"I know," I say. "Felix, will you please get off the floor."
A pause. "My shoulder is a little?—"
"I will come over there."
He gets off the floor.
The Deep goes quiet in the way that rooms only go quiet when something that's been running for a long time stops. The Well breathes wrong—slow and labored, the sound of a thing running on less than it needs—and somewhere inside it, folded into a century of taken light, is what's left of Cordelia Ashby, and of every grimoire this school ever talked down a stair.
Callum comes to stand beside me. He doesn't touch me. He's learned, these past months, that sometimes the closest thing he can offer is his presence without weight—near enough to reach if I reach, far enough to let me stand in whatever this is first.
"You didn't fix it," he says.
"No."
"And there was never anyone to save."
"No." I say it flat, so it can't shake. "There never was."
He doesn't tell me it was enough. He doesn't tell me I did the right thing. He stands next to me and looks at the gutted Wellwith me, and that's the thing about Callum. He never gives you comfort that isn't true.
Atlas's hand lands on my shoulder from behind, brief and warm. Ren says nothing, which from Ren is sometimes the loudest thing in the room. Felix has stopped pretending his shoulder doesn't hurt and is leaning against the wall doing something complicated with his cards that I think is actually just keeping his hands busy.
I don't know if I did the right thing.
That's the truth, the ugly one: I'm standing here in the quiet of the Deep with copper on the back of my tongue and the Well half-killed and Helena Grimoire loose in the world with ninety-six years of patience and the journals' true intent still in her, and I cannot tell if I stopped a theft tonight or only postponed one. If I mended the machine or just kept it bleeding on the table. If the choice was right or only survivable.
I think:she'll find another way.
I think:so will I.
One of us is going to be right.
I'm going to be ready.
"Let's go," I say.
Nobody argues. That's how I know they're as tired as I am. Felix pushes off the wall with his good shoulder. Atlas takes his hand back. Ren stays close as we go.
I don't look back at the Well. But I feel it, at my back, wounded and breathing, patient in the way that things are patient when they have been waiting for a century and expect to wait longer. It isn't done. Nothing down here is done. I chose to save a thing that is going to demand everything of me, and it will, and I knew that when I chose it.
I walk out of the room.
Behind me in the dark, the Well goes on existing, gorged on a century of people it was built to swallow. Cordelia Ashby isin there somewhere—not waiting, not holding on. Just kept, the way all of them are kept.
Somebody should write their names down.
I'm going to.
35
EVERLY
Ikeep pressing the bruise to make sure it's still there.
That's what it is, three days out from Wheeler's table, a bruise I can't stop pushing on. The bond used to live at the center of me like a banked fire, four threads I could warm my hands at without thinking. Now I reach for it and find thread worn down to filament, healing the way skin heals over a burn, thin and shining and wrong, and every time I touch it to check it I feel how close it came to going out entirely. So I check it again. Of course I do. You worry a loose tooth with your tongue because it might come free.
It's late. Concordia keeps its own dark, deeper than the night outside, the kind of dark that has been collecting in these stones since before the Schism, since before anyone thought to raise the rest of the campus around the bones of this place. The house has gone quiet the way it does when it's decided we're allowed to stay, and it decides, I've learned that much, the way it decides everything. I'm sitting up in the wide bed in the room that's become mine here, knees to my chest, the old cold of the floor reaching up through the frame, and I have pressed on the bruise one time too many.
