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“Spread out,” he says when we’ve gathered. “One to a grave. I don’t care which. Choose and commit.”

Still not one for pleasantries I see.

We disperse. Some students move to spots they seem to know, preferred graves from last year. I go deeper, past the group, until I find a headstone that draws me. It’s old, the inscription nearly gone, the stone thick with lichen. A low iron fence surrounds it, half-collapsed.

I step over the gate and kneel, the earth damp through my dress, the cold pressing up immediately, settling into my knees and my bones, and already I can tell that this will be nothing like the crypts. The bone on the slab was singular, a conversation with one person. Here, the ground is full. I can feel them below me, not as individual voices but as a pressure, dense and layered, the hum of hundreds of dead pressing up against the underside of the world.

I narrow the way I’ve been practicing. Palms flat on the earth, the focusing invocation Wellspring taught us, the formal channel. The dead man beneath me rises to meet it. Old. Very old. He’s been here a long time. The details come in fragments—cold hands, a life near the water, the slow ache of joints that stopped working years before the rest of him did.

I hold the connection. It’s manageable.

Then a second voice pushes in. A third. The dead here are layered so thick that narrowing to one is like trying to hear a single instrument in a full orchestra. My breathing quickens. My palms go cold against the earth.

Too many. Pull back.

I start to withdraw and then I feel him behind me. Not the dead man under the ground. Vale. Standing close enough that I can feel the warmth of him at my back, and I have no idea how long he’s been there.

“You’re reaching too wide,” he says in a gruff voice, low enough that no one else would hear. “Pull to the center. One point of contact.”

I try but the voices press. He must see me struggling because his hand is on mine, not holding it, but moving it from the flat earth to the base of the headstone, pressing my palm against cold stone.

“Here,” he says, mouth at my ear, causing me to suppress a shiver. “The stone is the anchor. The earth will scatter you.”

His fingers are warm against the back of my hand. The contact lasts only a few seconds and yet in it I feel something, like a pulse of focus so intense it’s almost sharp, and underneath it something wound tight, held down, kept firmly in check. Not his thoughts, not really. More like the pressure of him, the sheer concentrated force of a mind that never rests.

Then he lifts his hand and steps back and it’s gone, and my palm is pressed to the headstone and the old dead man from beyond comes back, clear and steady, and I hold him until Vale calls time.

The class gathers itself, students shaking out their hands and rubbing their arms. One girl looks like she’s been swimming in cold water, her face damp with sweat as she shivers. Vale gives notes on technique, which seem more general than directed to anyone in particular, then assigns a reading for Friday’s Bone Work.

I start to follow the others filing toward the bridge but then he calls out after me.

“Greythorn. A moment, please.”

Oh, no. I stop walking and turn around. The lanterns flicker around me and the cemetery is quieter now that the students have pulled back from the graves, but the dead are still there, murmuring at the edges of my awareness.

Professor Vale stands by the mausoleum with his arms folded, watching me.

“You went too wide,” he says. “Again.”

“I know. I’m working on it.”

“You’re going to need to work on it faster,” he says, his tone flat. “Your instinct is to open. That’s not a flaw in itself, but it will become one if you don’t learn to control it. The dead in this cemetery are not patient, and they don’t care that you’re new. If you open like that without a way to close, they will take more than you can afford to give.”

“I understand.”

He narrows his eyes at me for a moment, as if to check if I really do understand.

“I’ll be fine,” I say, perhaps sharper than I should have. “You don’t have to keep watching me.”

A pause as he studies my face, his gaze momentarily fixating on my mouth, enough that my lips tingle.

“Yes,” he says. “I do.” Then he clears his throat. “Your technique on the headstone was better,” he goes on. “Use the stone. It’s what it’s there for.”

I nod. He holds my gaze for a beat, and I hold his, because looking away first feels like conceding something at this point. The honey-gold of his eyes is darker out here, and in the lantern light his face looks older, carved, belonging to this place, as if he’s a brooding statue looming over a grave.

Then he turns away, back toward the deeper part of the cemetery, and I realize he’s not leaving with the rest of us. He’s staying out here. Alone, in the dark, with the dead and the red sky pressing down.

I watch him disappear, then hurry back across the bridge, my dress gathered in my hands so I don’t trip. The others are ahead of me, voices carrying faintly through the fog. Avelene is waiting at the far end, leaning against the railing.