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"Yes."

"Good. I mean—not good that it hurts. Good that you told me."

She's quiet for a while. Then: "Have you heard anything about your mother?"

"She's alive." I look at the notebook on the floor. "This morning, when I crossed the quad, the lamp was on in her office window. She's at her desk."

"Are you going to go see her?"

"Not yet." I've never walked into her office without my shadows around me. "I don't know what I'd say to her without them."

She puts her hand on my chest, over my heart, and I hold her. The study is quiet. The lamp is the only light, throwing our two shadows long across the floor and up the bookshelves, where they don't move, because we don't.

"I love you," I tell her.

I've never said it before. I've known it since the spring, when I chose her over my mother, but it frightened me too much to say.

Everly lifts her head off my shoulder and looks at me. Her face is blotchy and her eyes are wet, and she's smiling.

"I know," she says, and kisses me. "I love you too."

33

BRITTANY

No one is looking for me anymore.

A few days after the lights went out, I drive the 4Runner up to the farmhouse in the hills. It's mine again, though I keep forgetting that.

It smells like the guys lived in it, which they did: motel coffee, wet wool, and a sweatshirt of Atlas's that is now, as far as I can tell, part of the car.

Herbert rides in the other cup holder in an empty mason jar with holes punched in the lid, because he refused to stay at Callister and I refused to have him loose in the car on a mountain road. We've reached an agreement. He doesn't like it.

I've been officially missing for months, and now no one so much as glances at the car. No one's looking for anyone. The wardens' styluses don't work, and the infirmary is doing stitches. The only thing the school has managed since the lights went out is to tape a notice to the door of every building on campus.

I stop at Kingsley to read it, just to make sure. Nyxhaven University will be closed until further notice due to unforeseen circumstances, it says, and will reopen as soon as is practical, so students should make arrangements with their families. It's typed, but signed by hand at the bottom in fountain pen, very neatly: Catalina Bolingbroke, Headmaster. The world ended, and she still found time to blot.

She's alive. Callum told me at the kitchen table, in the voice he uses for facts he'd rather not have.

"She went up the stairs that night and walked out of the Burial Ground upright." He was looking at his tea, not at me. "She's been in her office every day since with her gloves on, writing letters."

He didn't say who to, and I don't think he even knows. I didn't ask him how he felt about it, because I'm not actually a monster.

I find out who she's been writing to on my way to the gate.

The road out runs past the administrative building, and there are cars parked all along the front of it, up on the grass where no one is allowed to park. They're long and dark and polished, the kind of cars that come with drivers, and a lot of them have out-of-state plates.

Men in expensive coats and women in more expensive ones are going up the front steps in little groups, not talking to each other. I don't know their faces, but I know what they are. Everyone at Nyxhaven knows what the families look like walking into a building.

Catalina is standing at the top of the steps in her grey coat and gloves, shaking hands. There's a thin healing cut at her hairline. Her school just lost its magic, and she's shaking hands as if she's hosting a dinner party.

I slow down. I shouldn't, but I do.

Someone raps on my passenger window, and I nearly put the 4Runner into a hedge.

It's Noah Bolingbroke, in his warden's black, bending down to look in at me. The last time I saw him he was on his feet behind the review board's table, letting his brother's shadows take me out of the room. I roll the window partway down. That's all he gets.

"Miss Leigh." He has the same polite, tired voice. "Keep driving, please. Slowly. Don't look at the steps."