After, I can't get the cards. They're across the room on the desk and my left hand is the burned one and I don't reach for them, and the not-reaching is so strange I just lie there and let it be strange. The cards still. My hand still. The future still, for another minute or two, dealt and face-down and politely waiting.
She turns my hand over in the dark to look at the mark.
"This is going to scar," she says.
"Good. I'll keep it." I mean it. I want one thing on my body that's about her that the future can't unwrite. "Souvenir."
"Felix." She's quiet a moment, thumb tracing the cooled edge of the burn, careful. "Don't do the odds thing right now. Just—answer me. Are you okay?"
I think about lying. The grin's right there, it's always right there, I could have it up in half a second and she'd let me, that's the mercy of her, she'd let me hide if I asked her to with my face.
I don't pick it up.
"If I die tomorrow," I tell her, and I keep my voice as light as I can make it, the way you'd mention it might rain, "at least I was honest about this."
Her hand goes still on mine. "You won't die," she says. Fierce. Like she can stack the odds too, just by saying it hard enough.
I smile, and I aim it past her, at the branches she can't see, the long bright unlikely ones where she's right, where I make it, where there's a version of next year with both of us in it and the cards quiet and my hand a scar instead of an open wound. There aren't many. I've counted. But they're there, and I choose them, the way I always choose hers, and I stay in them as long as I can.
I don't say the other word.
I never say the other word.
But I hold her burned into my hand until the sun comes up, and I don't run a single branch off the morning, and that's as close as I've ever come.
27
EVERLY
The whole campus is screaming at once, and that's the only reason this works.
The harvest, though there's not a soul up in that noise who'd call it that. On the rolls it's the year-end review: every grimoire-touched student on Nyxhaven's books called in tonight to have their magic weighed against the record, most of them shuffled through the wardens' hall above ground and never told there's anything below it worth knowing about. Only mine has the other line under it. Only mine saysReliquary.The result, even so, is the loudest the school has been since I came to it. Every sophomore in four cohorts funneled through one building in one night makes for its own kind of chaos: cover I didn't have to build, only borrow. Bodies on every path. Wardens shouting names off clipboards into the dark. A line of frat boys stacked three deep at the wardens' hall doors, somebody's familiar shrieking out a high window over all of it, the bells in the chapel tower marking an hour nobody's listening to. It's the ragged end of the year, finals hanging over all of them, and spring's turned mean here—a week of false warmth and then a last cold snap come back hard, a late frost silvering the grass after dark. Thequad was green and soft a week ago. Tonight it's gone hard as iron underfoot, and the iron rings.
Noise like this is a wall, and you can walk a great many things through a wall of noise that you could never carry through a quiet room.
So we walk them through.
I have my sanctioned way in, which is the cruel joke sitting at the center of all of it. My review. My name is on the clipboard the same as everyone else's, and there is no warden alive who'll stop a girl from going down to her own weighing. So I go, chin up, hands steady, none of my Tupperware optimism in evidence anywhere on my face, and Helena goes beside me, because Helena Grimoire knows the Deep the way I know the taste of a spell turning wrong—from the inside, from a long time ago, from having stood in it while it was being built.
The doors take us, and the marble swallows the noise in a single breath. One step and the screaming overhead thins to a hum, then to nothing, then to the sound of my own pulse in my ears. The entry hall is bigger than it has any right to be, vaulted dark climbing up past where Helena's candle can reach it, and our footsteps come back at us off stone worn smooth by feet that stopped existing before this country had a name. Candlewax and cold stone and underneath both of them something older, something with no warmth in it that has never once had warmth in it. The penny taste isn't here yet. It's waiting further down. I can feel the place where it lives the way you can feel a bruise before you press it.
"Reliquary first," Helena says, low, her voice eaten by the stone before it reaches the walls. "Then we keep going down."
We spent the two days since that fight in Concordia turning the argument into a plan, and the plan into something closer to a checklist. Break Catalina's working before it finishes. Get Nell out before the next mark comes due. Get everyone back up thestairs breathing. Five people, five jobs, nobody doing the job that isn't theirs, because after that night, after what it cost to get everyone in the same room agreeing on anything, none of us had the stomach left to argue it twice.
I watch the others peel off as we split, each one into the job that's his and no one else's. We can't all come down through the one door I've got and trust that nothing comes up behind us. Every entrance left unwatched is a door Catalina can shut on us from outside. Every exit left unwatched is a door we don't get to use once we're the ones who need to be running. So we cover them—every way in, every way back out—because the only thing worse than getting caught going down is finding out, too late, that there's no going back up.
Callum takes the family entrance, the low black door under the east stair, and the other three go in behind him. There's no version of tonight where Atlas Knox or Ren Ashford or Felix Ferrix stands in a line for a review that was never sent to them. A warden would spot that in a heartbeat. My name gets me through the front with a clipboard and a lie about why I'm smiling. Theirs is a door with no list on it at all, because the lockwork down here was bled by Bolingbrokes and it answers to nothing else. I watched him lay his palm flat to a panel of cold iron in September and watched the iron decide, slow and grudging, that it knew him. His blood does the asking. Tonight his blood is the key, and it's the same door all of us mean to use again on the way out, because however this ends, it isn't ending with a warden checking names at a front desk.
Atlas and Ren peel off down a side passage into the Reliquary itself, hunting whatever's watching down here—and it isn't the same magic the wardens wear us with outside. We've known since September that the marks die anywhere in Concordia; Catalina's tracking doesn't reach this far. But something built to guard what this building guards would never have trusted thesame magic that fails at the door. This is older. Its own watching, sewn blood-deep into its own walls, answering to whoever built it and not to any warden topside. Find it, and it's Catalina herself who knows we're here, not some warden with a clipboard. Break it, and even she goes blind, which is the only way any of us walk back out of this building without her soldiers waiting at every door we've got.
It's their job because it's nobody else's. Ren can feel a working before he can see it, his blood answering blood magic the way mine answers a grimoire, and once he's found it Atlas can overload it faster than anything down here could reset itself. Atlas's storm is banked so low it's barely a prickle on my forearms through the dark, which means he's holding it on purpose, which means it's bad. Ren moves like he's done this a hundred times, and three of them hurt.
Felix takes the Sepulchre corridor. The choke point. Every approach down here narrows to one mouth, and a man who can read the odds standing in a doorway is worth ten men who can only stand in it. It's the same mouth we'll all have to come back through when this is over, and he's the reason that door stays ours the whole time we're down here. He didn't make a single joke on the way in. That's how I know to be afraid.
And Brittany?—
Brittany is stationed at the stair back up, the one that spits out into the wardens' hall and the ordinary noise of the review, because somebody has to watch the door that leads back to the world the rest of the campus still thinks we're standing in. I don't see her go. That's the entire point of Brittany. She folds herself into the kind of blind spot nobody thinks to guard, a girl with a clipboard and an expression of profound boredom, and the building simply forgets to look at her. If anyone comes down after us before we're ready, she's the only warning we're going to get. It's a kind of magic the wardens don't have a stylus for.
