Page 62 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

She lets go.

She takes one more step down, and the water closes over her head.

The Well turns gold.

It happens all at once, all the way out across the dark. The water heaves up warm around my chest, and the note in my ears goes up and up until it's not a note anymore, and magic comes up out of the Well and through me and through Atlas behind me and up the stairs, up through the rock, up into the whole school above our heads.

Gold light runs up the walls of the cavern in ripples, so bright I can see every chisel mark in the rock and Atlas's arm across my chest. Magic pours up through me from every discipline at once, more than I've ever felt, and I can feel my hands again.

All of it is Nell. The Well drank her magic and her life, and now it's pouring her magic back out into everyone.

Atlas drags me backward up the steps, and I let him, because she's gone. There's nothing left in the water to hold on to.

I'm on my knees on the wet stone. Ren is there, with his hand flat on the step, listening, and Felix is on the stairs behind him with his deck crushed in one fist. Ren's face is turned to the water, and I see the moment he finds nothing. There's no heartbeat down there, not hers and not the slow one the piece of the Well used to make under it.

I open my mouth, and I scream, once. The Well takes that too. There's no echo.

Catalina is standing on the bottom stair with her lamp. She looks down at me the way she'd look at a puddle on her floor.

"Take her home, Callum," she says.

Callum is on the stairs above her, with his shadows piled up all around him, so thick the lamplight can't get through them. His face is grey. I can feel through the bond how badly he wants to hurt her, and how scared he is to try.

"Don't," I tell him. My voice is wrecked. "Callum, don't. Not now."

Catalina looks at him for a moment longer. Then she turns her back on all of us and goes back up the families' way with her lamp, and the wardens' footsteps follow her into the dark.

We climb up out of the hatch into the Eastern Courtyard, and it's still the middle of the afternoon. The sun is shining. Brittany is sitting on the bench Atlas didn't blow up, with Poe on her knee, and when she sees our faces she doesn't ask. She just puts her hands over her mouth.

Then we walk back across campus, and Nyxhaven is waking up.

Callum pulls his shadows up around all of us, and they come so easily that he looks down at his hands. The surge from the Well has steadied even his magic.

All over the quad, things are going right for the first time since spring. On the edge of the fountain, a Sanguis kid holds his friend's cut hand in both of his own, and the cut closes under his thumbs from one end to the other on the first try. He whoops and holds the hand up for everyone to see.

A girl comes down the infirmary steps with an empty sling dangling from her hand, flexing her fingers, crying and laughing at the same time, because the healers fixed her wrist on the first try. Over by Fulmen, someone sets off a crack of thunder for fun, clean and loud, and a whole crowd cheers.

The magic they're cheering for is Nell's life, and the first bit of magic the rune is already draining out of every first-year who put a hand on the sphere today.

Atlas walks next to me with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, and when a spark jumps off his fingers, perfect and blue, exactly where he meant it to go, he looks like he wants to tear his hand off.

"She knew we'd come," he says, very low. "She was waiting at the platform and she was waiting in that courtyard. Someone told her."

No one answers him. Atlas isn't looking at any of us. He's looking at Callum, and Callum is looking at the ground, and I know the others are thinking of Noah, who knew we knew about the rune and had all night to tell his mother.

I'm thinking about something else, though.

I'm the one who said Nell should stay home. I stood in the kitchen and argued for it until everyone gave in. And I'm the one who just picked the courtyard over the sphere and still didn't get there in time.

Last night I took a paperback off her chest and turned out her lamp. That was goodbye, and I didn't even know it.

I hate myself so much it hurts to breathe. But I hate Catalina more.

20

REN

Ireach for Nell before I'm awake enough to remember she's gone.