Page 102 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

She comes down out of the dark past the edge of the lamplight. I know her by her hair before anything else, that white hair in all that black. She isn't wearing my old coat, the one I gave her last winter in the Down Deep. She's come down in nothing but her thin grey dress.

The hem drags in the water, and she walks down into it without slowing or stopping to brace for the cold.

Atlas sees her a second after I do. "Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me. Get out of the water! Get your hands away from it, Helena, I swear to God!"

Felix is already up and running along the steps towards her with his arm out, his shoes slapping the wet stone. "Helena! Hi! Hey! Whatever this is, can we talk about it first? Because I can't see anything that happens after this, which means I've got no idea how this goes, which means neither do you, and I really think that's a reason to stop and have a little chat⁠—"

Callum is trying to get his feet under him on the bottom step, and they keep sliding out from under him.

"Helena—" My mouth is so numb her name comes out wrong. "Helena, don't⁠—"

I'm still saying her name when she puts her hands in.

I see it before I feel it. The water around her wrists goes white, a skin of light crackling out across the surface from her hands, and under it, all the way down, the knot I've been picking at all night lights up like a fist of hot wire. Every thread in it swings towards her at once.

Then the whole black face of the Well tilts. I know water can't do that, and it does it anyway, sloping down towards Helena as if she's lifted the far edge of the world, so that the cold climbs my ribs on that side.

Then the pull comes through the water and into me. It drags at my heart until it stumbles, and I get a quick, sick picture of the next minute: the water tipping, and all of us sliding down it towards her.

I grab it back.

I don't even decide to. I take hold of the Well from my end of the steps with everything I have left, all four at once, the way Helena taught me to hold a spell steady while I take it apart. It's a tug-of-war, and the Well is the rope. Helena leans back and pulls, and the whole thing lurches towards her.

"Let go, little grim," she calls across the water. "It's done."

"No!" I dig in harder. "Put it down, Helena!"

My right hand won't close. I tell it to, and it just hangs open under the water, and the Well slides through it the way the threads did all night, so that the only grip I've got is my left. Helena pulls again. The slope of the water steepens, and I'm dragged a step sideways along the stone before Atlas plants his feet and hauls me back.

"Ev, let go of it!" Atlas is yelling right in my ear. "Let go!"

"I can't!" I scream it back at him. "If I let go she gets all of it!"

He can't throw anything at her, either. I feel him want to through the thread between us, the storm he's been holding in all night shoving at the inside of his skin, and I feel him stop himself, because lightning in this water goes through me first.

"Fuck!" he shouts at no one. Then he throws wind instead.

It comes off his free hand far too big, and it tears across the surface of the Well in a sheet of spray that hits Helena full in the face and blows her dress out behind her. Her hair whips straight back from her head. She bends into the wind with her eyes shut and her hands still in the water, and she keeps pulling.

Felix has stopped running. He's down on one knee on the steps with his deck fanned in his hand, and I can see him looking at the cards and getting nothing back. "Okay. Okay, I'm guessing, Ev, I want you to know this is purely a guess—" He snaps a card off the top of the deck at the step under Helena's feet, and I feel the chaos go out of him all at once, with nothing aiming it.

It lands on the wrong step. The lamp flame jumps up tall and blue, the rest of his deck sprays out of his hand across the steps, and the stone under Felix's own foot skids. He goes down hard on his hip at the edge of the Well, half in it.

"Wrong one!" he yells, spitting water. "That was the wrong step, that's on me, I'm so sorry⁠—"

Ren takes his hand off my back.

I feel him go. He's reaching past me across the water, and through the thread between us I feel him find Helena's heart, slow and steady and very old, and close his blood magic around it and squeeze. A dark line runs out of Helena's nose and over her lip. She doesn't even lift a hand to wipe it.

Without Ren holding it, my heart stumbles in the cold, then drags, and grey comes in at the edges of everything.

"Ren!" Atlas bellows. "Her heart! Get back on her fucking heart!"

Ren's hand slaps back down flat between my shoulder blades, and his magic floods in and grabs hold of my pulse, so hard it hurts. "Ev. Ev, where are you?"

"Here." I'm breathing so fast I can barely get it out.

"Who's here?"