Callum #2
It's jealousy. I make myself use the word, in the privacy behind my own face, because precision is the only tool I've ever fully trusted and I won't lie to myself with a softer one.
Not envy. Not longing. Jealousy—cold and exact and corrosive, eating the discipline out of me from the inside while I stand at the front of a room and let everything my name is supposed to mean come apart in my hands.
"Bolingbroke." The instructor's voice, careful. "Do you need a moment?"
The dark is at my ankles. The sophomores are very still, the way you go still around a thing you've never seen before and aren't sure is safe. The Frost King, coming apart at the front of the room.
I imagine the version of this that reaches my mother by tonight—it will reach her by tonight, the house counts everything—and I find I can't make myself care, which is new, and which I set aside with the other things that are new and grinding somewhere in the mechanism that used to run clean.
I pull the shadow back. It costs me. It costs me the way stillness costs Atlas, a thing dragged down by force and held there bleeding.
The dark recedes off the desk legs, off the floor, back into the corners where it belongs, and I close my hand around the worst of the thread until I've got it down to an ache I can stand inside.
"No," I say. My voice comes out even. That much still works. "Continue without me. I have what I needed."
I gather my things. Cuffs straight. Everything where it should be, on the outside, where they can see.
I walk out of the seminar I have never once failed to hold, and the thread is still warm, still pouring her into me, still telling me with perfect cruelty exactly how good it is for her while the mark on my hand counts the distance I'm not allowed to close.
I leave with the taste of ash in my throat.
***-
I go to find Atlas the second the bond cools enough that I can walk a straight line.
I don't decide to. Deciding is what I do with everything; I gather, I observe, I prepare for the conversation before anyone knows there's a conversation to be had.
I don't do any of that now. I move through Ossium Hall and out into the thin autumn cold and across the quad toward Fulmen Hall, and the shadow comes with me low along the ground, and I let it, because for once I am not interested in the version of myself that decides things first.
He's coming out of the weather entrance as I reach it.
Still flushed. Still grinning that grin he gets when he's done a thing that's going to cost him—I know it now, I've learned to read him the way I read the dark—and the sight of it, the proof of where he's been and what he was doing while I broke a lattice in front of eleven witnesses, puts the shadow up my spine before I've said a word.
He sees my face and the grin goes.
I want to hit him. The wanting is simple and total and it surprises me with how clean it is: no calculation in it, no plan, none of the long machinery I run everything else through, just the flat animal simplicity of a fist and a face.
I have spent my entire life upstream of wanting things like this.
I stand in the cold and want it anyway, and I hold still, and the holding still is a wire drawn to the point just before it sings.
"Don't," he says.
"You felt me lose it." I keep my voice down.
The quad still has people in it; a Mors and a Tempest squaring up in the open is exactly the kind of line in my mother's ledger I cannot afford to give her.
I keep my voice down and it doesn't help, because the charge is already gathering off his skin, the air around him going taut and electric, the hair on my arms lifting.
"The whole seminar felt me lose it. You did that.
You knew I'd feel it and you went to her anyway. "
"I didn't go to her to hurt you." The charge climbs.
A spark jumps between two of his knuckles, blue and gone.
"I went because the mark on my hand burns the whole time I'm near that house and I went anyway, because she's worth it, and if you'd been the one who got there first I'd have felt your hands and choked it down like a grown man instead of melting down in front of a room full of kids. "
The shadow rises behind me. I feel it go up, a wall of cold at my back, the dark in the quad bending toward me from every corner the way it bends when I've stopped telling it no.
The mark on my hand flares hot—warning, the bond spiking, the tether catching the surge of two disciplines about to go off in a public place—and I don't care about that either.
"She is not a thing you reach first," I say, and my voice is finally not even, and that frightens me more than anything Atlas can do with a fistful of lightning. "She is not a flag on a hill."
"No." He's close now. The charge is a live thing between us, the smell of an oncoming storm, ozone thick enough to taste.
His eyes are wide and bright and furious and grieving all at once, the way they always are, the man who can't ground himself out standing a foot from the man who can't warm himself up.
"She's not. And you keeping her up top where you can watch her isn't safety, Callum, it's you needing to know where she is.
We're the same animal. You just dress yours better. "
The shadow gathers to strike. The charge gathers to answer.
Two disciplines a breath from going off in the middle of the quad, and the date in my mother's letter and the ash in my throat and the taste of her pleasure that isn't mine—all of it cresting at once toward the one stupid release available, which is to put my hands on Atlas Knox and let the dark do what it's been begging to do since the lattice broke—
A body steps between us.
I don't see who. A shoulder, an arm thrown out to each of us, a voice saying not here, not here, you absolute idiots, not in the open—and the contact breaks the line of it.
The shadow stalls. The charge gutters. Atlas steps back first, breathing hard, the spark dying off his knuckles, and I make my own hand unclench finger by finger until the dark drops out of the air and sinks back down where it lives.
It doesn't land. That's the only thing that matters and it's the smallest comfort I've ever been handed. It doesn't land, this time, in the open, where my mother would have heard about it before dinner.
But we both know now. We both felt how close it ran, how little held it, how much wanted it loose.
He looks at me over whoever's arm is still between us, and there's no apology in it and I don't want one, and what passes between us instead is worse than anger: the flat knowledge that this isn't the last time, that it's only a matter of which day, which slight, which hour of feeling the other man reach her while the thing on our hands holds us across campus and burns.
"Walk away, Bolingbroke," he says, quiet now, wrung out. "Before one of us gives her something to clean up."
I walk away. Cuffs straight. The shadow trailing off my hands like water I can't quite shake.
***-
My room. Lights off. The shadows pool around me like water filling a basin, familiar and easy, the one thing left in my life that has never once required me to pretend.
I call a thread of it up off the floor. Just to watch it come. It comes—clean, immediate, obedient, exactly the way it's supposed to—and I hold it a moment and let it sink back, and I despise that I checked. That I needed to know the one sure thing was still sure.
This is what she's done to me without lifting a hand against me. This is what a date on a page and a mark and a bond have made of the most controlled man on this campus: someone who sits alone in the dark and tests his own shadow the way you go back to check a lock you already know is thrown.
I sit in the dark with the letter and the copies I didn't put back in the drawer, and I let myself be still for the first time since the lattice broke, and I do the thing I'm built to do, which is to set the pieces in order and look at the shape.
Wheeler's method. The family's records. The date at the end of the year. The word review. Enya Halstone's empty room two floors above the kitchen in Callister House. I know about that; the house passes everything to everyone, and what it passes reaches me cold.
And underneath all of it, the thing I keep almost touching and pulling back from: that whatever Everly went down into the building next door and found, whatever she's been carrying around behind that careful warm face of hers, is the same shape as the pages on my desk.
I don't conclude things on this little evidence, ordinarily. I'm concluding this one.
She found something in Wheeler's room. I'm nearly certain of it. And I've spent weeks not asking, because asking would mean admitting we're past the point where I get to gather quietly and decide alone, admitting that the conversation has already started whether I prepared for it or not.
I take out my notebook. The paper one. I uncap the pen and in my own careful hand, the hand my mother trained, the hand that has never once let a letter slope, I write the only instruction that matters:
Ask Everly what she found in Wheeler's room.
I look at it in the dark until my eyes have made what sense of it they're going to make. Then I cap the pen, and set it square against the spine, and put my hands flat on the desk, and wait for them to stop shaking.
They take a while.