Page 42 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Honey?" The woman in the straw hat is holding something up over her cash box. "This one yours? It was in with my fives."

It's the jack of diamonds.

Felix laughs, startled, before he can stop himself. He goes and gets the card, thanks her, and sits back down holding it.

"She told me the trick's only any good if you don't know where the card's going to turn up," he says. "That's the chaos part. Then my sight came, the same year, and after that I always knew. I'd do it for people and watch them be surprised, and I'd already watched them be surprised before I started."

"And today?"

"Today I had no idea." He turns the jack over in his fingers. He's smiling, but his hand isn't quite steady. "I don't know what to do with my face when I don't know how something ends, Ev. I never had to learn."

I take the card out of his fingers and put it in my shirt pocket, and he lets me.

When we get home with the basket, Brittany looks at the peaches, then at the sunburn on my nose, and adds a new row at the bottom of the schedule on the fridge: EVERLY'S SOCIAL CALENDAR. She writes pancakes in Ren's box and fruit in Felix's, then leaves Atlas's and Callum's empty.

"I'm keeping records," she says. "Someone in this house has to."

"I'm not going to be managed by a refrigerator," Callum says. The next morning I catch him reading it over his tea. Atlas looks at his empty box for a long time and doesn't say anything at all.

The rune is in Wheeler's notes.

Ren and I go through them again at the kitchen table one night in August, since it's too hot to sleep. Everyone else has gone to bed.

Ren has his phone propped against the sugar bowl with the photos he took last spring of the notes in Wheeler's desk. Every page is the same rune drawn over and over in Wheeler's neat hand, lines added, crossed out, then added back. Ren has the clearest one copied out on a legal pad, and he's frowning over it stroke by stroke.

"He didn't finish it," he says, without looking up. "He told me on the stairs."

Wheeler died on those stairs holding Ren's hand. Ren doesn't talk about it.

"He said Catalina had his drafts," Ren goes on. "He said she'd finish it."

"So she has."

"I'd swear to it. And she has Noah now—he could finish it in his sleep."

I think about Noah letting Brittany go at the review board. I don't know why he did it, or whether he even meant to.

I keep swiping through the photos. In the corner of one page there's a small drawing of Concordia with the Well at the bottom of it and thin threads drawn running down to it from every building on campus. Under the drawing, in pencil so faint I have to tip the phone towards the lamp, Wheeler has written a note to himself and underlined it twice: must be ready before next enrollment.

I read it again, and then I think about my own enrollment day.

I think about Nexus Courtyard, packed and hot, the whole incoming class on the benches, and every one of them walking down to the platform to put a hand on the testing sphere. No one gets out of it. I don't know yet how you'd hide a rune in that, but if I wanted to put something on every new student at Nyxhaven at once, that's where I'd do it.

"Ren." I turn the phone around and push it across the table to him. "Look at the bottom. Under the drawing."

He reads it and goes still.

"Enrollment is the last week of August," I tell him. "It was the last week of August for me. It was so hot my cookies melted in the car."

I get up and go to the hardware-store calendar by the fridge, which no one has turned since March, and flip it to August. The last week of the month has a school bus printed across the bottom, with a little cartoon apple. I put my finger on it.

"There. That's when she's going to do it."

That's no time at all. It's barely enough time to panic properly.

I look down at the rune on his phone and imagine it on every first-year who walks through those gates this fall. I imagine them the way I was: getting out of the car with a polka-dot suitcase and a Tupperware full of cookies, too excited to sleep the night before, my mom crying in the parking lot and pretending it was allergies. Every eighteen-year-old who's proud to be here, whose parents just kissed them goodbye and drove home, drained a little every day for years, until there's almost no magic left in them and they burn out and die, as surely as severing would have killed the guys if Helena hadn't found us.

"Then that's what we're doing," I say. "Catalina's going to put this on every one of them, and we're going to stop her at enrollment."