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The first-years are the only ones who look well. One I don't know sits on the rim of the fountain with her face turned up to the sun and her eyes closed, smiling with no idea why.

I stand at the edge of the path and look at her for longer than I should, because yesterday the Well my family built was draining her. Then I go to find Atlas.

He's on the roof of Fulmen.

The roof door at the top of the attic stairs is propped open with a brick. Out on the flat part of the roof, where the tar is gritty under my shoes, Atlas is standing by the base of the big lightning rod—the one he once showed a frightened freshman in the middle of the night—with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped back. There isn't a cloud or a bird in the sky from one edge to the other.

"I can make a breeze." He doesn't turn around. He knows it's me without looking. Once, he would have known before I reached the top of the stairs. I don't know how he knows now. "That's what I've got. A fucking breeze."

"It's more than anyone else on campus has, at least."

"Wow. Thanks, Bolingbroke. Put that on a card." He kicks the base of the lightning rod, not hard, and it rings a little. "It was kind of like this at the gates, after they cut us off. Only then it was just us. Now it's everyone."

I have nothing useful to say to that, so I go and stand next to him and look up at the same empty sky, because it's all there is to do. The sun is thin on the bandage. Somewhere below us a door slams and someone shouts a name, but no one answers.

"I had this whole stupid thing in my head for after," Atlas says, still looking up. "I was going to take my kids up on a roof like this one and show them where to put a storm, the way I did with Nell." He holds out his hand, and the breeze comes off it, stirs the hair at my temple, and dies. "What am I going to teach them now? How to cool off soup?"

"Noah didn't come down last night." I hadn't meant to say it, and I say it to the sky, the way he did. "She came alone. The whole time she had me by the throat, I was listening for him on the back way behind her. I thought if he came, he'd come for me."

"Yeah, well." He kicks the lightning rod again, and it rings. "He wasn't the one standing in that fucking lake."

"No."

He doesn't move away. We stand there with our shoulders nearly touching, looking up at nothing, until someone below us shouts again.

"Is she up?"

"She's sleeping. Ren says to let her."

"Ren's lying on his floor."

"He's lying on his floor, and he says to let her."

He takes his hands out of his pockets. "I'm just going to go find her."

"She's sleeping, Atlas."

"I heard you." He's already heading for the door. At the top of the stairs he stops with one hand on the frame, looks back at me and at the sky behind me, then goes down anyway.

I stay up there by myself until the cold comes up through my shoes.

That night, Everly comes to the study.

I'm sitting behind the desk with nothing in front of me, and I've been sitting here since supper—cereal, because no one had the energy to light the woodstove. I tried to read, then to write in the black notebook. At some point I put my hands flat on the blotter, and I haven't moved them since.

She stands in the doorway the way she did over the summer, wearing one of Atlas's shirts that comes down to her knees, her hair still wet from the shower. The bruise on her elbow from the steps has gone purple. She looks at me sitting behind the desk with nothing in my hands.

"You can't get a shadow to hold a square." She doesn't make it a question. "I know. I can't make anything."

"I tried," I tell her.

"How'd it go?"

Lifting my hand off the blotter, I turn it palm up. A shadow comes off it, thin as smoke from a snuffed candle, drifts up a little way, wavering, and goes out.

"About like that."

She comes in and shuts the door, then comes around the desk and sits on the edge of it in front of me, between my hands, exactly where she sat that night in the summer. The lamp on the corner of the desk throws her shadow across my chest. It's just a shadow; it doesn't move unless she does.