Page 82 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"You said you went looking for someone," I say finally.

Helena looks past me at the stairs for a long moment.

"When the Well filled that day, it was fuller than it's been since 1930." She says it to the stairs, not to me. "I waited all summer for your bond to get strong enough to open it, so I could reach in and bring Cordelia out of the cold. When it filled, I didn't wait anymore. I reached down into it for her that night, the way I did every day I hung in the dark, and I found her." Her voice goes very quiet. "She's still there. She's old now, the way I'm old, and the Well has hold of her all the way through. If I lift her out, it will tear her apart. If I leave her, it will keep her forever."

She's quiet for a moment.

"Marjorie came down the cellar stairs in the morning and asked me if I'd found her," she says. "I told her yes, and then I sat on the cellar floor and cried until noon. I hadn't cried since 1930."

I think about the speech I rehearsed at a red light on the way to Linden Falls, the part about Cordelia I was so proud of, and I'm ashamed that I ever wanted to use her name as a weapon.

"I'm sorry," I tell her, and I'm surprised to find I mean it.

"I didn't come here for that." She turns back to me, and the grief in her face is gone. "You're taking the rune out of them. One at a time."

"Yes," I say, and wait for the rest of it.

"How many have you done?"

"Brittany keeps count," I tell her. "Just ask her if you want a number. She'll make you sign something first."

"You'll never do enough." She says it flatly. "It's a whole class, and you're one girl, and every one of them costs you a night. By the time you've done half of them, the first ones will be back on the list, because Catalina will put the rune on them again. And there's another class next fall. And the one after that."

"I know. She told me so herself, over tea."

Brittany knows it too. She's been working it out on the back pages of her notebook when she thinks I'm not looking.

"There's a faster way," Helena says.

"No," I say, before she can finish.

"You haven't heard it," she says mildly.

"I don't need to hear it," I shoot back. I've known what she came here to say since the second I opened the door. "You want to tear the Well down. If there's no Well, the rune has nothing to drain them into, and every first-year goes free at once."

"Yes," she says, as if I've passed a test.

"And everyone else loses their magic. Every Tempest kid with a conductor and every Sanguis kid with a knife—you'd be doing to the whole school what the wardens did to the guys at the gates."

She doesn't answer that.

"And the guys." My voice wobbles, and I make it stop. "You tied them into the lines that run through the crossing. That's what you did on the hill. If you tear out the Well, you tear up the crossing, and those lines go with it. Don't they?"

Helena doesn't answer right away. She looks past me at the stairs again, towards the second floor, where Ren is lying awake on his mattress, listening to my heartbeat the whole time we talk.

"Those lines would tear," she admits finally. "They'd have only a trickle left, next to nothing."

"So they'd be right back where they were at the gates," I say through my teeth.

"They'd live," she insists. "At the gates their magic was trapped inside them with nowhere to go, and that's what was killing them. This time there wouldn't be enough left in them to hurt them."

I think about Atlas sitting on the hood of the 4Runner with a roll of paper towels in his lap, bleeding through them, and about Felix with his sight back, grinning over the groundskeeper's dog.

"No," I tell her.

"Little grim⁠—"

"No. I'm not doing it, and you're not doing it. I'll get the rune out of them one at a time. I'll go faster."