Everly
You can't ask a building where the missing went.
Brittany worked that out before any of us did. Three nights ago, cross-legged on her bed with Herbert walking the back of her hand and the doom metal turned down to a heartbeat so the house couldn't hear her think.
"The building won't tell you," she said. "The building's the thing that took them."
"So we don't ask the building."
"We ask the missing." She didn't look up from the spider.
"Forgetting isn't clean. The chimera eats what they leave behind, but it doesn't lick the plate.
There's a stain in the stone where a person used to be.
" A beat. "And a stain can be read. If you know the shape of the working that smeared it. "
"And you know the shape."
"I've read things I wasn't supposed to." She finally looked at me. "Don't ask me how it felt to learn this one."
I didn't. I've stopped asking. She comes back up from the records nobody's meant to read with a smell on her now: old paper, and under the paper, something like a cellar that floods.
So we do it the only way that's left to us.
By candlelight, deep enough in Concordia that the marks die at the threshold and a working this size won't light up every tether on campus like a struck match.
Down into the Reliquary, past the archive, where twelve generations of the dead are logged in a hand too close to Callum's.
Down past interment, where the recent blood is soaked so far into the walls that Ren stopped on the stair and put his palm flat to the stone and didn't say what he heard.
Into a low room off the Hollows.
The air tastes of cold tallow and older dust. And the wardens' hum—that low red line laid through the whole school, the flat penny taste I've learned to stop noticing the way you stop hearing your own house—just isn't there. No hum down here. No taste. A silence with edges to it.
The dark sits against the candlelight like water against the hull of a boat. Waiting for the light to lose.
Five of us in the circle. Two at its edge.
Ren on my left, his hand near mine and not touching, his blood sense already gone out ahead of all of us into the stone. I can feel the edge of what it costs him, a tightness coming down the thread, his pulse a half-step too quick.
Felix on my right, the deck flat on his knee. Still. Actually still, which frightens me more than anything the dark is doing, because Felix is only still when the odds in front of him have stopped being a game.
Brittany across from me, building the structure low and even, the Mors shape of it recited like a grocery list. A grocery list is the only voice she'll let a thing this heavy have.
And Helena at the rim of the light. A hundred and twenty years old in a dead girl's sweater, the sleeves shoved up over scars that never closed in a century, guiding the whole of it with two fingers.
Atlas and Callum hold the door, one at either side of it, because Helena wouldn't let this happen without someone watching the only way out.
Atlas hasn't moved in ten minutes, not a shift of weight, not a breath I can hear.
Callum's shadow lies flat and thin along the threshold, listening for the house the way the rest of us are listening for the dead.
"You hold," she says. "You do not reach. The reaching is hers." A tilt of her head at Brittany. "You are the door, child. Doors do not walk through themselves. Tell me you understand the difference."
"Hold it open. Don't go in."
"Don't go in." Something in how she says it puts a cold finger to the back of my neck.
"You went in. Once."
"I did." She doesn't soften it. "It cost me the next ninety-six years, four feet above the thing you're kneeling on. So when I tell you to hold and not reach, I am not being careful. I am being specific."
I tuck the fear somewhere I can't get to it, because I need my hands steady. I set my palms inside the ring Brittany scored into the floor.
And I let the grimoire come up.
It arrives the same as always. Four colors braided to one cord at the back of my throat. The cold-coin taste flooding under my tongue: blood and metal, and something below metal. A pressure in my chest like a held note that's gone on too long.
I pour it into the circle. The circle drinks. Every candle leans its flame toward the center at once, all of them bowing to a window that opened somewhere none of us can see.
"Good," Helena murmurs. "Now hold."
Brittany's voice drops a half-step. The structure catches. Holds. Pulls.
The cold comes first, thinner than the room's cold, with intent in it. It goes past skin and into the teeth and moves in. I feel it arrive and don't flinch.
Then Ren's reach comes back over me, copper blooming bright on my tongue. I'm close enough that I get the overflow of what he's getting, and what he's getting is grief soaked into mortar. A dozen people scrubbed down to smudges. Names worn to a grease mark.
My nose starts to bleed. Warm on my lip, then my chin. I leave it. Moving a hand means moving the circle, and the circle is the one thing in this room I'm not allowed to drop.
