"Got it," I tell Atlas, even and bright, and turn the page.
He pulls back. The cold place in my chest where Callum is eases by a degree. Wheeler, who saw all of it and wrote none of it down, asks Felix whether he'd care to demonstrate a Tumult contribution, and Felix says he'd be delighted, and rolls a die that comes up however he wants it to come up, and the hour grinds on.
***-
It ends at ten, and the terms give me ten minutes after that—a courtesy window, the document calls it, between the close of the session and the moment the watching tightens back down. Ten minutes is not enough to do anything that matters with four men I'd cross a country for.
It's exactly enough to do something that matters with the building next door.
They scatter to their houses the way the marks make them: Callum already on his phone, Atlas out into a sky that's gone the wrong color for the forecast, Ren last through the door with a glance that lands on me like a hand between the shoulder blades and then is gone. And I go out the side door with my phone inmy pocket, around the narrow gap where the path doesn't run, to the annex no one else can hold in their eyes.
The door banded in iron isn't locked. It wasn't locked yesterday either, when I stood in front of it and lost my nerve. Today I have a plan, which yesterday I didn't, and the plan is small: go in, look, leave before the window closes. I put my hand to the door and it gives like it was leaning against the latch waiting for me, and I step inside.
And the costume isgood.
That's the thing that unnerves me most—how thorough it is. Inside, the building commits to the lie all the way down. Dust lies thick and even on the dead metal shelving, and cardboard slumps in the corners, soft with damp. The air is the stale nothing of a room where nothing has happened in years, and it smells like neglect, like a place the school forgot on purpose. If I had ordinary eyes I would believe every inch of it. I would back out and feel faintly silly for coming.
I don't have ordinary eyes. So I walk to the nearest wall and put my palm flat against it, and the lie thins under my hand like breath wiped off a mirror.
Under the dust there's stone. Not the cheap block of a storage annex—dressed stone, cut and fitted by someone who cared how it would look in a hundred years, carved at the seam where the wall meets the arch with a pattern I half recognize and can't place, geometric, deliberate, old. And on the inner curve of the arch, low, where my fingers find it before my eyes do: moss. Cool and damp and alive, a green fur of it growing in the dark.
Moss doesn't grow in storage. Moss grows where there's water and time and something to feed on, and none of those three things are supposed to exist in a decommissioned closet that the paperwork swears is dry.
I crouch and I take out my phone, and I turn the flash off, because some habits the summer drilled in so deep they'vestopped being decisions. I photograph the carving at the seam. I photograph the moss. I photograph the place where the costume of dead shelving hangs in front of the real wall like a curtain in front of a window, the two of them occupying the same square foot of the world and only one of them true.
And as I lean in close, it finds me.
Not blood magic. No penny on my tongue, nothing carved or worked. This is older than any working, and it doesn't arrive in my mouth at all. It arrives as a cold that has nothing to do with the room, and a slow draw low in my belly, like a hand closing there, and under both of those a sound that isn't quite a sound, a low note under a low note, like standing over a church organ when somebody leans on the lowest pipe. One held tone, endless, singing somewhere just behind my ear. It has been here a very long time. It was here before the school decided to call it a closet. It will be here after.
Something underneath the floor turns its attention toward the warmth of my hand on its wall, the way it turned toward me through the window last night. And the pull I've been pretending is dread comes up the stone and into my palm and answers, and this close there's no lying to myself about which direction it runs. It wants me. That part I could survive. The part that empties me out is that I want it right back—stand here with my hand flat to the cold and feel the wanting and find I have to talk myself into leaving, the way you talk yourself up off a warm bed in a cold room. All summer the loudest thing in my body was four threads and how much they hurt. The threads don't hurt anymore. So I can hear this now, clear as a struck bell, and what it's saying isstay.
I take my hand off the stone before it can decide it likes being touched. Before I decide I like it back.
Ten minutes, and the window's already closing. I make myself stand up, and making myself is the right verb, and Inotice that and tuck it away with everything else I don't know what to do with yet.
At the door I look back once, at the dust and the dead shelving and the perfect dull lie of the place, and underneath it the carved arch holding its breath in the dark, and I think—not in words, in the way the building and I have apparently agreed to talk—I see you. I'm not done.
Then I go back out into the narrow gap, and across to Callister House, and up the stairs past the raven that turns its glass eyes to log my return, and into a kitchen full of someone else's quiet.
I don't tell anyone.
Not Brittany, whose texts I'll answer tonight withalive, surveilled, no notes.Not the guys, who I won't get near until nine tomorrow and who have enough on the backs of their hands without me handing them this. I have photographs of a building that isn't a closet and a taste in my mouth older than the campus, and four threads paying out of my chest toward four locked doors, and a habit of carrying the heavy things by myself until I'm sure what they weigh.
I make tea I mostly don't drink—it's just something warm to hold—and I look at the photos until the screen times out, and then I look at them again.
Still here, though. Surveilled by taxidermy, leashed to a woman who smiles while she does it, sitting on a secret older than the school—and, since this morning, quietly tugged at by the thing the secret is about, a pull I can't explain and didn't ask for and already know I'm going to follow. Could be worse. Give it a week.
Tomorrow there's another hour. Another ten minutes after it.
Tomorrow I go back, and I go further.
3
ATLAS
The mirror's cracked again. Third one this month.
I didn't mean this one either. The weight room in Fulmen Hall is mine at three in the morning. It's mine most hours, actually, but three AM is when no one else is stupid enough to be here, which means the storm can come in off my hands and hit the walls without an audience of Tempest sophomores reading the weather for weaknesses. The crack means I've been training for two hours and the lightning isn't settling, and somewhere between the press and the rack the current ran ahead of me and split the glass before I felt it leave my hands.
