Page 53 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

For a second no one says anything. Then Ren says, "She's right," very softly. "I listen to Nell's heart at breakfast. When she held all four this morning, it jumped, and it didn't settle for a long while after. I don't know what it does in a courtyard full of wardens with the sphere right there, and I don't want to find out with her standing on the platform."

"Agreed," Callum says, without looking up from his notebook.

Atlas turns on him. "Course you agree. You'd wrap everyone you like up in shadow and stick them in a cupboard if you could get away with it."

"Only the ones I'd like to keep alive, Knox." Callum turns a page. "You're welcome to the rest."

"For the record," Felix says, "I also don't mind staying home."

"You're coming," Callum tells him.

"I was afraid of that."

Brittany picks her spoon back up. "We'll make popcorn," she tells Nell. "We'll watch something terrible and wait by the phone like the wives in a war movie."

Atlas lets his breath out through his nose. He looks at me for a long moment, and the spark between his knuckles goes out. "Fine," he says. "But when this is over, she comes on the next one."

"Deal," I say, and I mean it.

The night before enrollment, Felix finds me on the roof.

I'm sitting in the flat part between the chimneys where Atlas teaches Nell in the mornings. The slate is warm from the day, and I've got my knees pulled up, with one of the scratchy wool blankets from the hall closet around my shoulders.

Down on the quad the first-years are having a welcome party, with string lights in the trees and music thumping out of someone's speaker, and sometimes a whole crowd of them cheers at once, loud enough to carry all the way up here.

Before I came up, I looked in on Nell. She was asleep on her side with the lamp still on and a paperback open face down on her chest, and I took it off her, marked her page with a receipt, and turned out the lamp. Her room smelled like the vanilla lotion Brittany keeps stealing for her. She didn't wake up.

Callum is out somewhere. The thread between us runs off south across campus and stays still, which is how it feels when he's concentrating, and I've just decided not to worry about it. Yeah, I know how that sounds.

The roof hatch creaks open behind me. Felix climbs out, crosses the slate in his socks without looking down, and drops onto the roof beside me with his deck already out. I hold up one side of the blanket for him, he gets under it, and for a while we just sit there shoulder to shoulder, listening to someone down on the quad try to start a chant that no one else joins.

"I keep seeing Nell."

All at once I'm scared, my stomach dropping so fast that the warm slate under me feels cold. "Seeing her how?"

"In a courtyard. On her own." He turns a card over in his fingers without looking at it. "That's all of it. It's just one flash, and it keeps coming back—stone, and a roof along one side held up on columns, and Nell standing in the middle of all that stone by herself."

"Tomorrow?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I think so? It's tangled up with all the enrollment flashes, and those are a mess." He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Last week I watched Atlas eat pancakes for what felt like an entire afternoon."

"Did he eat pancakes?"

"He ate the whole stack. I was really proud of myself."

A breath huffs out of me, and he smiles, but the card in his hand has stopped moving, pinned flat against his knee under his thumb.

I think about it. Nell isn't coming with us tomorrow, because I said so.

"That's good, though," I say slowly. "If she's on her own, then no one's got hold of her. No wardens, no Catalina."

Felix turns the card over again. It's the queen of cups, from the tarot cards in his deck.

"Yeah." He looks at it a while longer. "I guess that's what it means."

He doesn't sound sure, and I'm not sure either. It's one flash of a courtyard, I tell myself. This school is practically made of courtyards. I'm still scared, and when I reach for him through the bond there's fear in it, low and unhappy, that he isn't letting show on his face.

"Felix." I nudge his knee with mine under the blanket. "What else are you seeing?"