Atlas
The mirror's cracked again. I did it sometime in the last hour and I haven't looked since, because looking means seeing my own face do whatever ugly shit it's doing, and I'd rather not.
Fulmen Hall is a cage they built to fit my worst instincts.
Scorch marks up the far wall where lightning I didn't ask for went looking for ground.
The ceiling above the rack is black in a spreading bruise.
Every Tempest student who passes through here notices how hard I'm breathing and how high the charge is sitting, and reports it the way you'd report a leak, and the mark on the back of my hand does the rest of the snitching they can't. Known, all the way down.
That's the cage. Not the walls. The watching.
I'd burn the whole building down before I got used to it.
The conductor sits on the bench beside me. My hand keeps drifting toward it—not a threat, a habit. I press my palm flat to the bench instead and wait for the next thing, jaw locked so tight I'll be feeling it in my teeth tomorrow.
The next thing is her.
I feel her before the door finishes opening.
The air shifts, warmer, a warmth that has nothing to do with the radiators Fulmen Hall stopped bothering to run once the spring came in.
The charge in the room leans toward her the way iron filings lean toward a magnet, and so do I, every damn time, and I make myself not.
She's wet. Not from rain—there isn't any yet—from the walk, the late fog that hangs off the river this time of year and beads in your hair and sits in the collar of her shirt in a way that's doing something to me I don't have room for right now.
She's got her bag over one shoulder and her jaw already set, the look she gets when she's carrying something and has decided to set it down here.
"You didn't come to the session," she says.
"No."
"Atlas."
"What." It comes out harder than I mean it to.
Or exactly as hard as I mean it to. Some days I can't tell the difference.
"I broke the last mirror during it." I roll my shoulder.
The mark on the back of my hand is a low coal, same as always now, hotter for her being close, and I leave my hand where it is and let it burn.
"Figured I'd save Wheeler the trouble of watching me lose my shit. "
She doesn't laugh. That's how I know.
She comes the rest of the way in and sets her bag down on the cracked tile, slow, and sits on the bench a careful foot from me, and her hands are in her lap and her thumb is working the cut on her palm she keeps reopening, and I watch her decide how to start.
"I went to see Helena last night," she says. "About your mom."
The charge in my hands goes still. That's the tell, if anyone were reading me—not a spark, the absence of one. My pulse is suddenly loud in my own ears, which never happens, and the room holds its breath because I'm holding mine.
"I know what happened to my mom." It comes out flat, mean at the edges. It's the sentence I've said a hundred times, the one that ends conversations. "I was there. I don't need it explained to me like I wasn't standing in the fucking kitchen."
"I'm not explaining what happened," Everly says, and she doesn't soften it into a question the way people do when they find out I watched it. "I'm telling you why."
That lands somewhere under the flat place I keep it, a different kind of blow than the one I braced for.
"She was in a registry," Everly says. "The Administration keeps one: every grimoire it's ever found, whether she ever set foot on this campus or not.
Your mom was in it since before you were born.
Untrained. Nobody ever taught her what she was.
" A breath. "So instead of teaching her, they studied her.
Quietly. A little at a time, for 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. "
I don't say anything. There's nothing in my body that knows what to do with the words yet—my hands are fists and I don't remember making them fists—so I let her keep going, and I watch her face, because her face is the only thing in the room that isn't lying.
"It wasn't only bad luck, Atlas." She holds my eyes. "Not just her body giving out on its own, out of nowhere, the way you've spent your whole life telling yourself it did. Somebody spent years finding out exactly how much it would take to break her. And one Tuesday, they had their fucking answer."
The mirror across the room. Third one this month. There's a fourth coming and I can feel exactly where it'll start.
"Say it again," I tell her.
"Atlas—"
"The last part."
She doesn't flinch. She never flinches, that's the whole thing about her, that's the thing I noticed first and the thing I keep noticing.
"Somebody spent years finding out exactly how much it would take," she says.
"And they got their answer in your kitchen.
And then they called it an accident, and nobody was left who could say otherwise. "
My mom liked mornings. She was up before the rest of the house, and the kitchen would already be warm when I came down, and she'd hum something with no tune to it.
That's most of what I kept of her, that and the last of her, and nothing in between that belongs to me anymore.
I was seven. I remember the tomato going soft under the knife, the radio going, her hands flat on the counter like she was only thinking about dinner.
And then I didn't have a mom, or a dad, or a house, and nobody sat me down after and explained shit, because the people whose job that would've been were gone too.
I've been angry the whole time since without knowing what the hell I was actually angry at, swinging at fog, because there was never a face in it.
Now there's a face. There's a reason that isn't grief and isn't rotten luck.
Somebody wrote a number down, patient, the way Wheeler's patient, over years, and my mom was the number, and the warm kitchen was already circled on somebody's calendar before I ever came down the stairs to it for the last goddamn time.
There's a lump in my throat I can't swallow past and my chest feels like somebody's standing on it. My hands have stopped doing what I tell them. The cold comes off me in a wave and the charge climbs my arms toward the place it goes right before it gets loose.
My hand finds the conductor. I don't decide it. It's just there in my grip, the metal cool, and I stand up off the bench and the lights swing because the lights are wired to the building and the building is wired, now, to me.
"Outside," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "I need—"
I don't finish it. I'm already moving for the door.
The cold hits and the storm comes with it, which is to say the storm comes out of me, because there wasn't a cloud over Nyxhaven an hour ago and now the sky's gone the green-bruise color it goes when I've stopped asking it for permission.
The first rain hits the back of my neck.
Then it's all of it at once, the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as arrive, soaking me through to the skin in the time it takes to reach the bottom of the steps.
Good. Let it. Let the whole campus read me everywhere at once—let the thing on my hand try to tell Catalina which corner of the storm I'm standing in.
I made a sky big enough to lose myself inside, and somewhere under the rage I know exactly why.
Nobody can read one man's storm out of a whole sky gone wrong.
It's how I get to stand this close to her without burning through both hands.
I stand in it. Hands open at my sides. The charge rides up my arms and stands the hair on them and I let it. A strike comes down on the green a hundred yards off and the thunder lands a half-second behind, close enough to feel in the teeth, and I don't care, I want it closer.
The door opens behind me.
She walks out into it. Doesn't stop in the dry under the lintel.
Walks straight out into the rain I made, brown skin gone slick with it in a second, her hair flattening dark to her skull, and she comes to where I'm standing in the worst of it and she doesn't ask if I'm okay.
There's no version of okay. She knows that.
She's the only one who's ever known that.
She just stands there in my storm and lets it hit her too.
"I'm going to take it apart," I tell her. The rain's in my mouth. "All of it. The sessions, the notebook, Wheeler, the whole rotten fucking thing—" The thunder eats the end of it.
"I know," she says.
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
And then I'm kissing her, or she's kissing me.
Doesn't matter which. The rain doesn't leave room for the difference.
Her mouth is warm in all that cold. My hand goes into her wet hair.
The other finds the small of her back and pulls her in against me, hard, hard enough that she gasps into my mouth.
She comes up on her toes, fingers fisting in the soaked front of my shirt, kissing me like she's furious too.
Like she gets to be furious about my mom.
Somewhere in my chest the thread between us pulls tight and bright. I feel her wanting through it, hot, direct, arriving from outside me, same as her warmth always does.
God, I want her. It's a physical ache sitting right next to the grief. Close enough I can't always tell which one's driving.
A strike comes down close enough to whiten the whole green. She doesn't startle. She fits her body harder against mine.
"Inside," I say against her mouth. "There's a—come inside."