Page 51 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Eustace brings the Storm Daughters. Tamsin, a girl with a nose ring and a laugh you can hear across a parking lot, brings half the Chance Dealers. And the second-year from Vitae who wants to be a doctor brings a handful of her friends to the Stag, one of whom has a little sister enrolling this fall.

The back room of the Stag smells like spilled beer and fryer oil, and the table is so sticky my sleeves cling to it every time I lift my arms. Cases of beer are stacked against the wall behind me, and a neon sign buzzes in the window.

The Vitae kids sit very straight on one side of the table in their blazers. The guys sit on the other side, wrapped in Callum's shadows, so anyone glancing through the door would see a few college kids and some empty chairs. The girl whose sister is enrolling has a paper napkin in her hands, and by the time I've finished explaining what the rune does, she's shredded it into strips.

"She's going to put her hand on that thing. On Friday."

"Not if we can help it," I tell her.

"She's been practicing her signature for her dorm forms all summer. She did a whole page of them." She lays the strips of napkin side by side on the sticky table, lining them up. "She's so excited. She thinks it's going to be the best day of her life."

I thought the same thing once, but I don't say so. Under the table Felix's knee presses against mine while his deck moves through his fingers without a sound, and through the bond I can feel how hard he's working, a strain that never lets up. He's looking at every one of them. He's been doing it at every meeting, hunting through their futures for the flash that says this one is going to turn on us.

On the walk back to campus, through the dark with the crickets going in the ditches, I finally ask him what he saw.

"Plenty. That's the problem." He shuffles one-handed. "Everyone in that room hurts us in some future or other, and maybe half of them do it by accident. I can't really tell which flashes mean they'd sell us out and which mean they'd trip over a curb at the wrong moment." The cards riffle together. "It's a lot of curbs, Ev."

"Someone's going to sell us out."

Callum says it to the kitchen table at large, past midnight, after another late meeting at the Stag. The window over the sink is open to the bugs and the dark. Brittany has her feet up on a chair. Nell went to bed hours ago, and I can hear the old pipes knock overhead when she turns over.

"The only question is who," he goes on, "and how much they have to sell."

He has a notebook open in front of him, the kind with a plain black cover, and he's been writing in it since the very first meeting. When he turns it around so we can see, his handwriting is small and neat and slanted, every line ruled straight.

There's a page for every person we've talked to, with their name and house at the top, tidy columns underneath: what they know and what they don't, who they live with, who they eat lunch with, who they've been seen talking to.

"Everyone we've told anything goes in here."

Felix leans over to look, then leans back again. "That's kind of creepy."

"That's my mother's method." He doesn't sound proud of it. "She kept a book like this on every family that ever sat at her table. She never once had to guess who would turn on her, because she'd written down what each of them wanted long before they knew it themselves. I hated those books when I was a boy. They work."

Felix leans in again. "Do I have a page?"

"You're not someone we've told things to."

"That's not a no."

Callum turns the notebook back around and goes on writing. Felix grins at me across the table, and through the bond, from Callum's end, comes a small warm burst of pleasure that never gets anywhere near his face.

We let him keep writing.

We're careful after that, more careful than I've ever been about anything in my life. No one gets the whole plan. Eustace knows one part, Tamsin knows another, and the Vitae kids know a third, but none of them know about Concordia, or Nell, or that there's a building beside Callister House at all.

Brittany draws it all out on the back of a cereal box so we can see who has which piece, then burns the box in the sink and tells Herbert he didn't see anything.

At every meeting after that, Callum sits a little apart from the rest of us with his black notebook open on his knee, and Felix studies every face across the table. I keep an eye on Felix's hands, because his cards go still when a flash shows him someone turning on us. They keep moving through every meeting, at least.

Callum must have seen me at the window on move-in day, because a few nights later he knocks on my door after midnight, in a pressed shirt with a sweater over it.

"Put on shoes," he says. "And something with sleeves. It's cold in the stacks."

"What stacks?"

He doesn't answer, which is how I know he's pleased with himself.

We cross the quad under his shadows. The first-years have moved in, so there are lights on all over campus now, a warden by the fountain with his lantern, and some boys on the Ossium steps passing a bottle back and forth. They look straight at us and see nothing. The shadows keep trying to drift off towards the music, and Callum keeps pulling them back with a small, irritated twitch of his fingers.