Page 17 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Later, when the others are asleep, Felix comes and sits down next to me on the floor between the beds.

For a while he doesn't say anything, just shuffles, the cards riffling softly in the dark, the only sound besides Atlas snoring and the ice machine grinding away outside. Callum and Everly are asleep in the other bed, her face pressed into his neck, his arm over her waist. One of his shadows has wandered over on its own and draped itself across her feet, keeping them covered.

I listen to all of them. Atlas's heart is slow and enormous while Callum's runs cool and even, the same as his voice. Everly's is the one I'd know anywhere, and through the thread between us I can feel her dreaming, though not what about.

"The twelve percent," Felix murmurs.

On Ev's floor, the night before the gates, he told us he'd seen a future where he dies, and he put it at twelve percent. I wait for the rest. With Felix, the rest always comes if you leave enough quiet for it.

"It's still there... in what I can see now." He cuts the deck without looking at it. "Everything's blurrier and out of order, and I can't put a number on it anymore. But the one I told you about on Ev's floor keeps turning up."

His heart doesn't change when he says it, which is how I know he's been carrying it by himself long enough to get used to it.

"Okay," I say.

"Callum said he'd break both my hands if I didn't tell you."

"I know. I heard him." Callum hadn't bothered to lower his voice.

"So I'm telling you." He riffles the cards again. "Now you know. Congratulations."

"Does Ev know it's still there?" I ask quietly.

The cards stop moving. "No. She thinks the hill fixed it, and she's not going to find out otherwise." He keeps his eyes on the deck. "She's got enough to carry. She'd try to fix it, and she can't, and then she'd have that to carry too."

"Then I won't tell her," I say. "But you tell me. If it gets worse or closer, you tell me that same night."

"That's a lot of conditions."

"That's the deal." I don't look away from him. "Take it or I wake Callum up and let him break your hands after all."

He's quiet for a while, cutting the deck. "Fine. Then you don't tell anyone you've stopped sleeping through lunch."

I don't say anything.

"You used to give Wheeler everything you had and pass out until dinner. You've closed every cut in this motel, and you haven't taken a single nap." He turns a card over and looks at it. "It doesn't cost you anything anymore, does it?"

"Not the way it used to," I admit. "Sometimes it runs out for a while and everything goes quiet. But I'm not grey, and I'm not sleeping through lunch."

"Does Ev know?"

"No," I tell him, and it sounds worse out loud than it did in my head.

"Look at us. A couple of liars." He grins down at the cards. "I'd put money on us, if I could still see where the money goes."

I reach over and put my hand on his ankle, the same as I did on Everly's floor the night before the gates, when he told all of us for the first time. Under my fingers his pulse comes up steady and a little too fast. For days I couldn't have felt that, but now I can feel it all the way up my arm, and I sit there on the motel carpet with my hand on him and listen to it go.

7

FELIX

Ican see the future again, sort of.

"Well, what do you see?" Atlas asks me. "When we go over the wall?"

We're parked on a farm road outside Nyxhaven with the engine off, the windows fogging up from all of us breathing in a car built for a family of soccer fans. The 4Runner smells of cold pizza and wet wool and the vanilla air freshener Brittany hung from the mirror, which gave up somewhere around Linden Falls. Through the windshield there's a field, then a line of black trees, and past the trees, the faint orange glow of the campus lamps.

"A dog," I tell him.