Helena is not among the taken.
I find her in the half-second I have to find anything—Helena Grimoire at the edge of the red light, not fighting, not caught,not running for the stair the way I sent Nell.She's going the wrong way. She's turned toward the dark at the very bottom of the Deep, where the Well throats down into something even the men never mapped, and a cold that has nothing to do with the fight crawls up the back of my neck.
Why isn't she running with us? Why is she going down?
Her eyes find mine across the chamber. One look, the way Nell looked at me—except Nell's was terror, and this is theopposite of terror. This is a woman who already knows how the night ends and made her peace with it years ago. She doesn't look afraid. She doesn't look caught. She lookssorry,and that's so much worse, and I will spend a long time learning why.
"Helena—" I don't even know what I'm asking.
She doesn't answer. The dark at the bottom of the Deep takes her—not Catalina's dark, her own, a step she chose—sideways into the black where the Well drops past where anyone has gone. One breath she's there. The next there's only the place she was standing, and the red light folding into it like she was never standing in it at all.
Then hands close on my arms.
I've got nothing left to fight with. I reach for a fifth thing anyway, out of nothing but stubbornness, some last scraped-out corner of any discipline at all—and there isn't one. The grimoire slams shut against my chest—not by my hand, by theirs—and what's left of the chord whips out of me all at once, and I go down between two wardens with my legs gone to water and my own blood in my mouth. The cold rushes in to fill every place the magic was.
I want to cry and I can't. There isn't water enough left in me for it. My eyes just burn, dry and open, while everything else in me finally, finally stops.
I have never been this empty. I didn't know I could be.
They have us. All of us. They have me.
And here is the thing we feared all year.
We braced for it from the morning the wardens carved the marks into the men's hands, from the first burn of blood magic, from Catalina at her window sayingdon't think of it as punishment, think of it as accountability.We knew what accountability meant. It meant this. It meant getting caught. And getting caught meant separation.
That's the punishment we imagined. I imagined it so many nights I could draw it: expulsion papers, the marks drawn tight, the four of them scattered to the far ends of campus and me alone at Callister House with the thread between us stretched to agony across the distance. After a year of stealing hours against the marks, of counting the sanctioned minutes, of Ren telling methey'll know when I reach for you—after all of it, the worst we let ourselves picture was being pulled apart.
They march us up out of the Deep. Through the Hollows, where the cold draw of the Well finally slackens low in my belly and the air starts tasting like wet stone and old candle smoke, where the dead light of the wardens' lanterns crawls over carvings I'm too drained to read. Up past the Sepulchre. Past the long shelves of the Reliquary, where the founders kept whatever the founders thought worth keeping behind glass gone green at the seams.
The house lets us pass. That's the wrongness I keep coming back to. Concordia Hall has fought us for the secret of itself all year, and tonight it simply opens, level after level, like it's been waiting to be walked through in exactly this direction by exactly these people. It swallows us up its own throat the same unhurried way it's swallowed everyone who ever came down these stairs before us. It has all the patience a hundred years of hunger buys.
The men don't speak now. Atlas's jaw is a clenched line. Ren can barely keep his feet, and every time he stumbles the thread between us goes thin and cold and I want to put my hands on him and can't. Felix is grinning at the ceiling like it owes him money. Callum walks like he's escortingthem.
And I think:separation.I think:they'll send them away from me.And underneath the terror there's something almost like bracing for a pain I understand, because separation still lets you feel each other across the distance. Separation is the threadpulled thin, but the threadholding.I've lived inside that thread all year. Even stretched to screaming, it would still bethere.
It would have been mercy.
I know that now. I didn't know it on the stairs.
We come up into the gray light before dawn, into a hallway I half recognize, and they don't take the men one way and me the other. They don't pull us apart at all. They keep us together, the five of us, herded down a corridor I know, toward a door I know, and the wrongness of it goes cold in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, becausebeing kept together is not the plan. Being kept together was never the plan.
Catalina is waiting.
She doesn't look at her son, who her own legacy dragged down. She doesn't look at the others. She looks at me, the way you look at the one thing in a room that matters, and her face does something almost gentle, which is the most frightening thing it has done all year.
"You're wondering," she says, "why I haven't separated you."
I don't give her my face. I learned that this year. I keep my chin up and my mouth shut and I make her say it.
"Because I don't need you apart, Everly." She says my name like she owns the vowels. "I need you whole. And then I need you willing. Pull these four away from you, and all I'd have is a girl who fights me—and a thing that fights doesn't walk down to the Well on its own two feet." Her smile is the worst kind. Patient. "I need you towantto. And I happen to know exactly how that's made."
The cold reaches all the way down.
She turns to the warden at the door, and she doesn't raise her voice. She never has to.
"Give them to Wheeler."
32
