Everly #3
She doesn't sleep. She stops. I've found her at three in the morning sitting upright in the dark of the box room she's claimed for herself, eyes open, hands folded, somewhere else entirely—down in the Deep, I think, where ninety-six years of her is still standing over Cordelia and always will be.
When I say her name she comes back from a long way off and it takes a second for her to land behind her own eyes.
She wears what the house gives her. Tonight it's a dead graduate student's sweater, gray wool, the sleeves shoved up past her forearms so the old scars on her palms catch the kitchen light, the ones that never closed, ninety-six years and still raw at the edges like the working only just let her go.
She eats almost nothing. She watches the rest of us eat the way you'd watch a custom you used to keep and have forgotten the steps of.
And she talks in a register a hundred years out of date, dry and exact and, every so often, devastating.
She'll drop a name from 1931 like it happened over breakfast, because to the part of her still down in the dark with Cordelia, it did.
Margaret used to do that, she'll say, of a gesture, and Margaret has been dead since before the war, and Helena says it in the present tense and doesn't notice she's done it.
She is the most damaged person I have ever sat across a table from, and the most certain, and I cannot always tell where the wisdom stops and the wound starts. I'm not sure she can either.
***-
When we plan it, she won't be left behind, and she says so before anyone can be kind enough to suggest it.
"You're not keeping me safe." She says it flat, to the table, to all of us. "You're keeping me useless. I have been useless under that building for ninety-six years. I would rather die on my feet tomorrow than spend one more night being protected from the only thing I'm for."
Nobody argues. You don't, with that.
So she walks us through it, the Well laid out in her century-old hand on the back of Brittany's discarded sheet music: a living thing that breathes on death, that will know us the moment we cross the Hollows, that has known every footstep above it for a hundred years and is only patient because patience has always paid.
"The question," she says, tapping the deepest line, "isn't whether it wakes.
It wakes. The question is whether you move before it can answer. "
And here is the thing we decide, the thing that turns my stomach and steadies it in the same breath: we take the trap on purpose.
We were always going to have to reach the Deep.
We were always going to have to break Catalina's working before she binds herself into the Well past any undoing, and pull Nell Fortuna's name off the list before the next mark comes due.
The only thing we lacked was a way in that didn't light up every tether on campus—and Catalina has just handed me one.
A sanctioned reason to descend. An honor with a flourish on it.
A night when the whole school is in motion for the review, bodies and noise everywhere, nobody watching the one girl who's been told to go underground.
The stair she built to swallow me becomes the way the rest of them slip in behind me.
"You walk down for your review," Helena says. "They walk down behind you, in the cover you make. And somewhere on that stair it stops being her trap and starts being ours." She looks at me. "If your nerve holds."
"My nerve holds."
Over the map—the real one, the 1934 one with four levels where the school admits to one—Callum's hand comes to rest on the route, and then it moves, and it isn't the map he turns.
It's my hand. He turns my hand palm-up under his and traces a slow circle at the inside of my wrist with his thumb while we both keep our eyes very studiously on the Sepulchre corridor, like the route is the only thing happening at this table.
Across from us Atlas watches him do it, and very deliberately, one at a time, cracks his knuckles.
The mark, I think. Three of them sitting here with burns on their hands for the privilege of being jealous in a kitchen. We are going to walk into the worst place on this campus on purpose, the one place none of them can feel me, and they're squabbling over a thumb on a wrist.
I tuck the want of it away—the awful, disqualifying warmth of being fought over—with everything else I'm not going to look at tonight.
From the corner, Brittany sets her too-strong coffee down. She hasn't looked up from Herbert, working a slow circuit across the back of her hand.
"I'm coming," she says.
Callum starts to say something and she talks over it, flat, unbothered, the way she says everything.
"If I get caught, it just looks like I cracked. Failing sophomore, finally lost it, wandered somewhere I shouldn't." She lifts two fingers off the table, the entire shrug. "You can't argue with that. Nobody guards against the girl they've already written off."
Herbert pauses on her knuckle, considering the room.
He, I notice, doesn't argue with it either.