Page 43 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Ren looks at me across the table. Then he picks up a pen, pulls the legal pad towards him, and turns it to a clean page.

14

ATLAS

Nell is a fast learner. Way too fast.

We're up on the roof after breakfast, before it gets too hot, on the flat part between the chimneys where the slate levels out. Someone a long time ago put down a strip of tar paper up here that's gone soft and sticky in the sun, and it smells like hot tar and pigeon shit and, when the wind's right, the lake.

Nell sits cross-legged on it in a pair of Brittany's shorts that are too big for her, hands on her knees. From up here you can see the whole campus laid out green and empty, Callister next door with its shades drawn and the spires of Fulmen on the hill to the north, and no one down there can see us. As far as the rest of Nyxhaven knows, Concordia is just a lawn.

"Breathe in," I tell her. "Feel where it is."

Nell shuts her eyes. "It's kind of everywhere."

I crouch down in front of her. "Yeah. That's the problem. Pick one place—your hands. Put it all in your hands."

Frowning, concentrating, she puts it in her hands.

I can feel it even from across the roof. The pressure drops, and the air between the chimneys goes thick and close, summer-storm heavy. A pigeon on the next chimney over takes one look at her and leaves. Nell holds it there, hands cupped in front of her, arms shaking.

"Good. Now let it go into the roof. Slow, like letting the air out of a tire."

"How do I⁠—"

I put my palm flat on the slate to show her. "Put your hands down flat. Let it run out of your palms and into the slate. You don't push it, you just stop holding on and let it drain."

She puts her palms down on the roof and lets it out slowly. The slate buzzes so hard under her hands that I feel it in my feet through my sneakers, then it settles, and the static goes out of the air all at once. My hair lies back down.

Nell opens her eyes, lets out her breath, and grins at me. "I did it."

"Yeah." I can't help it—I grin right back. "You did really good."

"Can I do it again?"

"That's the whole job. You do it again every day until you don't have to think about it."

She needs it. She came into her magic all at once in July, all four kinds, and she doesn't know what to do with any of it. She makes the kitchen faucet run when she's nervous and the lights flicker when she laughs, which is a lot, because Felix lives here. The other day she sneezed in the upstairs hall and every window on the third floor rattled in its frame, and Callum came out of the study looking like he'd been shot at.

I know what that's like. I was a little kid when mine started, a storm in me bigger than I was and no one around to show me where to put it, so it went into lamps, car batteries and whatever I was holding when I got pissed off.

She does it again. The second time she lets it out too fast, and somewhere below us there's a crack of thunder out of a clear blue sky. Then Ren's voice floats up from the garden, very calm, asking whether we could please not rain on the blood lesson. Nell claps her hand over her mouth. I lean over the edge of the roof and tell Ren to build a bridge and get over it.

"Atlas." He doesn't even raise his voice. He doesn't have to. "Brittany has an open cut on her finger. If it fills up with rainwater, I'll close it, and then I'll come up there and find out how slow I can make your heart go before you fall asleep on the slate. I've always wanted to know."

Nell laughs so hard the lights come on in the kitchen.

"He's bluffing," I tell her.

He isn't. Ren never bluffs.

Afterward we sit with our backs against the chimney where the bricks are warm and split the thermos of iced tea Everly sends up with us. Nell pulls her knees up to her chin. Down in the garden I can hear Ren telling Brittany to do it again.

"The magic is so loud now. Since you all got the Well out of me." She picks at a bubble in the tar paper with her thumbnail. "In my head, all the time. Before that it was quiet, and I liked it quiet. I know I'm not supposed to."

I don't know what to say to that. Everly would know. Everly would say exactly the right thing and then probably bake her something.

"When I was a kid I got hit in the head with a baseball," I offer. "Everything went quiet for a whole afternoon. Best afternoon of my life. I still wouldn't do it again."