Page 64 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

I stand there and let a whole class walk past me. The girl with the ponytail who went up first yesterday is yawning into her hand and frowning at her map, and she passes so close that her backpack brushes Callum's shadow. I feel it pull right under her ribs, patient, steady.

The boy who bites his nails goes by, then a kid grinning at his phone, then two girls holding hands, and every one of them has it.

The rune is working. It's draining their magic down into the Well a little at a time, the way Wheeler drained Nell all last spring with his mensura. Soon they'll be tired, and before long they'll be too tired to wonder why.

I feel sick.

By the library steps, a handful of first-years stand apart from the others, close together, talking over each other. Their blazers fit and their shoes are polished. One of the boys has the Bolingbroke cheekbones, the same sharp, clean lines as Callum's, so he has to be a cousin. He's leaning on the railing like he paid for it.

I listen to them.

Their blood sits still in them, with nothing pulling on it.

They're the families' children. They're laughing on the library steps with nothing tied to them, while every other kid on this lawn has a line running out of them into the ground.

I go back the long way, off the main path and through the Eastern Courtyard, the old one with the covered walkway along one side and the stone benches no one ever sits on.

It's empty. The bench Atlas blew apart is gone, the gravel already swept up. I crouch where Nell stood with my hand on the flagstone and reach, and there's no trace of her heart in the stone, only the magic, which is in this stone the same as in every other stone on campus. I stay there until a pair of upperclassmen cut through the walkway arguing about a quiz, and then I get up.

I cut back across the lawn behind the library, and I see the rain before I hear it. From out here there's no house at all, just the gap between two buildings where everyone else sees a hedge and a strip of lawn, and over that gap a low grey cloud sits by itself in a clear blue sky, raining straight down. The grass under it is flattened and dark.

A first-year girl with a campus map has stopped at the edge of it. She puts her hand out into the rain, pulls it back wet, and looks up at the cloud and then around at the sun on everything else, with her mouth open.

I stop beside her inside Callum's shadow, close enough to hear her pulse speed up. Walk away. Please, just decide it's the sprinklers and walk away. She shakes the water off her fingers, frowns at her map, and goes on towards the dining hall, looking back over her shoulder at the cloud as she goes. Over at the fountain, none of the wardens are looking this way yet, but sooner or later one of them is going to wonder why a rain cloud is sitting over an empty strip of lawn.

I walk into the rain and up Concordia's front steps, and Callum's shadow slides off my shoulders in the foyer. In the kitchen the rain is still drumming on the roof, and Callum hasn't moved, the pen still in his hand.

I sit down across from him.

"It's all of them," I tell him. "Every first-year has the rune on them. I can feel it pulling at their blood. Except the family kids."

Callum closes the notebook. "How long?"

"Nell lasted a spring." I rest my hands on the table. The wood is cold. "And Wheeler was only taking a little from her, until she couldn't say no to it anymore. This is slower, because it's spread out over all of them and takes less from each one." I look down at my hands. "It'll be longer than a spring. Years, maybe. It takes a little at a time until there's almost nothing left, and then they burn out and die."

"Then we get it out of them before any of them get near the end."

He says it the same way he says everything, as if it's already decided, and his shadows lift off the floor a little, the first time they've moved all morning.

"Callum." I don't know how to start, so I just say it. "I'm scared for Ev. I stood outside her door this morning, and her heart doesn't sound like hers. She's the one who gets us up off the floor every time, and I don't know who gets her up."

He looks at the ceiling, as if he can see through it to her room. "We do."

"I don't know how." My hands are flat on the cold wood, and I can't make them stop pressing down. "I listened to Nell's heart every morning all summer, Callum. And yesterday, when it mattered, I was standing in that amphitheater listening to a ball of glass."

"So was I. So were all of us." His voice is still level, but he reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine, which I don't think he's ever done. It's cool and steady, and it stays. "Don't try to fix her. You can't, and she'd hate you for it. Just be on the other side of that door when she opens it."

I look at his hand on mine. Then I get up, go upstairs, and sit down on the floor outside Everly's door with my back against the wood. Her heart is still going slow and heavy on the other side of it.

"I'm right here, Ev," I tell the door. "I'm going to sit here until you open it, and you know I'm more stubborn than I look."

21

EVERLY

It's been raining on the roof over my head all day, and it isn't raining anywhere else.

Past the gutter, the sky over the quad is clear and going purple, but over Concordia the clouds hang so low they could be sitting on the chimneys. Atlas is up there in it.