Page 101 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I can feel her working through the soles of my feet and through every line that runs down into this place. She takes hold of one thread and unwinds it from the knot down there in the black, gently, without tearing it, so that somewhere far above us a child in a dormitory bed takes a full breath for the first time in weeks. Then she takes the next.

It's beautiful, the best work I've ever seen anyone do, and better even than anything I taught her. I taught her all winter on the floor of the Down Deep, with the soup she brought me going cold in its thermos beside us. She listened to every word. No one had listened to me like that since Cordelia, and I let it go to my head.

And she has four of them holding on to her. I can feel the bond from here, louder than it has ever been, four threads running into her chest, grown thick and warm while I wasn't paying attention.

No one held on to Cordelia. No one held on to any of them. They went down these stairs one at a time with their hair done, and the families waited at the top with the doors shut behind them. I'm glad the little grim has her boys. I want that written down somewhere, by someone, so no one can say later that I wasn't.

But she's going too slowly.

There are so many threads tied down there, and she's so cold. The Bolingbroke woman has gone back up the stairs, but she'll come down again with wardens behind her. The little grim will stand in this water every year of her life, getting colder, until one year it keeps her.

The Bolingbroke woman has helped me without knowing it. Every time her sphere puts that rune on a child, it cracks the Well a little, and she's put it on every first-year twice now. I can feel the cracks from here, thin as hairs in old glass.

The afternoon Nell went in and the Well filled, I sat on the dirt floor of Marjorie's root cellar and reached down into it for Cordelia, the way I had every day since 1930. I found her. I held on to her all night, as far down as I could reach, and I felt how deep the Well has her.

I can't lift her out. I can only let her go.

The Well can only be broken in the moment it's swallowing something. It won't reach for just anyone. It wants a mage strong in all four disciplines who still has a foot in the ordinary world: a family who's never heard of magic, a life outside these walls. Cordelia had the magic, but the families had cut her off from everything else long before they sent her down. The little grim has both, and now she has four boys tied to her, and the bond is finally strong enough. When the Well pulls all of that into itself, there will be a moment when it's wide open, and I can tear it.

I wanted that moment to reach in and lift Cordelia out whole. She's too far into it for that now. So I'll use it to break the Well instead, and she can go where she should have gone in 1930, and I'll be there to hold her when she does.

Tearing it down is easier, at least. I only have to stop caring what's left afterward. When the Well goes, it will tear the lines too: the lines I tied the boys into on the hill, and the ones I opened for Marjorie, Dana and the sisters, and up in the hills Marjorie will have to get up and use the switch again, like everyone else. I know all of that. I'm going to do it anyway.

I think of Cordelia sitting on the edge of my bed in her slip, the morning they took her, holding very still while I put the pins in, then turning around to kiss me when I put in the last one. I'm going to hold her again tonight.

I step out of the mouth of the tunnel and go down towards the water.

31

EVERLY

My right arm is white with Catalina's cold from the fingertips to the shoulder, and I can't feel the hand on the end of it.

I keep it under the water anyway, next to the other one. It's the hand I pulled her cold off Callum's throat with, and now it won't close all the way. When I find the end of a thread with it, the thread slides out between my fingers, and I have to go after it again with my left.

The rest of me stopped feeling the cold as cold a while ago. It's just a hard ache from my ribs down, with Atlas's arm locked around them and Ren's hand flat on my back over my heart.

"Where are you?" Ren asks, close behind me. He's been asking all night, like a bartender deciding whether to take my keys.

"The Well." I have to go looking for the rest. "You. Atlas. Felix and Callum on the steps."

"What did you have for breakfast?"

"Toast." My jaw is shaking so hard I have to push the rest out through my teeth. "Atlas burned it."

"It was fucking fine," Atlas says into my hair, his teeth chattering. "You ate the whole thing."

"Good," Ren says. "Keep going."

I keep going. Behind me on the bottom step, Felix is still holding his sleeve to Callum's cheek and telling him to hold still, damn it, and Callum is telling him in a hoarse, ruined voice that he is holding still. I pull another thread loose with my left hand and feel a first-year somewhere above us take a breath.

Then wings clatter out of the tunnel behind the lamp. Poe comes down out of the dark in a mess of feathers, skids across the wet top step, and stops beside my shoes with his glass eyes fixed on me. Brittany would never send him down those stairs unless someone got past her.

My stomach drops so hard I nearly lose the thread I'm holding, and my heart starts to slam under Ren's palm. She's fine, I tell myself. She's sitting on the stairs being furious at someone. She's fine. My hands keep working under the water, because I don't know how to make them stop.

"Ev?" Felix's voice goes up. "That's Brittany's bird. Why is Brittany's bird down here?"

All four threads of the bond go tight at once, and I lift my head and look towards the far end of the steps.