Page 57 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Every first-year at Nyxhaven gets tested in Nexus Courtyard on enrollment day. I wasn't. My first sphere was in Professor Warrick's class on my third day, and it went four colors and shattered in my hands, and that's how all of this started.

That's where the new first-years will get the rune. It took Ren and me a week bent over Wheeler's notes at the kitchen table to work it out, and once we saw it, it was simple enough that I kind of wanted to throw Ren's phone across the room.

The rune is built right into the testing: every first-year puts a hand on the sphere so it can tell the school what they are, and while it's busy doing that, it puts the rune on them. No one knows it's there. They'll walk out of the courtyard proud and happy with their house assignments. For years they'll just feel a little tired. Then, when their magic is almost gone, they'll burn out and die.

The plan is simple. That's one of Callum's rules: the simpler the plan, the fewer people have to know it.

The Storm Daughters start a fight at the north end of the courtyard, and Tamsin's Chance Dealers make sure every warden on that side of the amphitheater has a reason to look the wrong way.

While everyone's watching the fight, Callum hides Ren and me in his shadows so we can walk right down to the platform, where I put my hands on the sphere to unwind the rune out of it before the first kid ever touches it. That part is mine, because only a grimoire can reach into someone else's spell and pull it apart. Atlas and Felix wait at the top of the benches to get us out.

Nell stays home, and Brittany stays with her. I made sure of it.

Nexus Courtyard is packed by the middle of the morning.

The amphitheater is a big bowl of pale stone sunk into the ground, the benches stepping down in rings to the platform at the bottom, with wide aisles cutting down through the rings like the spokes of a wheel. The first-years sit in the lower rows in blazers so new they still have the fold lines in them, while their parents fill the upper rows, holding up phones and fanning themselves with the welcome booklets.

The four house banners hang off iron poles around the rim, limp, because there's no wind at all to move them. It's sunny and hot, the stone already warm through my jeans. The whole place smells like cut grass, sunscreen, and some dad's cologne, applied with a fire hose. It's all just so normal that I want to scream.

We're sitting at the very top of the east aisle, the guys and me, folded up small inside Callum's shadows, and to anyone looking we're just a patch of shade under the Ossium banner. Callum sits beside me with his eyes half shut, holding the shadow over us. It's cool against my arms, and it won't stay still—one piece keeps sliding off towards a toddler in a sun hat a few rows down, because his magic does things on its own now, and Callum keeps reeling it back.

Down at the front, on the near side of the platform, a handful of first-years sit apart from the rest. Their blazers are better cut, no one is taking their picture, and they're the only kids in the whole amphitheater who look bored. They're the old families' children, the ones the rune won't take, and in my head I've already named them the trust-fund row. Callum glances at them once, and then he doesn't look again.

The sphere sits on its iron stand in the middle of the platform, catching the sun.

I can feel the rune in it even from all the way up here, a line pulled tight, cold and still as death magic. It feels made, like something someone built on purpose, and it's nothing like the magic in the lines under the hill. I put my hand on Ren's knee. He's already listening to it, his pulse going quick and hard through the thread between us.

"It's in there," I whisper.

The Storm Daughters start their fight right on time.

It starts at the north end with a shout and a girl's scream. A gust of wind comes out of a perfectly clear sky and tears the Fulmen banner right off its pole, sending it flapping out over the crowd. Someone's dad grabs for it. Every head in the amphitheater turns north.

Callum's shadows close around Ren and me as we stand up and start down the east aisle. Callum comes partway down behind us to keep the shadow on us, while Atlas and Felix stay at the rim.

The steps are shallow and uneven, worn down in the middle. I keep my eyes on my feet, then the platform, then my feet. We pass a mother holding her phone over her head to film the fight. We pass a boy in a blazer much too big for him, biting his nails, so close that my sleeve brushes his shoulder.

Ren is right behind me with his hand on my back. Rows of first-years go by on either side, and with every step the rune tugs at me harder, almost like the pull of the bond.

We come off the last step onto the platform, where the stone is smooth, polished by every kid who's ever stood on it.

I'm one step from the sphere when I realize the wardens haven't turned around.

There are way too many of them. They're sitting all along the front row in black robes lined with red, more wardens than I've ever seen in one place, more than I knew the school even had, and not one of them is looking north at the fight. They can't see us, and their finding spells can't feel Callum's magic, but Catalina must have told them I'd come for the sphere, because they're looking straight at the patch of air where Ren and I are standing.

Catalina stands on the far side of the platform in her grey coat—in this heat—with her gloved hands folded in front of her.

"Miss Grey." She doesn't raise her voice, or take her eyes off the sphere. "I wondered whether you'd come."

The shadow around us wavers.

"Ev." Ren's mouth is right at my ear, and his voice is shaking. "She knows we're here. They all know. We have to go back up right now, before they close the aisle."

He's right, and I know he's right. But the sphere is one step away, and the first-years are sitting right in front of me with their hands folded in their laps, waiting for their names.

"No," I whisper. "I'm doing it. Keep them off me."

I lunge for the sphere.