Page 86 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"It reached for every one of us through you the last time. I felt it on the stairs, and so did he." He tips his head at Atlas. "It isn't only yours."

"And Helena." Atlas turns around from the stove. "Ren told us what she said in the foyer. She's done waiting for your bond to get strong enough to open the Well, and you want to carry the bond down there and stick your hands in it. That's her whole plan, Ev. You'd be doing it for her."

"She won't tear it down," I insist.

"Because you're sure." He says it flat, the way he says things he doesn't believe.

"Yes, because I'm sure. She came here and asked me first, Atlas. I said no, and she nodded and left. People who are going to do it anyway don't ask."

"For fuck's sake." He drags a hand down his face. "You're doing it again. She told you to your face, and you're sitting there believing the best of her because you'd rather. You did the same thing with⁠—"

He stops.

"Say it," I tell him. "With Nell. I did the same thing with Nell."

"I wasn't going to say that," Atlas mutters.

"You were." My voice has gone high and tight, and I can't bring it down. "You can say it. I've been saying it to myself since the water."

No one says anything. Atlas looks at the floor. Callum looks at me as if he'd like very much to be somewhere else, and Brittany has stopped pretending to read her notebook.

I turn to Ren. "Are you going to pick me up and carry me back up the stairs this time?"

His heart jumps. I feel it go through the bond. "If I have to."

"I'm going," I say again. "You can come down and hold on to me, or you can stay up here and be angry at me. I'd rather you held on."

Callum puts the black notebook in his blazer pocket, which is where it goes when he's finished with a conversation, and he doesn't look at me again for a long time.

"Ev..."

That's all Felix says. He's stopped shuffling, and the deck sits still in his hand, which it hardly ever does. He's looking at the drawing in the middle of the table, at all the hearts and all the strings, and I wait for him to tell me what he sees—sideways, or straight, or through a fish tank, or however it comes to him now.

He doesn't, though. He looks down at his cards instead.

He's been doing that a lot lately. I add it to the list of things I'm going to deal with once I have hands that can feel anything again.

"Same rule as the spring," I say, looking at Ren.

We made it on the floor of Helena's room a couple of nights before we went down to get Nell. It was Ren's rule, and it's really the only reason I'm sitting in this kitchen instead of lying at the bottom of the Well with all the other girls.

"If I say I want to stay, and I can't tell you where I am or who's with me, you pull me out. Even if I fight you."

Ren rubs his thumb back and forth along the edge of the table, along a groove someone carved into the wood a long time ago.

"And if you say no?"

"Then you listen anyway."

I hear it as I say it. It's the exact thing I've been angry at him for since the amphitheater, when he picked me up and carried me off with the end of the rune still in my hands, and now I'm asking him for it.

Through the bond I feel his heart pounding until it finally settles, and he nods.

Atlas gets up from the stove and goes to the window over the sink, where he stands with his back to us and his shoulders up around his ears. The glass is fogged, and there's nothing to see through it but our reflections and the dark. A little static runs off his hand where it rests on the sill and crackles blue against the glass.

"Fine," he says to the window. "But I'm the one holding you."

Then he turns around, and his face is wrecked.