidy wardens and their leashes; it's older than that, older than the wardens, and it holds the bond the way a deep well holds a dropped stone—takes it in, gives nothing back, keeps the secret because keeping secrets is the only thing it's ever been asked to do.
The candle Helena lit when we came in burns straight up without a flicker. The dust on the mantel hasn't been disturbed since whoever last had a conversation in here they couldn't have anywhere else. The hall has held a lot of those, I think. It's holding this one now, patient as stone, counting nothing, telling no one.
Tomorrow, under cover of the review, when the whole campus is moving and loud and watching the wrong things, they mean to go down past the Reliquary and the Hollows, past the Sepulchre, to the bottom of all of it, and break Catalina's working before she can finish binding herself into the Well, and pull Nell off the list before the next mark comes due. One window. One night. We've gone over it a hundred times. We have not, it turns out, gone over the part where everyone is this afraid and pretending the fear is a strategy.
We are not going over it calmly.
"She's not going down there." Callum says it like it's already decided, like he's reading it off a ledger. His shadow has pooledout from his feet across the old floorboards, dark and certain, the way it does when he's holding himself very still on top of something that isn't. "She nearly let it take her in the séance. I felt it. We all felt it." His eyes come to me and they are not cold, that's the thing nobody believes about Callum—they're never cold when it's me. "The Well wants you more than it wants any of us. I'm not walking you toward the one thing in that building that's hungry for you specifically."
"And you breaking the working yourself?" Atlas is already up off the windowsill, and the air in the room tilts toward him, that pre-storm lightness that makes the hair on my arms lift. "You can't. None of us can. It's keyed to her grimoire. She's the only one who can unpick it and youknowthat, Callum, you've known it for a week." He drags a hand back through his hair. "So this isn't about safety. Say the real thing. This is about you needing to be the one who decides where she stands."
"That's not?—"
"That's exactly it." Atlas takes a step in and the floorboards seem to lean toward him. "You spent the whole summer telling me to trust her. To stop deciding things for her. You said it to me in a motel parking lot at four in the morning with your hands shaking, Callum, I remember it. And now we're one night out from your mother becoming the worst thing in that building and suddenly you're the one drawing the line around where Everly gets to stand." His voice drops, rough. "I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared. I'm saying scared isn't a plan. It's just you, deciding."
"And what would you have her do?" Callum's control cracks for exactly one word and then closes back over it. "Walk down into a building that wants to swallow her, and trust that the four of us will be fast enough? You felt it in the séance same as I did."
