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When words fail me, I lift her hand—the one I have been holding—and I turn it palm up. I press my lips to the inside of her wrist, feeling her pulse there, then straighten up.

“Monday,” I say. “After class. We should talk some more. You can see my notes.” I’m saying this with a little too much eagerness and I’m suddenly aware that I’m coming across as a nerdish professor or scientist who just wants to share his great discovery.

But if that’s off-putting to her, she doesn’t show it. “Monday,” she says with a smile.

“If you need me before Monday, check the library. The crypts. The quarters. When I’m at the Mortis I will be in one of those three rooms at any given hour of any given day.”

She nods. Her eyes are on my mouth. If she steps toward me now I will take her inside her door and I will not come out before dawn. I think she knows this too.

Alas, she doesn’t step toward me.

“Goodnight, Baz,” she says.

“Goodnight, Saturna.”

She disappears behind her door.

Chapter

Seventeen

BAZ

Ihave no choice but to take the ferry to Sogliano the next morning. Thankfully I come back to an apartment where the door was left locked and there were no signs of entry. I spend the day at my desk, ignoring the shadow in the corner, adding the Hollow to the chart in a new fifth column, letter E for extant, and when I’m done my pen is unsteady and my mind is racing. I sleep two hours, piss poor, and then I’m back on the ferry to Mortis at dawn.

My plan is to stay at the school all week. Aside from not feeling all that secure in my own apartment, the Hollow was inside these walls and I want to know if it comes back. Of course, that’s not the only reason. If I’m honest with myself, Saturna Greythorn is a more pressing concern, for no other reason than I want to be near her as much as possible. Just in case something goes wrong, of course.

Regardless, nobody has told me I can’t stay at the Mortis and there’s no rule about how long teachers can hog up the quarters, but Hetch notices. Of course Hetch notices.

“You’re still here,” he notes, peering over his glasses at me in the long gallery on Tuesday night.

“I’m still here,” I say, flashing him a fake smile.

He waits for me to say more. I don’t.

“Last time a teacher stayed over this much, he was going through a divorce with his wife. Old Tim Heckleberry. You don’t have a secret wife, do you Vale?”

I chuckle. “So far no woman has been foolish enough to do me the honor.”

He grunts and goes back to his paper. “Yes, well you and me both, then.”

Despite being in a room where the attendants give turn-down service, I barely sleep. My mind is filling with things I can’t put in any column.

The conversation on the sea wall keeps circling back. Two voices in the dark—Caranthis and that man speaking quietly, but freely, not expecting to be overheard in that corner of the school. Baz is becoming a problem, the stranger said or at least insinuated.

He’s been looking at things that are not his to look at.

Did they mean Saturna? Or did they mean my research?

I know Caranthis suspects she’s unusual, he’s got to have known that since he admitted her without practicals, which I’ve always found strange, an act of deliberate cultivation rather than administrative oversight. The question is whether they know that she’s a witch.

If they know, she’s in danger.

If they don’t know, she’s in danger of a different kind…the kind that comes from being too interesting for too long to the wrong people.

I also kissed her.

That’s in there too, underneath the Caranthis problem and the Hollow problem and the bodies-in-bodies-out problem. I mean, it’s not a terrible problem to have in comparison. Sure, the others are charts, solvable in theory even when they resist solution in practice.