Page 72 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

He turns to the last page with writing on it. He added it the night after enrollment, in the same neat hand as the rest. "Noah Bolingbroke," he reads, in exactly the same voice. "Knew I was alive. Knew we knew about the rune."

"Did he know where we'd be?" Brittany asks. "Or when?"

"No. I didn't give him anything he could use." Callum looks at his brother's name for a while. "He'd have had to guess. So would she."

That's all any of them knew. No one had the whole plan. None of them knew about Concordia or had ever come near it, and none of them knew Nell was living with us. When he turns past Noah's page, the next one is blank, and he just stares at it, as if a name might float up through the paper if he waits long enough.

Brittany hasn't said a word since Twenty Questions, which for her is practically a vow of silence. Finally she says, "It wasn't any of them."

"It has to be one of them." He doesn't look up. "She was waiting for us, Brittany. She had every warden on campus sitting in the front row."

"Does it have to be?" Brittany asks. "Or do you just want it to be, because then it's not anyone sitting at this table?"

Callum's pen stops.

She shoves her mug away, all the way to the middle of the table. "She was waiting for Ev. You don't even need a spy to know Ev would try to stop a rune going on a whole class of first-years. She walked into the Well after Nell. Catalina watched the wardens try to sever her at the gates and watched her blood slide right off their styluses." She lifts one shoulder. "There's no version of Ev who stays home. Catalina just had to stand there."

I'm sitting with my hands wrapped around my cold mug, and I can't make my fingers let go of it.

"And Nell..." Brittany's voice catches on the name, and she picks at the skin on her mug with one fingernail until it comes off in a wrinkled sheet. "Catalina's family built the Well. She knew it still had a piece of Nell, and she knew that the first time this house was empty, the Well would walk Nell right out the front door."

I hear Catalina again in the courtyard, bored and sure of herself: I did wonder which of the two you'd pick. "So the rune didn't even matter to her. Not really."

"It mattered." Callum lays his hand flat over the open notebook. "She'd have liked both. But she can put a rune on next year's class whenever she wants, and there's only one Nell."

"So enrollment was—" I start.

"A way to get every one of us out of this house on the same morning." There's no expression on his face at all. "We spent a week hunting for a traitor. Not one of us thought about who we were leaving behind."

He closes the notebook.

I want it to have been someone. God, I want it so badly—Eustace, Tamsin, Twenty Questions, anyone I could go find and scream at until my voice gave out—because at least that would be easier than the truth, which is that it was me.

Brittany looks out the window instead of at me. She knows exactly what I'm thinking, and she lets me think it.

The crickets are going in the garden while the coffee pot ticks as it cools. I sit there and breathe until I can finally let go of the mug.

"Okay," I say.

Brittany turns her head.

"We can't do anything about Nell." My voice is shaking, and I don't care. "But there's a whole class of first-years walking around this campus with that rune in them, and they're still alive. Catalina put it on them so the Well could eat them slowly, where no one would notice. So we take it off. Every kid who has it, one at a time, until her rune doesn't have anyone left to drain. She doesn't get any more of them."

"Fine," Brittany says, as if I've asked her to pick up milk. "I'll make a list."

She takes her mug to the sink, fishes the skin out of it with a spoon, and goes up to bed without looking back at either of us, which is how I know she's trying not to cry in front of us.

Callum doesn't move. He still has his hand flat on the closed notebook, and one of his shadows has crept across the floor and wound itself around my ankle under the table, the way they do now when he isn't paying attention.

"It'll be you," he says. "Every night. Your hands on every one of them."

"I know," I say.

"I was on the stairs when you went into the water after her." He's looking at the notebook, not at me. "I could feel the Well pulling on you through the bond, and I couldn't get down the stairs fast enough, and my mother was standing at the bottom of them with a lamp, watching it happen. She didn't even look worried." His voice stays level, but the hand on the notebook doesn't. "I can't stand on those stairs again, Everly. I don't know how."

I get up and go around the table to him. He tips his head back to look at me, and up close he looks so tired, grey under the eyes, his hair falling into his face where he's been shoving it back all week. I push it back for him and leave my hand there. Even wrecked, he's so beautiful it's almost rude, and I'm a terrible person for noticing at a time like this, but I notice anyway.

"Then don't stand on the stairs," I tell him. "Stay right next to me. When my hands get cold, warm them up."