Page 29 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

All afternoon I stand at one of Concordia's high windows with my forehead on the glass while the campus empties out under it. Students drag suitcases down the paths to the parking lot, wheels rattling on the flagstones, while parents wait by their cars in the sun with their keys in their hands. A Tempest boy chases a lost sheet of paper halfway across the quad before he gives up on it.

A year ago I should have been one of them. Instead I spent the summer running across the country with four boys. My parents still think I'm doing a summer internship—my dad even sent me a link this morning to an article about the best way to negotiate a salary.

None of the people with suitcases glance at the building I'm standing in. They can't see it.

Since Brittany's review, none of us can pretend anymore: Catalina is draining students with her own son sitting at the table, and we're going to stop her.

First, though, we're getting the Well out of Nell.

It's Ren's idea and my hands, but it takes all of us. We set it up in the old common room on the ground floor, because the lines are strongest there, Ren says, right on top of the crossing. When I stand in the middle of the room in my socks, I can feel what he means: magic moving under the floorboards like water running underground, coming up through the soles of my feet and into my knees.

We push the dusty armchairs back against the walls. Atlas carries the heaviest ones, while Felix carries one with great ceremony, then sits in it and refuses to move.

"I'm guarding it," he tells Brittany, right up until she kicks the leg.

Callum rolls up the old rug. Under it the floorboards are dark and worn smooth, with a pale square where the rug has kept the sun off them for decades. Brittany brings down every blanket from the four-poster upstairs and piles them on the floor, then a stack of towels, a basin of water and a box of tissues, which she sets within reach without saying what any of them are for.

Nell lies down on the blankets with her hands folded on her stomach, as calm as if she's about to have her teeth cleaned.

"It's okay," she keeps saying. "It doesn't even hurt. It's not bad."

That's what scares me. My stomach goes tight and sour, and all I can think is, She sounds like I did in the water.

"We still want it out," I tell her.

"I like the quiet."

"You can be quiet after, once it's out of your head."

She looks up at me. Her birthmark is dark high on her cheek, and she's calm, so much calmer than she ever was last fall, when she sat in the back of lectures chewing pen caps and talking too loud in the dining hall. I know what's in there with her, because I felt it too, in the water: the Well, in my head, in my voice, telling me I could put everything down.

Ren kneels at her head and puts his hands on either side of her face, his palms over her ears and his fingers along her jaw. Ren says the Well in her beats like a second heart under her own. He's going to hold her real one steady no matter what the other one does.

Atlas sits down behind me on the floor with his legs on either side of mine, his chest to my back. The last time I pulled on something this big it pulled back, and he's the one who held on to me in the Well and didn't let go. When he puts his hands on my shoulders now, I can feel through the bond that he's scared, even though his hands are steady, and I lean back into him for a moment just to feel how solid he is.

Felix is by the door in the armchair he stole back from Brittany, cards out. When Ren kneels down at Nell's head, Felix says, "Remember to tip your surgeon," and no one even smiles, not Nell, not him. He doesn't try another one.

Brittany sits at the foot of the blankets with her legs crossed and Loki in her lap. "I can't really do anything useful," she announced at dinner, "but I'm staying." She can feel the Well in Nell now too.

"It makes my teeth ache," she tells no one in particular, working her jaw.

Callum kneels on Nell's other side and looks across her at me. "It's going to be cold. The cold came up your arms in the water, and it will again." His voice is quiet. "When it does, give me your hands. I'll keep them working."

"Okay." I close my eyes.

I find it right away.

It's the same thing I saw in the water, the thread coming out of Nell's chest just under her heart, only now, instead of running down into the Well, it's come loose from the water and wound itself up inside her, knotted around and around itself, a ball of yarn the cat got into.

It's singing the long low note I've been hearing in my sleep since the Well. When I touch it, the pull starts low in my belly, a hand closing in my shirt.

You can put it down, it tells me, in my voice. You can put all of it down.

I'm just so tired. I've been tired for months, and for a moment what it says sounds like maybe the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.

"Not tonight," I tell it, out loud, and start to unwind it, pulling it out of her the way I'd drain a spell out of someone.

It's slower work than the water was. All winter on Helena's floor I practiced on her cords until I stopped snapping them. This one was made to stay, and it fights me for every turn.