17. Everly #2
"Not a font. Not a battery. A living thing, old enough to have outlasted whatever built this school around it, and starving the slow way, the way anything starves when it's fed less than it needs for a hundred years running.
" Her eyes—and they don't blink, I keep waiting for it and it doesn't come—move to the window where the gray light is thickening toward morning.
"It won't take a whole grimoire by force.
That's the one mercy in the whole ugly design of it.
You have to walk down of your own feet, of your own will, which is why nobody's ever been dragged.
They're invited. An honor, a study, whatever the polite word is that year.
" A pause. "Cordelia believed hers. She went down into the Deep to test what she'd worked out, and she didn't come back up.
She wasn't the first grimoire this house talked into that stair, and she wasn't the last. And they bound me above her so I'd have a hundred years to think about which part of it I should have stopped. "
She turns one of the journals toward me, but doesn't let go of it. The hand inside is dense, furious, alive with arrows and crossings-out and second thoughts—and then, halfway down a page, it simply stops. Mid-argument. A sentence with no end on it.
"I'm not giving you the rest of it," she says, before I can ask.
"Not because I don't trust you. Because I haven't decided yet what the rest of it is worth.
" Her unblinking eyes come to rest on me, and there is something terrible and gentle in them at once.
"Just know it's here. That's enough for today. "
Callum leans in over the page, and Felix drifts off the wall to look, and the two of them are already going at it low and fast: Felix asking what the numbers in the margin track, Callum saying they're not numbers, they're load, how much the stone can give before it cracks—and Atlas pulls the second journal toward himself and starts turning pages with that careful, contained focus he uses when he's holding his temper somewhere out of the room.
Helena leans toward me while they argue. Just to me. Her voice drops under theirs.
"There's a name you should have," she says.
"I held it ten years for the right person to give it to.
" Her scarred palms are flat on the table.
"The Administration keeps a registry. Every grimoire it's ever identified, whether she ever set foot on this campus or not—flagged, and if she's useful, studied.
" A breath. "There was a woman a little before your men were born.
Untrained. Nobody ever told her what she was, so when the Administration found her, they didn't teach her.
They tested her instead—quietly, a little at a time, over years, seeing how much she could hold and never telling her what any of it was for.
They wanted to know what an unbound grimoire could survive.
" Her eyes hold mine without blinking. "They found out. It killed her." A pause. "Lyra Knox."
The name doesn't mean anything to me. And then it means everything, all at once, because I know exactly one person at this school named Knox, and he is sitting four feet away turning pages with his jaw set. My hands have gone cold around nothing, and I put them in my lap before he can look up.
"What did they write?" I hear myself ask. "Beside her name. When they were done."
Helena tells me. Quiet. Just to me. And I take it the way you take a hot coal you can't put down, both hands, no idea yet where I'm going to set it, because the man it belongs to is right there, and this is not how he should learn it, over stale cookies on a Tuesday, and I don't know yet when there will ever be a right way.
I tuck it away. Next to all the other things I'm carrying that I don't know what to do with yet.
***-
Brittany comes down for coffee.
She's in the doom-metal shirt she sleeps in and headphones around her neck and the flat unbothered face she wears like armor, and she stops in the kitchen doorway and takes in the scene: four exhausted people, three forbidden journals, and a hundred-and-twenty-year-old woman who looks twenty-five sitting at the table not blinking.
Brittany does not blink either.
She looks at Helena for a long moment. Helena looks back. Nobody says anything, and I have the sudden sense of two predators sizing each other up across a clearing and deciding, mutually, not to bother.
"I've read about you," Brittany says finally.
Reaches past Atlas for the kettle like Helena's a fixture, a thing the house came with.
"In the Mors records. The parts they pull from the shelf when a sophomore asks for them.
There's a version of you in there that doesn't have your name on it anymore. "
"Then you already know more than they wanted you to," Helena says.
And something passes between them—dry, exact, an entire understanding folded into eight words—that the rest of us are not invited into. Brittany pours her coffee. Helena watches her do it like she's remembering what coffee is.