Page 61 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

Catalina doesn't even flinch. She turns and follows Nell down the covered walkway, a step behind her, as if she were seeing a guest to the door. Under the last arch, in the flagstones, there's an iron hatch, flush with the stone and black with age. I've walked right over it all year and never once noticed it. Nell bends and lifts it by its iron ring as if she's done it every day of her life, and there are steps underneath, going down into the dark.

They go down, and the hatch starts to swing shut over them.

I'm up, with my right arm hanging and my stomach still rolling. I run for the hatch anyway and throw myself at it, and I get my left arm under the edge just before it slams. It comes down on my forearm hard enough to make me yell. Then I shove it up with my good shoulder, and I'm through, half falling down the steps into the dark.

There are stairs. They're wide, shallow and old, cut down through the rock for people walking slowly in a line. This has to be the families' back way down to the Well. Concordia stays hidden from everyone but me, so this is how they bring their sacrifices down. A cold draft comes up it that smells like wet stone. Somewhere far below me I can hear two sets of footsteps, unhurried.

I go down after them in the pitch black with my left hand on the wall, because my right one won't lift past my waist.

Above me the hatch bangs open again, and I hear Atlas swearing, and Ren and Felix calling my name. Then I feel Callum come through behind them, his shadows pouring down the steps past my ankles like water down a drain. So he got away from the amphitheater. The relief is so big that my knees almost give out.

At the bottom of the first flight I come out into the Burial Ground. I know this room. We laid Enya here in the spring, and I've spent all summer on this floor among the tombs, listening to Callum teach death, but I've never come in from this end before. Catalina's footsteps go straight through it without slowing, past the slabs with BOLINGBROKE cut into the lids, out the far end, and down.

The back way comes out on the side of the cavern wall, high up, and I can see the Well below me.

In the spring it came up gold when I put my hands in it. Today it's black and flat and still, and it goes out farther than I can see. Catalina has a lamp now, a small one, and she's at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the broad steps that lead into the water. She hasn't touched Nell once.

Nell is already walking down the steps into the water by herself.

"NELL!"

I take the stairs two and three at a time. They're wet, and Catalina's lamp below throws my shadow up the wall ahead of me, huge and jerking. Halfway down, my foot skids on the slick stone, and I grab for the wall with my right hand out of habit. My shoulder lets go of me in a white flash that turns my stomach over, and I land on my hip and slide down a few steps on it.

Get up. Get up, she's in the water. I get up holding my right arm against my ribs and keep going with my left hand on the wall. The cold in my belly makes my legs heavy and slow, and with every step down the Well's note gets louder, the long low hum it sings to the people it wants.

Catalina doesn't turn around when I come off the last stair. She doesn't try to stop me, either. She just steps back out of my way with her lamp, and I go past her and splash down the steps into the Well.

The cold is exactly as bad as I remember. It knocks all the air out of me. I don't care about that either.

Nell is in up to her chest, standing very still, with her sweater sleeves floating around her wrists. I grab the back of her sweater in my left fist and haul. My right hand won't close properly, so I hook its fingers into her sleeve and pull with that too, and the pain goes all the way up into my neck.

She doesn't move. It's like pulling on a parked car.

"Nell, come on." My voice is cracking all over the place. "Come on, please, walk with me. Just walk backward with me."

"Ev." She turns her head. She's so calm. "Let go. It'll take you too."

I can feel it. The pull in my belly has gone from a hand on my sleeve to an arm around my waist, and the note is singing in my ears, so loud and so kind, telling me I can put everything down and rest.

I go looking for the thread first, the way I did in the spring: the one thread of the Well's spell that was pulling her along, so I can find its end and unwind it. There isn't one. There's no end and no coil, nothing I can get hold of.

So I try the other thing. I reach down for the piece of the Well that's holding her and try to drain it into me the way I took the warden's cold. I pull, and what I get hold of is all of it.

The whole Well is holding her, and it's so much bigger than I am.

The water's up to my chin. I didn't feel myself go deeper.

Then there's an arm around my ribs, solid and hot and crackling, hauling me backward, and Atlas is yelling in my ear: "I've got you! Ev, I've got you, let her go!"

"No! I've almost got her—" I gasp, and get a mouthful of water.

"You don't! Ev, you're going under with her!"

I hold on. My fingers are knotted in her sweater, and I'm not letting go, I'm not, and Atlas is pulling on me, and the Well is pulling on Nell, and I'm the rope between them.

Nell reaches back. She takes my hands in hers, under the water, and her fingers are warm. Then she pries my fingers open, one at a time, very gently, the way you'd take something sharp away from a little kid.

"Go home, Ev," she says. Then she looks past me, at Atlas. "You were a really good teacher."