Page 28 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The lobby is lit. There's a young warden at the front desk with a stylus tucked behind his ear and a crossword in front of him, and he stands up when we come out of the stairwell, because even under Callum's shadow, two people limping across a marble floor make plenty of noise.

Felix is leaning against the noticeboard by the front doors with his deck in his hand, like a student waiting on a friend who's running late. He doesn't look at us. He flips one card off the top. That's how chaos magic works: a card turns over and something unlikely happens nearby, and Felix doesn't always get to pick which unlikely thing.

The noticeboard comes off the wall behind him and lands flat on the marble with a bang like a gunshot, thumbtacks bouncing everywhere. The warden nearly jumps out of his skin, and so do I.

"Not that one," Felix mutters, and flips another.

The phone on the front desk rings. The warden stares at it, then picks it up, says "Wardens' Hall," and turns his back to listen to whoever isn't on the other end of it.

"Ladies," Felix says, holding the front door for us, and Atlas tells him to fuck off on the way through.

The air outside is cold on my face, and the grass of the quad is soft and wet under my boots. Halfway across it Ren comes up out of the dark on my other side and puts his hand on the back of my neck. My heart has been trying to climb out of my mouth since the review room. Under his fingers it slows down, beat by beat, until I can feel my legs again.

"She's all right," he tells Atlas. "Her heart's all right. The knee is bruised, not broken. Keep going."

So much for walking in alone.

My hands don't stop shaking until we're inside Concordia, where Everly is waiting in the foyer. She doesn't say anything at all, just puts her arms around me and holds on.

They hide me in Concordia.

By Saturday morning I'm officially missing. There's a notice pinned up outside the dining hall, and Felix walks past it under Callum's shadows and brings it back to me word for word in his best administrative voice. "Brittany Leigh failed to appear for her review. There has been an incident. Anyone who sees her is to report it to the wardens."

According to the administrative office, then, I'm not the one who caused the incident. The incident just happened, the way a gravy boat falls off a stand.

I move into the little room next to Nell's. It has a narrow iron bed, a desk with one short leg, and a window that looks out at the side of Callister House, which is kind of strange, since no one in Callister can see this building at all. Loki comes with me and curls up on the end of the bed, and Poe takes the curtain rod.

Herbert comes last. Ren goes to Bellamy for him after dark and carries his tank up Concordia's stairs very carefully, holding it level the whole way, before setting it down on the desk. Herbert goes straight to the corner, turns his back on all of us and sulks. He won't come out for anything, not even crickets, and I don't blame him.

Everly finds me on Saturday night sitting on the bed with a bag of frozen peas on my knee, which has gone purple, and my hands in my lap, staring at them.

She leans in the doorway a while before she says anything. She's wearing one of Atlas's sweatshirts with the sleeves rolled up and up, a mug of tea in each hand, and she sets one down on the desk next to Herbert's tank without asking if I want it.

"You can see Concordia."

"Yes."

"You walked in here on your own. You took Poe off Wheeler's spell and made him yours. You did blood magic in the fall, and storm yesterday." She sits down beside me, and the old springs creak. "Brit."

"I know what you're going to say."

"I'm not going to say anything you haven't already written down."

Well, that's fair. I look at my hands. They're just hands, and they've been failing practicals since I was eighteen. In the spring I wrote I might not be failing their test on the inside cover of my notebook, in pencil, very small, and I didn't show it to anyone. I've been carrying it around ever since, a stone in my shoe I couldn't stop walking on.

"I'm a grimoire."

It comes out flat. I don't make it weird, and neither does Everly. She puts her arm around my shoulders and leans her head against mine, and we sit there on the narrow bed while the tea goes cold on the desk.

Eventually, Herbert comes out of the corner of his tank and walks up the glass to look at us.

"Took you long enough," I tell him.

10

EVERLY

The term ends on a Wednesday. We spend that whole night getting the Well out of Nell.