Page 52 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The library is dark except for one lamp over the circulation desk. He takes me around the side to a basement door with its latch taped flat, the one Brittany uses when she steals paperbacks, and holds it open for me with great courtesy.

Inside it smells of old paper, floor wax and dust, and I've missed that smell more than I knew. The long reading tables are empty under the dark windows, with their green lamps switched off. I run my hand along the back of a chair.

"I want to sit down and complain about a paper," I whisper. "Isn't that stupid?"

"No." Callum looks at the tables, not at me. "I came here every night my first year. It's the only building on campus my mother has never set foot in. She considers reading something other people do on her behalf."

It's the most he's ever told me about being a first-year. I can picture him at one of these tables, younger and already in a pressed shirt, reading until the porter threw him out, in the one place she would never come looking for him.

He leads me up a narrow iron staircase to the third floor and along a row of shelves to the back corner, where he runs a finger along the spines without looking and stops on one. It's small and old, bound in faded green cloth, with a Nyxhaven bookplate inside the cover. It's a Latin grammar.

"Your father taught you Latin off trivia cards," he says. "It shows. You decline nouns like a game-show contestant guessing."

I laugh out loud. He puts his hand over my mouth, and that's when the lantern comes up the stairs.

It's a warden on his rounds. The light climbs the iron steps and comes along the end of our row, and Callum's shadows thicken around us until I can't see my hands. His other hand stays flat between my shoulder blades, cool and steady. The lantern light slides across the shelves and over us and doesn't stop. The warden tries the door of a study room, rattles it, yawns, and goes back down. I let my breath out against Callum's palm.

"Sorry," I whisper when he takes his hand away.

"Don't be. It was a reasonable response to the insult."

On the way out he stops at the circulation desk, finds the date stamp in the drawer without looking, and stamps the card in the back of the book. Then he writes my name on the card in his small slanted hand. The book is due back in the middle of October.

"I'm expelled," I remind him. "I can't check out books."

"Students return their books on time." He hands it to me. "So you'll have to be one again by October."

"Callum, I don't think that's how it works."

"It's how it's going to work." He says it in his usual voice, flat and certain. "When this is finished, you'll come back here and sit at one of those tables and complain about a paper. I intend to see to it."

I hold the little green book against my chest all the way home. In the morning Brittany writes in Callum's box on the fridge, library (crime). Callum reads it over his tea and doesn't cross it out.

A few nights before enrollment, we're at the kitchen table going over the plan one more time, and Atlas finally says what he's been chewing on all week.

"Nell should come with us."

Nell is at the end of the table with a paperback open beside a bowl of peaches, and she looks up. Brittany puts her spoon down.

"She's stronger than any of us except Ev," Atlas goes on. He's leaning forward with his forearms on the table, and a spark keeps ticking between his knuckles that he rubs out with his thumb. "She held all four this morning, and the slate barely hummed. If the wardens close in on that platform, she could drop a storm on the whole courtyard. She could actually help."

"No," I say.

He looks at me. "You haven't even heard the rest of it."

"I heard it. No." My heart is pounding, and I make myself say the rest out loud, so everyone at this table hears it. "The wardens have been looking for her for months. Wheeler drained her for a whole term, and the Well had its hooks in her right up until we pulled them out. If she walks into that courtyard, any warden who casts a finding spell is going to find her first, and then so will Catalina. I'm not walking her into a crowd of styluses and hoping she walks back out."

"I'd be right next to her the whole time⁠—"

"So would I, and I'd still be scared out of my mind." It comes out louder than I mean it to. "I'm scared for her all the time, Atlas. I want her in the one building on this campus no warden can see, and I want her here when we get home."

"She's not glass, Ev." He says it quietly, and that's worse than if he'd yelled. "I've been up on that roof with her all summer. She's tougher than she looks, and she's sick of being the girl everyone has to carry. You lock her up in here and she's going to think that's all she is."

That one hurts, because he might be right. I look down the table at Nell. She's turning a peach around in her fingers, and she doesn't look upset at all.

"I don't mind," she says. "Really. I don't mind staying."

"Not this time," I tell Atlas. "She stays here with Brittany and Poe and the doors shut. That's my call, and I'm making it."