Page 95 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"Does it hurt?" Ren asks.

"Yes," I admit.

"Where?"

"My hands. My chest. Kind of everywhere."

"Okay." He presses his palm flatter against my back. "Then I'm going to hold your heart a little tighter, and you're going to let me, and you're not going to argue about it."

"I wasn't going to argue."

"You were thinking about it. I can hear it."

"Fuck, this water." Atlas's teeth are chattering right by my ear. "Fuck this water. Who builds a magic lake under a school and doesn't heat it?"

"The families," Callum says from the steps.

"Yeah, I know it was the families, Callum, it was a rhetorical⁠—"

"I know what a rhetorical question is."

A laugh comes out of me as a shudder, and Atlas's arm tightens around me as if he's proud of himself for it.

"Your lips are blue," Callum tells me, in the same voice he'd use to read a line out of a ledger. "I'm only mentioning it."

"Thanks, Callum," I say through chattering teeth.

"He's mentioning it because he's scared," Ren says.

There's a pause on the steps. "I'm mentioning it because it's true," Callum says. "And because I'm scared."

I lose track of how long. There's no time down here, only the cold and the threads, Atlas's arm around my ribs and Ren's hand on my back. At some point I notice the lamp has burned lower, its reflection in the water gone small and orange.

At some point I notice Atlas's arm is shaking. He's holding the storm in, all of it, so it can't get loose in the water, because lightning in this water would go straight through me and Ren. It's costing him. Through the bond I can feel him straining, and his breath hisses through his teeth by my ear.

"Hey, Ev." Felix's voice comes down from the steps, easy and warm. "Did I ever tell you about the time I lost my car to a Mors senior in a game of Go Fish?"

"You don't have a car." My voice sounds strange to me, far off.

"Not anymore, I don't. That's the tragedy of it. Keep pulling, I'm getting to the good part. So it's late in the Long Shot basement, and he asks me for sevens, and I say go fish, very confident, very cool, and he says, 'Felix, there's a mirror on the wall behind you.'" A pause. "Who hangs a mirror in a basement, Ev? Who does that?"

He keeps going. It's a terrible story, and it gets longer and worse the more he tells it, and I'm pretty sure he's making it up as he goes. I want to kiss him for it so badly.

The bundle doesn't feel any smaller.

I've pulled so many loose. I know I have. But every time I reach for the knot it's still there, so tight I have to fight for every end, and I can't feel the bottom of it. What if I can't do this? What if I stand here pulling threads until the Well finally gets me, and the knot is still sitting down there, tied tight, the morning after? My hands are gone, too. I can't feel them at all anymore, and when I look down at the water I can't tell where my wrists go in.

So I stop using my hands.

I use my magic instead, all four at once, the way Helena taught me all winter on her floor in the Down Deep. Blood lets me feel each sleeper's pulse at the far end of a thread. Chaos shows me which end will come loose next, a half second before I reach for it. I go into the knot with everything I have.

It's faster, but it's just not fast enough.

"Where are you?" Ren asks again.

It takes me a second to answer. I have to go looking for the words, and they're farther away than they should be.

"The Well. Atlas... you."