Page 93 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

The lamp throws a small yellow circle around Atlas's back and nothing else. Behind me Felix is humming under his breath, very quietly, a song I don't recognize.

Then Atlas stops.

He holds the lamp out over the next step down, but there isn't one. There's just dark, the light falling into it without hitting anything. My stomach drops just looking at it, and my knee still has a scar from the last time.

Atlas steps over, turns around on the far side, and holds the lamp out over the gap. He waits with the light held steady until every one of us has stepped across—me, then Ren, Callum, and Felix—then turns around and keeps going.

Felix lands on the far side with a little hop. "Nailed it," he whispers. "Someone tell Brittany I stuck the landing."

"Shh," Ren hisses, and through the thread between us I feel him checking my pulse. I let him. It's kind of nice to be fussed over on the way to the worst place I know.

Somewhere in the middle of the stairs, the pull starts.

It's in my belly, the same as my first morning at Callister when I had no idea what it even was, like a hand wound into the front of my sweatshirt, tugging. With it comes the note, the long low one, singing in my ear so deep I feel it in my back teeth.

You can put it down.

It's so gentle. It sounds like my mom at the end of a long drive, telling me I can go to sleep now, she's got it from here.

"Not tonight," I tell it.

Atlas glances back. "What?"

"Talking to the Well."

"Great. Love that." He hitches the lamp higher. "Tell it to go fuck itself."

I do. It just keeps humming, as patient as before.

"What's it saying?" Felix asks from the back.

"That I can put it down."

"Put what down?"

"Everything, I think."

I know what it means, though. It wants me to stop fighting, lie down in the water, and stay down here with the other girls. It's asking me to drown, and it makes drowning sound like a nap.

No one says anything for a few steps. Then Felix says, "Well, tell it you're busy. You've got a whole house full of idiots to look after, and a spider."

"Herbert isn't hers," Ren points out.

"Herbert's everyone's. Herbert belongs to the people."

Callum hasn't said a word since the hearth. Now he says, from somewhere behind Ren, "And once they're loose. What then?"

"Then we come back up."

"And the Well is still there, and my mother is still there." His voice is very even. "She'll stand next year's class in front of the sphere at enrollment and put the rune on every one of them, and she'll call it a welcome. Then she'll do it again the year after, and you'll be back down here in this water, untying them. What do you do about that?"

"I don't know yet. I'll figure it out after."

"That's your plan? Figure it out after?"

He said the same thing to me in the diner lot in the spring, and that night he sounded as if I were a puzzle he'd decided to enjoy. Tonight the thread between us is pulled so tight it aches, and his voice cracks on the last word. He's terrified, and he's Callum, so the only place it shows is that one cracked word.

It's been my plan since my first week here, I almost tell him, and you're all still here. I don't say it, because Nell isn't.