Everly
The fight has four sides and every one of them is about me.
I feel it before any of them open their mouths: four threads pulled tight in my chest, four kinds of fear pouring up them at once. The awful part is that I can tell them apart now.
The better part of a year ago they were strangers I couldn't have told you the difference between except by which one had most recently tried to ruin my night. Now I could pick each one out blind.
Callum's fear comes cold and close, a hand closing around something.
Atlas's prickles over my skin, the charge before a strike.
Felix's flickers at the very edge of my sight, gone before I can turn my head to it.
Ren's just sinks, low and steady, copper settling on the back of my tongue, and that's the one that scares me.
We're in Concordia Hall because it's the only place left that doesn't tell on us.
Everywhere else, the marks burn: the wardens' little half moons sunk into the back of every hand but mine, broadcasting where they are and that they're near me, that the bond is reaching.
Here the hall swallows it. Here they can stand in one room with me and not set the alarms off all over campus.
But the marks still ache for the nearness.
I can see it in the way Atlas keeps flexing his hand, in the dull throb I catch off Ren's thread like a low tooth-ache.
They each paid to be here, and the wardens only take one kind of payment: it hurts.
It's hurting all of them right now, just to stand close to me.
And tomorrow we go into the Deep.
The hall knows it, too. I don't have a better word for what Concordia Hall does than know.
It isn't warded the way the frat houses are warded, with their tidy wardens and their leashes; it's older than that, older than the wardens, and it holds the bond the way a deep well holds a dropped stone—takes it in, gives nothing back, keeps the secret because keeping secrets is the only thing it's ever been asked to do.
The candle Helena lit when we came in burns straight up without a flicker.
The dust on the mantel hasn't been disturbed since whoever last had a conversation in here they couldn't have anywhere else.
The hall has held a lot of those, I think.
It's holding this one now, patient as stone, counting nothing, telling no one.
Tomorrow, under cover of the review, when the whole campus is moving and loud and watching the wrong things, they mean to go down past the Reliquary and the Hollows, past the Sepulchre, to the bottom of all of it, and break Catalina's working before she can finish binding herself into the Well, and pull Nell off the list before the next mark comes due.
One window. One night. We've gone over it a hundred times.
We have not, it turns out, gone over the part where everyone is this afraid and pretending the fear is a strategy.
We are not going over it calmly.
"She's not going down there." Callum says it like it's already decided, like he's reading it off a ledger.
His shadow has pooled out from his feet across the old floorboards, dark and certain, the way it does when he's holding himself very still on top of something that isn't. "She nearly let it take her in the séance.
I felt it. We all felt it." His eyes come to me and they are not cold, that's the thing nobody believes about Callum—they're never cold when it's me.
"The Well wants you more than it wants any of us.
I'm not walking you toward the one thing in that building that's hungry for you specifically. "
"And you breaking the working yourself?" Atlas is already up off the windowsill, and the air in the room tilts toward him, that pre-storm lightness that makes the hair on my arms lift.
"You can't. None of us can. It's keyed to her grimoire.
She's the only one who can unpick it and you know that, Callum, you've known it for a week.
" He drags a hand back through his hair.
"So this isn't about safety. Say the real thing.
This is about you needing to be the one who decides where she stands. "
"That's not—"
"That's exactly it." Atlas takes a step in and the floorboards seem to lean toward him.
"You spent the whole summer telling me to trust her.
To stop deciding things for her. You said it to me in a motel parking lot at four in the morning with your hands shaking, Callum, I remember it.
And now we're one night out from your mother becoming the worst thing in that building and suddenly you're the one drawing the line around where Everly gets to stand.
" His voice drops, rough. "I'm not saying you're wrong to be scared.
I'm saying scared isn't a plan. It's just you, deciding. "
"And what would you have her do?" Callum's control cracks for exactly one word and then closes back over it. "Walk down into a building that wants to swallow her, and trust that the four of us will be fast enough? You felt it in the séance same as I did."
"I felt her hold it off," Atlas says. "I felt her be stronger than it. That's the part you keep editing out."
"Stop." That's me, and neither of them does.
Felix hasn't moved from the chair, and that's how I know it's bad.
Felix is always doing something with his hands—a card walking knuckle to knuckle, a die turning, the small busy mercy of it.
Right now his deck is flat on his knee and his hand is flat on top of it and he's staring at the middle distance like there's a chalkboard hung in the air that only he can read.
There is, sort of. He's been somewhere else for the whole argument. He comes back for this.
"Tear it up," he says. Quiet, pleasant, wrong. "All of it. The plan. Tomorrow. Every version where we walk her down those stairs."
"Felix—"
"I keep looking." He says it to the air, not to me.
"I look down every branch where we do this the way we've planned it, and you want to know what I keep finding at the bottom of them?
" His mouth does something that isn't a smile.
"Bad odds. I'm not going to dress it up.
I have stopped being able to find the good ones.
So I'd take a coward's branch. I'd take the worst plan in the world if it had her standing up at the end of it.
I'd take running again. I'd take anything.
" The card under his palm doesn't move. "I am asking us to be cowards. On the record. That's where I am."
The room goes quiet for one beat and I understand, the way you understand a drop in your stomach before you understand the stairs, that Felix has just told them the thing he never tells anyone.
He didn't say how bad the odds are. He never says how bad.
But he doesn't have to. I've spent enough nights watching that smile to know that when it doesn't even try to climb, the odds underneath are the kind he carries alone so the rest of us don't have to.
And then Ren speaks, and it's worse than all of it.
He's been in the corner, arms crossed, the stillness he wears when something's coming up through his blood sense that he doesn't like.
He doesn't raise his voice. Ren never raises his voice.
He waits until the loud people run out of air and then he sets one quiet sentence down in the middle of the floor where it can't be stepped over.
"It isn't her dying that I can't carry." His brown eyes find mine and hold, steady and terrible.
"The Well doesn't take by force. It takes what's given.
It only takes what yields to it." He swallows.
"So that's the nightmare. Not them killing her down there.
Them making her want it. Her own will turned around and pointed back at her, somewhere underneath the whole campus, where the bond can't reach and none of us can get to her in time.
" His voice drops to almost nothing. "I would feel her choose it.
Through this." He touches two fingers to the center of his chest, where the thread between us lives.
"And I would not be able to stop her. Because it would be her. "
My mouth goes dry, and I swallow, and the swallowing doesn't move it an inch.
Nobody says anything.
And then everybody does.
It tips. No single moment I could point to and say there—just all of it, at once.
Callum's shadow comes off the floor in a sheet.
It doesn't pool at his feet anymore; it climbs, peeling up the wall behind Atlas and folding over his shoulder like a hand closing around it.
Atlas throws it off with a crack of charge that splits the air blue, ozone flooding sharp and sudden, thunder right behind it close enough to feel in my teeth.
The bolt goes wide. It scores a black line down the old paneling a foot from Callum's head, and plaster spits, and somewhere above us the hall ticks.
"Both of you—" I get two words out.
Felix's hand finally moves—a card off the top of the deck, a flick of the wrist—and something flickers at the very edge of my sight, gone before I can turn my head to it, the way chaos magic always announces itself first. Then the room tilts: not force, probability bent hard in one direction, the floor going wrong under me the way a stair goes wrong in a dream, every outcome in the room suddenly rolling downhill toward whatever Felix wants.
"Sit," he says, pleasant as anything, and the odds do the rest—Atlas drops into the chair behind him like the world simply decided that was the likelier thing to happen.
He's back on his feet in the next breath, furious, because Atlas Knox has never once in his life done the likely thing, and that stubbornness is the only reason the odds can't hold him.