Brittany
Herbert's working a web across the top corner of his tank. I watch him for a while because watching him is restful and because the alternative is the summons on the desk.
It's the same summons Ren warned me about.
You are required to appear before the review board.
The seal, the soft phrase—failure to demonstrate progress consistent with placement—dressed up nice, like something a person could survive walking into.
I know better now. I know what route to Well Authority intake, same disposition as the others means, because Ren told me what it means, standing in this kitchen with a form he'd already rewritten in his hand.
I know where the others went. I've felt the empty place in this house where Enya Halstone used to hum over a kettle, same as everyone in it has, and none of us said her name out loud until Ren finally did.
He fixed the record that same night. As far as the school knows, I'm already reviewed. Already closed. A finished matter nobody looks at twice. That's supposed to be the end of it.
I unlatch the tank and let Herbert climb onto the back of my hand. He settles on my knuckles, slow and deliberate, an ounce of certainty parked on my skin—about as close to comfort as I let myself get.
"Don't," I tell him, because he hasn't done anything yet, but I can feel him about to be right about something.
Here's the thing I keep turning over. Catalina wants Everly.
Everyone in this house knows it, even the people who won't say her name for it.
But Everly's watched, and warded, and surrounded by four men who'd take this campus apart stone by stone before they let anyone near her, and Catalina hasn't found her way through that yet.
So she takes what she can get instead. Enya.
Whoever got logged before Enya that nobody thought to grieve because nobody knew to look.
Me, maybe, if Ren hadn't gotten to that drawer first. Small takings, while she waits for the real one.
Consolation prizes. I'll be ugly about it and call them what they are: snacks, taken off a girl nobody would miss, because the review board sounds so much better than that.
That's the reason I'm not sleeping tonight. Not my grade.
And there's a worse thought underneath it, the one I don't say even to Herbert.
Maybe it isn't only that I'm easy. My blood's answered wrong every session for two years, too much power for a small spell, none at all for a big one, a warming charm that frosted the whole worktable last month instead.
Not nothing. Never nothing. Just never the shape his instruments know how to read, so the record says the same three words every time: does not respond.
His glass and his ledger were built to catch one kind of answer, and mine keeps coming back a different one.
Logged, and never explained. That's not the profile of a girl nobody would miss.
That's the profile of a girl a man like Wheeler doesn't leave alone once he actually looks at her.
He hasn't looked yet. I intend to keep it that way.
"They rigged it before I ever sat down for it," I tell Herbert.
He's crossed to my wrist. He doesn't look convinced, exactly. He looks like he already knew and was waiting for me to catch up, which from a tarantula is somehow worse.
So here's what I've decided, sitting in a room with a form Ren already lied for me about and a review I might still have to walk into if the lie doesn't hold.
I'm not going to wait around to find out if it holds.
Nobody guards against the person they've already written off, and as of tonight I know exactly what that written-off status is worth.
It's the only thing that's kept me off Wheeler's floor so far, and I intend to use every inch of it.
They want a girl who can't pass Blood Magic, harmless, beneath notice.
I'll be exactly that. Better than I've ever been at it.
And underneath it I'll do the one useful thing a person my size can do in a building this watched: notice everything, say nothing, and get it to the people who can use it before Catalina decides she's tired of waiting and comes back for a second helping.
They lock the doors they think matter. They mark the students they think are dangerous—I've watched them do it, watched four men get blood drawn up out of their own hands and bound into tracking marks, watched Everly tracked by every sightline on this campus.
They spend everything they have watching the people they're afraid of.
They don't spare me a second glance, because I'm the low-magic girl who can't pass Blood Magic, and a girl like that isn't going to do anything.
A girl like that has eighteen months of knowing where everyone who matters eats lunch.
She knows which wardens cut corners, which sessions run loose, which door down toward the Reliquary gets left on the latch because somebody's too lazy to work the lock twice.
I've been collecting all of it without trying, the same way I collect Everly's tells. I didn't know what it was for.
Now I know what it's for.
Herbert shifts on my wrist and turns toward the door, toward the hall, toward Everly's side of the floor. He does that when something out there matters to him.
"I know," I tell him. "I'm getting to her."
That's when the knock comes. Two knuckles, soft, the knock of someone who isn't sure she's allowed to be knocking at all.
I don't say come in. I just open the door.
She's still got her coat on. Her hands won't quite hold still, tucked up under her arms, and her eyes find mine and don't say anything, which from Everly is its own kind of loud.
"Hey," she says. Just that.
I step back so she can come in. Herbert's already moving—off my wrist, across the desk, down onto the floor, making for her—and she crouches without being asked and lets him climb her sleeve, and something in her shoulders comes down half an inch when he does.
I don't ask what happened. I already know there's nothing I can do about it tonight except this.
"It's not months anymore," she tells Herbert, not me, which is easier on both of us. "It's weeks. Maybe less."
That lands somewhere behind my sternum, right on top of everything I've just spent an hour figuring out. Wheeler's floor. Enya. Now this. Flat is the one useful thing I've got to give her right now.
"Okay," I say.
"That's it? Okay?"
"For tonight, yeah. Okay." I go to the left drawer and get out the gummy worms, because some things don't need improving, just repeating.
I turn the music up half a notch, to the volume that means I'm here and I'm not looking at you.
"Tomorrow we do something about it. Tonight you sit on my floor and eat sour candy and let the spider tell you you're not as alone in this as you think. "
She almost laughs. Not much of one. I'll take it.
"Good enough for now," I tell her, and I mean it exactly as much as I've ever meant anything.
She stays maybe twenty minutes. Doesn't talk much. Lets Herbert walk the length of her arm about six times. When she finally gets up to go, she pauses at the door with her hand on the frame.
"Thank you," she says, and this time she means the candy and the music and the not asking, all three, and I know it, and I let her have the moment instead of deflecting it.
"Go to sleep," I tell her. "If you can."
She goes.
I'm not going to make it weird. I didn't tell her any of it tonight—Wheeler's drawer, Ren's lie, the review that's still sitting on my desk with my name on it—because she'd already handed me the worse half of her night and I wasn't about to hand her mine on top of it.
I'll tell her when I have something she can actually use.
I always want the evidence first. That's just how I'm built.
I pick the summons back up and read it one more time. You are required to appear. The seal. The sentence about progress. I know now exactly what it costs a girl to walk into that room, and exactly what it's worth that nobody's watching me closely enough to notice I'm not walking into it at all.
I set the paper on the desk, face-up this time. I don't need to hide from it anymore. It's evidence now, and it's evidence about them, not about me. Their glass has spent two years telling them I've got nothing worth measuring. Let it. If their test can't read the answer, that's the test's problem.
The chord in the speaker finally finishes and the next one starts to arrive. Herbert settles on my wrist and goes still, done supervising for the night.
I'm not failing Blood Magic. I'm failing their test. There's a difference.
Herbert, I note, agrees.