Her heartbeat sits copper on the back of my tongue, my sliver of blood-sense thrown wide open, and I can taste everything—and it stutters. Skips. Catches like an engine that won't turn over.
"Everly." She sees me. Her voice comes from very far away, from under water, from somewhere I can't reach with my hands. "Don't. It'll take you too. It only wants?—"
"Shut up, Nell."
I'm already moving. I'm moving before I decide to.
No. No. Not her. Not like this.
The sacrifice is a live working, and live workings don't stop because you want them to. I've watched the men try to break one all year, watched it take all four of them and still hold. One discipline can't touch it. That's the whole design. Catalina built this place so no single mage could undo what it does, and the Bolingbrokes kept it that way for twelve generations to make sure of it.
But I'm not a single mage.
I open the grimoire and I open all of me at once.
Metal floods up—Ren's, the blood-sense, every pulse in the room laid on the back of my tongue. Charge crackles down my arms—Atlas's storm, every hair standing up, my teeth aching with it. Shadow pools cold at my feet—Callum's, climbing my ankles like water. And something flickers at the very edge of my sight, gone before I can turn to it—Felix's, the giddy, sickening tilt of odds shifting, the floor of the world sliding toward outcomes I can't see. Four disciplines that should not live in the same body slam together behind my ribs, and the chord they make is too big to carry.
It wants out of me the way water wants down. My nose is bleeding. I feel it start, warm over my lip, and I don't have a hand to spare for it.
I carry the chord anyway.
I drive it into the working like a wedge into a crack.
The Well screams—not a sound, a pressure behind my eyes, the one low note behind my ear climbing until it bleaches the edges off everything, and the metal taste floods from penny tocopper to something I'll be tasting for days, the taste of a blood working broken before it could finish.
The wound resists. It wants her. It was promised her, and magic this old does not let go of what it's been promised. The Deep has fed on girls before. I'm only the latest to stand at its mouth and tell it no, and it's heard the word before, and it has nothing but patience for however long it takes to hear yes instead.
You don't get her,I think, and I am not warm, I am not anybody's idea of an optimist, I am something with its teeth bared.You don't get her.
I reach in past the light and find her wrist—solid, still solid, thank God, still a wrist and not smoke—and I pull.
She comes up all at once. The current lets go of her like a hand opening, and I go down hard on the stone with Nell on top of me, both of us soaked in red light, and for one black second I'm sure I'm holding a body. That I dragged a dead girl out of a hole. That I was a heartbeat too slow.
Then she coughs. Wet and ragged and alive.
The relief hits me so hard it frightens me—worse than the near-miss did, somehow—a wave that breaks over me and leaves my hands shaking against her shoulder blades. I shove it down anyway, the way I shove down everything there isn't time for right now.
"Up." I haul her with me. "Nell. Up. Look at me."
Her eyes find mine. She's gray under the brown, sweat-slicked, and she'shere.
"You came down here forme—" Her voice breaks. "Everly, you shouldn't have, you can't?—"
"The stair." I get her on her feet and turn her toward the dark of the steps that climb up out of the Deep toward the Hollows and the long way to air. "Don't stop. Don't look back. Don't wait for me, don't come back for anything, don't you dare.Go."
For one second she doesn't. For one second she just looks at me, and her mouth works around something she doesn't have time to say.
Then she goes. One last look I'll think about for the rest of my life—and she's gone into the dark, footsteps ragged on the stone, and that is the last anyone sees of Nell Fortuna tonight.
And saving her is the thing that costs us everything else.
The seconds it took—reaching her, breaking the working, dragging her free—those were the seconds the wardens needed. I feel the shift before I understand it. The room goes colder. The red light dims, then surges, and Catalina's dark comes pouring back into the chamber from the stairs above, thicker than before, a black tide rolling down the throat of the Deep.
"Everly!" Atlas's voice, raw, from across the chamber. "Getback?—"
There's no getting back. There's no breaking all of it. I know it the way you know the second wave is bigger before it reaches you.
They come for us one at a time. That's the part I'll remember after. Not a wall, not a charge—apicking off,slow and certain, the way you take apart a thing you built and know the seams of.
