Page 55 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

He takes off his reading glasses, folds them, and sets them on top of the rune. His hair is the same pale blond as mine, cut shorter than he used to wear it, and there are dark marks under his eyes I don't remember. "You look well. Are you eating?"

It's such a stupid question, and it still nearly undoes me.

It's what he used to ask when I came home from school too thin, after a term of my mother writing to me every week about my marks, my posture, and the people I'd been seen with. Are you eating, Cal? After she'd gone to bed he'd come up to my room with toast on a plate, buttered all the way to the edges the way I liked it, and sit on the end of my bed while I ate. I was small enough then to believe he could do anything.

"I'm eating," I tell him shortly.

The last time I stood this close to him, he was holding my wrist at the gates and telling me to keep still, in the same patient voice he'd used when I was small and he was picking a splinter out of my palm.

I look at his hands now, resting on the papers. There's the thin white scar across the back of the right one, from the garden fence.

"I asked to be the one," he says. "At the gates. Mother would have given you to whichever warden was nearest. I wasn't going to let a stranger put a stylus in my brother's arm."

It's the worst kindness anyone has ever done me, and I don't know what to say to it, so I don't say anything.

"You knew," I say instead, when I can trust my voice. "At the review board, when my shadow came through the door. You looked straight at me."

"I knew," he says.

"You didn't tell our mother."

He doesn't answer that. He picks up a pen from the desk, turns it over once, and puts it down again, square to the edge of the paper.

"Why not?" I press.

"I haven't decided yet." He says it so simply that I believe him. "Ask me again when I have."

I look down at the papers on his desk. "You're finishing it. Wheeler's rune."

"Wheeler left it half done, and someone has to." He looks down at the pages. "The Well's failing, Cal. It's failing faster every term, and Mother has tried everything else. This is the only thing that actually works without sending anyone down the stairs."

"It drains every student who gets it, a little at a time, for years," I say coldly. "Wheeler did the same thing to Ren, and to the Fortuna girl."

I keep Nell's first name out of my mouth. I don't want him to hear how well I know it.

"It drains them slowly," he says patiently. "No one dies."

"Enya died."

I know exactly how Enya died. I was the one who ended it, with my shadow, because by then there was nothing left in her for anyone to save and no one else would do it. Until tonight, I hadn't said her name aloud since.

"Enya was a mistake." His voice doesn't change, but his hand goes flat on the desk. "This is different. It's spread across a whole class, so no one ever takes too much from any one of them. No one walks into the water. No one ends up in a cell for you to find."

"No," I say. "They burn out instead, right at the end, when there's almost nothing left in them. It's a different road from severing, but it ends in the same place."

I look at the rune on his desk. In this light the ink on the newest page is still shiny. He was drawing it when I opened the door, and he'll go back to drawing it when I leave.

"Do the families' children get it?" I ask, though I already know.

He picks up the pen again, and puts it down.

"No. Every one of the old families gave blood to set up the spell, so it won't take on anyone with that blood in them. You're safe. So am I." He looks up at me. "Mother isn't going to put a rune on our cousins, Cal. You know that."

"So it's everyone else."

"Everyone who can spare it," he says, as if he's quoting her.

"And who decides what they can spare?" I ask him. "You? Her? Did anyone ask the Fortuna girl what she could spare?"