"There," Brittany says. Flat. "Got one."
"Hold it," Helena says. "Don't pull. Let her come to you."
The working narrows. Everything I'm feeding the ring funnels to a single thread, fine as a hair, hunting toward something the stone half-keeps and can't quite hold. The candles gutter low.
Beside me, Felix's breath goes audible. Counting himself through branches I'll never see. It hitches—once—on one he doesn't like.
"Felix."
"Keep going," he says, too even. "Don't stop on my account."
"Steady," Helena says. To me. Only to me.
I'm steady. The blood ticks off my chin onto the stone—once, twice—loud as a clock in all that silence. The thread draws tight.
And I follow it down. Not with my body. With the part of me that holds all four colors. Down toward the smudge that used to be a person, reaching the way you reach for a name on the tip of your tongue, almost there, almost—
—and the floor reaches back.
It isn't the thread that wakes it. It's me. The warmth I've put into the stone.
I feel the Well find me through the very magic I built to question it. A pull from below. Vast, unhurried, coming up through the open circle like water through a crack you didn't know was in the hull.
No chains yet. Just attention.
The enormous, patient attention of the thing I've been sleeping above since September—turning over in the dark, finding the heat I've spilled into the floor, knowing me by it.
It comes up the cord at the back of my throat. Up through the soles of my feet, through my wrists where they press the ring, into the held note, one low all-consuming tone singing just behind my ear now. And the note becomes a hand. And the hand closes around something low in my belly, and pulls.
My knees go soft first. I don't decide that. They just do, an inch of give at the joint, my weight tipping toward the floor before I catch it.
Gently. Like coaxing a child onto a step.
Down is easy. Down is deep. Come and see.
And here is the thing I'll carry out of this room and never put down:
I want to go.
It isn't a want I chose. It's the pull your body gets leaning off a high ledge, nothing to do with what you'd pick, if picking were the part of you in charge. It lives in the meat under choosing, lower than thought, lower than fear.
My breath's gone shallow and fast, four quick pulls that don't reach the bottom of my lungs. My jaw's unclenched. I didn't do that either.
The Well opens beneath me, and it's cold, and it's endless, and it knows my name.
And the part of me that's been alone since September—in a house that counts my breathing, four men hung off my sternum that I can feel and can't touch—that part leans toward it before I can tell it not to.
My spine curves with it, an actual degree of lean, my weight coming forward onto my palms.
It would be so easy. The cord goes where the cord is pulled.
I'm already pouring into the circle. It would take nothing—less than nothing, a loosening, a yes—to pour into the rest. To stop being the one who holds.
To be held instead, all the way down, forever, by something that finally wants the whole of me at once.
My hands slide toward the edge of the ring.
I feel my own fingers do it. I try to stop them.
I tell them to stop, a command that has worked every single time I've ever given it, my whole life, and it doesn't reach past my wrists now.
Some far-off part of me is screaming at the rest of me to grab the floor, grab anything, and nothing answers.
My fingers keep going. An inch. Another.
"Everly."
Ren's voice, from the far side of a great distance.
His hand clamps over my wrist, hard enough to bruise, and I'm grateful for the ache of it before I even feel the sting, because pain is at least mine.
He hauls back. I feel him put his whole weight into it, feel his boots find the stone, and my arm doesn't come with him.
Not all the way. Like pulling against something bolted to the floor.
"Ren—" Felix's voice, wrecked. "Ren, she's not stopping—"
"I've got her." He doesn't have her, and I can feel that he knows it, feel his fear spike as my hand keeps sliding under his grip, a slow, relentless inch he can't hold against no matter how hard he drags.
His blood sense slams into mine—his pulse hammering where his thumb lands, his fear pouring up my arm hot and bright—and none of it is enough.
The Well is older than a heartbeat and louder than one, and it has waited longer than Ren has been alive.
"Helena." Brittany. The flat's gone out of her now. "Helena, she's—she's smiling."
Am I? I can't feel my face. I can only feel the deep. The down. The yes building behind my teeth like the blood built on my lip, and under it, so much relief I could cry from it, the relief of finally being allowed to stop.