Page 35

“So, if you miss the ferry, what happens? Do you have to sleep in the library?”

He chuckles and even though the sound is soft, it makes my stomach dance. I think this is the first time I have ever heard him laugh. The fact that I made him do it feels like a gift.

“No. But I’m sure it seems that way. We have teacher’s quarters here. There are a few rooms on the second floor of the west wing that get fresh sheets every couple days whether anyone’s used them or not.”

“That seems wasteful.”

“The Mortis is a wasteful institution,” he says deadpan.

Now it’s my turn to laugh and I’m immediately startled by it. His eyes come up to mine, briefly, and whatever he was going to say next he decides not to say. He looks back down at his notebook instead.

I look at the book on the table in front of me and tilt my head slightly to read the running head along the top of the page “On the Inherited Witch-Sign and its Common Manifestations” and I lift my eyes very slowly to his.

He doesn’t flinch. He just watches me watch him. Silence between us builds with all the things we’re not saying.

Finally, he asks, “Why are you here?” His tone is hushed.

“I…I went too far on Saturday. Midnight Class.”

“Yes. You did,” he says matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t know I’d gone too far.” I make myself say the words. “I thought I was still reaching when I was already through.”

“Yes,” he says again, in the same quiet tone. “I know.” He turns the pencil in his fingers. “What did you see?”

I’d known he was going to ask. There’s no way that his curiosity wouldn’t get the better of him.

“The far side wasn’t the far side I’d met before,” I say carefully. “There was weight to it. A direction. Something moving past me, but I don’t mean past me the way a person walks past, I mean like a current. Cold water with something being carried in it, toward somewhere I couldn’t see. I wasn’t the thing being pulled. I was in the path of it.”

He’s gone very still.

“And then,” I say, “something out there noticed I was there. It turned toward me. It wasn’t angry. It was…interested. If I’d stayed any longer, I think…”

I don’t finish the sentence.

“That isn’t what the veil is,” I add. “What they teach it to be.”

“No,” he says. “It doesn’t sound like it.”

He starts tapping the pencil against the page of the notebook. I’ve noticed he does that sometimes, constantly fidgeting, moving some part of him.

“I came to see if any of these books explained how a person, you know, does that,” I say feebly.

“They don’t.” He glances at the floor stack. “I’ve been looking.”

I see.

He’s been looking, too.

For me.

For the thing I do, which is not what the Mortis teaches.

He reaches for the stack of books by his foot and sets another on the table between us, this one bound in dark-green cloth with a water-stained spine, and he opens it to a page he’s marked with a ribbon. The handwriting in the margin is small. He puts his finger on a paragraph halfway down the page and leaves it there without saying anything.

I lean in to read it, trying not to breathe him in. His finger is close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off the back of his hand. The paragraph is about reaching and why some practitioners reach and some narrow, and the author’s claim that the two are not styles of the same art but two separate arts entirely, descending from two separate lineages, and that one of the lineages predates the other by some centuries, and that the newer has spent much of its history denying the older existed.

I finish the paragraph. I don’t dare look up.