34. Everly #3
She's looking at me, and there's no defeat anywhere in her face. Something more careful lives there instead, the look of a woman who planned for ninety-six years, just met the one thing she didn't plan for, and is already making room for it.
"You chose the wall," she says.
"I chose not to hand you a century of the dead. And the Well's still standing, which means I chose a problem."
"Yes." She glances at the wound—mine and hers, layered over each other, the tear running too wide and too deep to close. "You're aware that you didn't fix it."
"I'm aware."
"It's gutted. Unstable. There's no one anchoring the working now that the wardens' binding has died." She says it the way you tell someone a fact they already know. "Something is going to have to watch it."
"Yeah," I say. "I figured."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then something moves across her face, there and gone too fast to catch. Pride is the nearest word I have, and it isn't the right one. Whatever it is, it's older than pride.
"There is a way to keep it alive that doesn't ask for anyone," she says. "The journals stop at a proof I couldn't close. But the beginning is sound. And you have time, now, that I didn't."
"Are you giving me homework?"
"I'm giving you a head start." She says it without irony. "The same one I gave you in the corridor."
Then the building shudders—the backlash still traveling up through the stone, the warden working dying all at once across the whole campus—and she uses the chaos the way she's always used chaos: as a door.
She goes through it with no hurry in her, nothing like flight—just leaving, moving through a building that no longer has eyes, through corridors that aren't watching anymore, out into the dark past the campus edge and into whatever she has planned next, which she has had ninety-six years to plan.
She'll find another way, I hear, from somewhere I can no longer see her. So will I.
A fact. Not a threat. I know the difference.
I stand there for a second after she's gone, listening to the Well breathe wrong.
"For the record," Felix says, from the door, cards still moving, "the odds of her coming back are—"
"I know."
"I was going to say excellent."
"I know," I say. "Felix, will you please get off the floor."
A pause. "My shoulder is a little—"
"I will come over there."
He gets off the floor.
The Deep goes quiet in the way that rooms only go quiet when something that's been running for a long time stops.
The Well breathes wrong—slow and labored, the sound of a thing running on less than it needs—and somewhere inside it, folded into a century of taken light, is what's left of Cordelia Ashby, and of every grimoire this school ever talked down a stair.
Callum comes to stand beside me. He doesn't touch me. He's learned, these past months, that sometimes the closest thing he can offer is his presence without weight—near enough to reach if I reach, far enough to let me stand in whatever this is first.
"You didn't fix it," he says.
"No."
"And there was never anyone to save."
"No." I say it flat, so it can't shake. "There never was."
He doesn't tell me it was enough. He doesn't tell me I did the right thing. He stands next to me and looks at the gutted Well with me, and that's the thing about Callum. He never gives you comfort that isn't true.
Atlas's hand lands on my shoulder from behind, brief and warm.
Ren says nothing, which from Ren is sometimes the loudest thing in the room.
Felix has stopped pretending his shoulder doesn't hurt and is leaning against the wall doing something complicated with his cards that I think is actually just keeping his hands busy.
I don't know if I did the right thing.
That's the truth, the ugly one: I'm standing here in the quiet of the Deep with copper on the back of my tongue and the Well half-killed and Helena Grimoire loose in the world with ninety-six years of patience and the journals' true intent still in her, and I cannot tell if I stopped a theft tonight or only postponed one.
If I mended the machine or just kept it bleeding on the table.
If the choice was right or only survivable.
I think: she'll find another way.
I think: so will I.
One of us is going to be right.
I'm going to be ready.
"Let's go," I say.
Nobody argues. That's how I know they're as tired as I am. Felix pushes off the wall with his good shoulder. Atlas takes his hand back. Ren stays close as we go.
I don't look back at the Well. But I feel it, at my back, wounded and breathing, patient in the way that things are patient when they have been waiting for a century and expect to wait longer.
It isn't done. Nothing down here is done.
I chose to save a thing that is going to demand everything of me, and it will, and I knew that when I chose it.
I walk out of the room.
Behind me in the dark, the Well goes on existing, gorged on a century of people it was built to swallow. Cordelia Ashby is in there somewhere—not waiting, not holding on. Just kept, the way all of them are kept.
Somebody should write their names down.
I'm going to.