Page 84 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"What happened?" I ask her, and I'm proud of how steady my voice comes out.

"There was a health check on Monday." She hugs herself tighter. "For all the first-years. The wardens set it up in the dining hall and said that since the magic's so strong this year, they wanted to make sure no one was getting hurt by it. We all had to put our hands on the sphere again, the one from enrollment. Everyone did it. It only took a second." Her chin wobbles. "I was fine on Monday. By Wednesday I couldn't get out of bed for my eight o'clock."

Brittany is standing beside her with her notebook. She doesn't say anything. She just opens it to the first page, to Josie's name with its neat line through it, and her mouth goes flat while she works it out.

Josie isn't the only one. The rune is back in the boy from New Jersey, and the Tempest girl from Vermont, and the twins from Delaware who got the giggles halfway through, and every other name on that list with a line through it—every kid I sat on the floor with until dawn. Catalina put the rune back on all of them in one afternoon, exactly the way she told me she would, with her gloved hands folded on her blotter.

I'm so angry I want to scream. I'm angry at her, and at myself for thinking that going faster would ever be enough. Under the anger, my stomach has gone cold and tight, and my hands won't stop shaking at my sides.

I don't know how to beat someone who can undo all my nights in a single afternoon without even getting up from her desk. What if there isn't a way? What if she just keeps doing this until I fall over, the way she said I would? Stop it, I tell myself. Josie is standing right here. Fall apart later.

"Come in," I tell Josie. "You can lie down. I'm going to take it out again."

Every rune I've taken out of a first-year has had a thread running out of it. I noticed it with Josie the first night, but I was too tired to think about it—there's only so much brain a girl can run on no sleep and stale peanut butter.

Josie doesn't talk this time. She lies on the blankets in the old common room with her hands folded on her stomach and her eyes shut, while Ren kneels at her head with his hands on either side of her face, holding her heart steady. The common room is chilly at this hour, the fire in the big hearth burned down to coals, and it smells of woodsmoke and wet wool.

Halfway through, I stop unwinding and follow the thread instead.

I've never let myself do that before. I close my eyes and go after it with my magic, hand over hand like a kite string, down out of her chest into the floor, through floorboards, stone, and the dirt beneath, into the crossing under Concordia where all the lines meet.

The ley lines are there, the ones Helena tied the guys into on the hill. But the thread keeps going past them, down into the cold, and the pull starts up low in my belly while the Well's long low note begins singing in my ear.

The thread goes into the water.

When I open my eyes, Josie is staring at me. I smile so she won't be scared and go back to unwinding, and I don't say a thing until she's gone.

Then I go back over the other nights in my head. Every one of them had a thread, and every thread went down. I didn't follow them all the way, but I didn't even have to; I know what direction the Well is in the same way I know which way is down.

They all go to the water.

Catalina can tie them all back up in an afternoon, whenever she likes. But every one of those strings runs down to the same place. If I go on untying them up here, one kid a night, she wins. So I'm done doing it her way.

I give up on sleep and pad down to the kitchen in my socks.

Brittany's notebook is on the table where she left it, next to Herbert's tank, with Herbert up in the corner on his web. I take one of her lists out of the back, a page of names she's already copied over somewhere neater, flip it over, and draw on the back of it with her pen.

I draw a heart, the lumpy kind you'd put on a birthday card, with a loop around it and a line running from the loop to the bottom of the page.

Then I draw another heart, and then a whole lot of them, crowded all over the page on top of each other, every one with a little loop and a line. All the lines run down to the same place at the bottom, where they bunch together and tie off in a big ugly scribble.

It looks like my mom's birthday balloons. Every year she tied a bunch of them to our mailbox so the guests could find the house, all bobbing on their strings, with every string knotted around the post in a lump she had to cut off with kitchen scissors the next morning.

I sit there with the drawing until the window goes pink, and for once I let myself want something.

I want a house after this, one with a kitchen big enough for all of us and a mailbox Ma can tie balloons to. I want to bring the guys home and watch Dad quiz them at the table about the War of 1812 while Felix tries to cheat.

Callum will know every answer, and Dad will love him for it. Ma will take one look at Atlas, decide he's never eaten a proper meal in his life, and keep filling his plate until he gives up.

I want to go back to school, sit at a desk with a real schedule, and complain about it like a normal person. I want Brittany on the couch with Herbert's tank on the coffee table, and Ren asleep upstairs in a house quiet enough that he can finally rest.

Then I fold the drawing in half, because to get any of that, I have to go down the stairs first.

"It's kind of like a bunch of balloons," I tell the others.

It's late the next night, after the first-years have gone home, and we're all in the kitchen because it's the only warm room in the building. The woodstove is going, the window over the sink is fogged at the edges, and the whole room smells of coffee that's been sitting on the burner long enough to count as a war crime. Atlas is pouring himself another cup of it anyway.

I hold up the drawing. "You can untie every balloon one at a time. That's what we've been doing. Or you can go down to where all the strings are tied together, and untie that."