Page 85 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Brittany reaches down the table, takes the page out of my hand, and studies it, then flips it over, sees her list on the back, and gives me a look.

"I copied it," she tells me. "You're lucky."

"I know. I checked."

"How sure are you? That they all go to the same place."

"Pretty sure. I followed Josie's all the way down last night. And with every kid before her, I felt the others going the same direction."

"Okay." She sets the drawing down in the middle of the table. "That's evidence, at least."

"And the place where they're all tied together," Callum says slowly, looking up from his black notebook, "is the Well."

"Yes. Every string I've followed goes into the water."

"The Well, where you nearly drowned in the spring, and again the day you walked in after Nell and Atlas had to drag you out." He says it very evenly, the way he says things when he's trying hard not to shout. "You understand why I'm asking."

Atlas snorts into his coffee. "He means don't be a fucking idiot, Ev. He just needs a whole paragraph to get there."

"I mean precisely what I said," Callum says, without looking at him. "If I'd meant idiot, I'd have said it. I've had a great deal of practice saying it to you."

"I understand," I tell Callum, before Atlas can answer that. "It's still where they're tied." I put my finger on the scribble at the bottom of the page. "Your mother put the rune back on every kid I cleared, in one afternoon, and she called it a health check. She can keep doing that for the rest of my life. If I keep going one kid at a time, I'm just doing what she told me to do. I'm tiring myself out. So I'm going to the root, and I'm cutting all of them loose at once."

Atlas puts his coffee down on the counter very, very carefully.

"I'd have to go down." I keep my voice steady. I practiced this in bed, staring at the ceiling, and it sounded a lot more convincing there. "Behind the hearth, the way Helena took me—down the stairs, through the tunnel, to the steps above the water. I'd have to put my hands in it. Then I find where all the threads come in, and I unwind them from that end, from the bottom, all at once. Every first-year at once." I shrug. "Easy."

No one even smiles. That's fair; it wasn't even that good.

The woodstove ticks, and in his tank Herbert shifts, a little shuffle of legs on glass.

My knees have gone weak under the table just thinking about the cold and the stairs. Worse is the part I still haven't told anyone: how good it felt in the spring when the Well came up into my hands. It felt like being hungry my whole life without knowing it and then finally being fed. Some nights I dream about it, and I wake up wanting to go back.

Ren lifts his chin off his hand. His eyes have been drifting shut since supper, but they're open now. "And the Well tries to keep you again, like last time. Last time your heart slowed down until I had to go looking for it, Ev. You told me you wanted to stay, and when I asked you who was with you, you couldn't say my name." He says it quietly, the way he'd read me a pulse. "I was the one listening, so you're going to hear it from me."

"It will." I look around the table at all of them. "So you hold on to me, and you don't let go."

No one says yes.

"Okay," I say. "Then we vote. Same as the diner."

I expect it to go the way it went in the Linden Falls lot, one at a time, a yes and a no and Felix refusing to play. Instead they answer together, all four of them, before I've even finished asking.

"No."

Atlas says it to his coffee. Callum says it to his notebook. Ren says it to me, and Felix says it to the deck in his hand, and it comes out of them as one word.

"Unanimous," Felix says from the counter by the sink. He doesn't smile. "Write that down, Callum. First time in recorded history the four of us agreed on anything, and it's this. Ev, I'd love to give you odds on how bad an idea it is, I really would, but I'd be making them up, and you'd know I was making them up, and then we'd both feel worse." He turns the deck over in his hand and doesn't cut it. "So, no. That's my whole bet. No."

"I'm going anyway," I tell them.

Callum closes the notebook. "Then why did you ask?"

"Because you should get a say." It sounds thinner out loud than it did in my head.

"A say you've already decided doesn't count." He doesn't raise his voice. He never does. "In the diner lot you asked because you thought we ought to have a say in what was done to our bodies. I thought it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. This is something else."

"It's my body this time," I shoot back.