Page 10 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Thank you," Ren says, and means it.

Everly turns towards him. "Felix?"

He's standing apart from the rest of us, by the dumpster at the edge of the light, with his back to the diner windows. He has his deck out, of course. He hasn't put it down in days, and it hasn't done a thing for him in all that time, but he keeps cutting it one-handed, the cards whispering together.

"I can't see the odds, so I don't get a vote. I have no idea what happens if we go up that hill, and I've never not known." He turns a card over without looking at it and holds it up between two fingers, face out, towards the dark. "Being outvoted, I can take. I've been outvoted plenty."

He slides the card back into the deck and keeps cutting.

Everly sighs. "Well, that's two yeses, a no, and Felix."

"And you," I remind her.

She looks at me, and under the pink neon she looks very young and very tired. She's still in the blazer she put on the morning my mother expelled us, creased at the elbows now from days of driving, and there's a dark stain on the knee of her grey skirt where she cut herself on the broken step going down under Concordia. She never had the chance to change. None of us did—we walked out of the gates in what we had on.

"I'm a yes. She's lying about something, I know she is, but she isn't lying about this part, and this part keeps you alive. I'll just figure out the rest after."

"That's your plan?" I ask. "You mean to walk the four of us up a hill for that woman and figure it out after?"

"It's been my plan since freshman year, and you're all still here."

I don't have an answer to that. Annoyingly, it's true.

"How bad does it hurt?" Atlas asks through the towel. "She say?"

"She said, 'A lot.'" Everly pulls her blazer tighter around her. "Most of the night. And it won't come back the way it was. It'll be wild."

"So, the way it's always been for me," Atlas says. "That's fine. I've actually had worse." He jerks his chin at me without taking the towel down. "Bolingbroke's the one who's never had a spell not do what he told it. Should be fun to watch."

"I'll be sure to sit where you can see," I tell him.

Ren doesn't even look up. "You have not had worse."

Atlas waves the paper towels at him. "My own lightning's gone through me more times than you've had haircuts. I'll live through a hill."

"Where do the lines run?" Ren asks. "How does she know where they cross? Is the hill the only place, or just the closest?"

"She didn't say," Everly admits, which turns out to be the answer to most of his questions.

He listens with his head tipped and his arms folded, already turning it over, already wishing he had a notebook. Halfway through, Felix wanders inside to ask whether the diner does pie and comes back with a slice of apple in a foam box and a fistful of plastic forks, which he sets on the hood between Atlas's knees with a little flourish. None of us touch it. It's the most optimistic thing anyone has done all week.

I hear all of it from far off, because in my head I'm back on the gravel outside the gates.

I'm standing with my arm held out while my brother Noah's long pale hands turn it over, gently, with the care of someone who has done this before.

There's a thin white scar across the back of his right hand, just under the knuckles. He got it at fourteen, climbing the iron fence at the bottom of our garden to fetch a baseball I'd thrown over it, and he came back over the top with the ball in his teeth and blood running down his wrist, grinning at me.

Keep your arm still. It's worse if you move.

For years I told myself that Noah got out—that he was somewhere far away with an ordinary job, never giving any of us a thought. I believed it because I needed at least one of us to have managed it.

He didn't. He was standing at the gates in a warden's robe with the red lining, and he cut me off from the Well, then pulled his hood back up and stepped into line. I held still for him because he told me to. I've been doing what my family tells me my whole life.

I should want nothing from him now. I still catch myself waiting for Noah to come down the road after us with his hood off and tell me he's finished with her. I wanted that when I was small enough to throw a baseball over the garden fence, and I want it in a diner parking lot with no feeling in my hands. I hate myself for it.

Under the pink sign, my shadow lies on the gravel at my feet, the ordinary kind the light makes for everyone. Before the gates it would have come up off the ground when I called it. Now it moves when I move and does nothing else.

My mother would take Helena's offer. She'd look at what was on the table, take the deal that kept her alive, and deal with the person who offered it later, at a time of her choosing, without losing a night's sleep over any of it.