Everly #2
We move fast and then we can't, because the corridors weren't built for fast. The stairs down to the Sepulchre are shallow and worn slick in the center, dished by a hundred years of feet that went down them and a smaller number that came back up, and I take them with one hand flat on the wall because the wall is the only thing here that's solid.
The cold climbs my arm from the stone. Somewhere below us water is moving, a slow drip finding stone and finding it again, and the air carries a smell like wet paper left too long in the dark.
Each step drops the air another degree, the way a held breath gives out a little at a time, until the Reliquary level is gone above us and the Sepulchre opens at the bottom—a long throat of a hallway, the walls cut with names from floor to lintel.
Students, I understand, after the third one—and then I make myself stop reading them, because that way lies a grief I can't afford tonight.
My breath ghosts white in the dark and the candle Helena carries throws our shadows long up the names, so that for a moment every dead girl on the wall has my shape laid over hers.
Then Helena's gone on ahead with the others, the candle's light gone with her, and I'm a beat behind in the dark.
A beat alone. The first one in weeks.
I turn to say something—I don't even know what, something about the names, something ordinary to set between me and all that cut stone—and the air changes before I see him.
Warmth, where there's been none. A shift in the cold against the back of my neck.
I turn the rest of the way and Callum is there, close, having caught me up in the dark, and he's looking at me the way he looked at the mark the morning they carved it into his hand.
Like it costs him. Like it's a fact he's carried so long it's worn a groove down to the bone.
"Callum," I start.
He kisses me.
Not the way he's kissed me before. Every other time there was a hand half-raised to hold the line, the Frost King's toll already paid before his mouth ever reached mine.
This time his hand comes up to my jaw and there is no ledger in it anywhere.
No held thing kept back to keep us safe.
His mouth is on mine and the cold of the Sepulchre just—goes.
Heat arrives from the wrong direction, from outside me instead of in, and my heartbeat doubles before I've decided anything, the thread in my chest going tight and bright, and I'm reaching for it before I remember that down here I'm allowed to.
Down here it costs nothing. Down here I can pull the line as hard as I want and no warden will ever know.
I pull it. God help me, I pull it.
He breaks the kiss just enough to speak, his forehead dropped against mine, his breath gone ragged, nothing I have ever once heard from him. The controlled man I met in September is nowhere in this hallway. Whoever's left is someone I've never been alone with.
"I'm wrecked," he says against my mouth. Quiet. Each word dragged up unwilling, the way his blood was dragged to the surface of his hand under the warden's stylus. "You wrecked me, Everly."
"Callum—"
"I don't know how to be the man I was before you." His thumb moves once along my jaw, like he's checking I'm real. "And I've stopped wanting to."
There it is. Not all the way out—the real question still hangs over both of us in the dark, the one with his mother on one side and the Well on the other, the choice he hasn't yet said down to its last word.
But this is the nearest he's come to saying it.
We both know it. I feel it land in my chest like a weight set deliberately down, the kind you don't pick back up the same.
I don't get to keep it. That's the other thing about down here. Everything you're given, this place wants back inside the hour.
"We have to move," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than any part of me.
His jaw goes tight. He nods, once, just enough, the way Ren nods, the way the whole drowning lot of them nod when there isn't time for more.
I want to say it back. I want to say a great many things back, here in the one place on this campus where saying them costs nothing, where no warden's stylus is writing it down.
The words crowd up behind my teeth—you didn't wreck anything that wasn't already breaking, you idiot, you beautiful frostbitten idiot, you're the first warm thing this place ever handed me—and not one of them gets out, because there's a girl below us being prepared and a window that's already closing and a door I have to open with my hand and not my heart.
So I press two fingers to the back of his hand instead, once, over the mark that won't stop counting him. Frost King. The first to threaten me in a hallway, and now the last man I'd ever let go down here alone.
And we move.
***-
Helena's waiting at the mouth of the next descent, and she's gone still in a way I have learned, over this long year, to be afraid of.
"It's tonight," she says, before I can ask anything. "Nell. She's already in the building."
The floor doesn't tilt, exactly. It's more that everything I've been carrying since September gets heavier all at once, the way water does the instant it turns to ice—same weight, suddenly with edges.
Tonight. Not the abstract someday-soon we've been racing all term.
Not the thing we keep telling each other we have weeks to stop.
Tonight, while the campus screams overhead and queues up for its weighing, they have Nell somewhere below us being prepared, and the word prepared sits in my mouth like the penny taste finally arriving, flat and bright and sick.
"How far down," I say. It isn't really a question. I already know the shape of the answer.
"The Deep." Helena's already moving toward it. "Where they keep the things that aren't meant to come back up."
The Hollows we passed without my even marking the threshold. This is below even that. Past the Reliquary, past the Hollows, past the Sepulchre and its wall of girls—the Deep, the bottom of everything, the place the school doesn't print on any map it hands a sophomore.
The door, when we reach it, isn't like the others.
The others are doors. This one is older, blacker, set so far back into the stone that it reads less like a way through and more like a place the wall gave up trying to be wall.
No handle. No lock I can see. No hinge, no seam, nothing my eye can find a joint in.
Just black stone the cold pours off of, thick enough that the hair stands up along my arms, and under the cold a low sound that isn't quite sound, more a pressure against my eardrums, like the building is holding its breath on the other side of it.
Helena puts her hand flat against it. The same gesture Callum gives the iron upstairs, the same Ren gave the warden's table, the gesture of someone offering a piece of themselves to a lock and trusting it to take only that.
And then she goes somewhere else. Just for a second.
Her eyes don't close, but they stop seeing me, stop seeing the corridor, fix instead on something three inches of black stone and ninety-six years away.
"Cordelia's in there," she says.
The grief in it is so plain and so old it stops my breath. I know the name the way I've come to know all the names that matter to Helena—her sister, the one the Grimoire record keeps folding shut under words like tragedy and closed chapter and a matter best not discussed.
"She has been," Helena says, "since 1930."
And under the grief—I hear it before I have any word for it.
A second thing, threaded all the way through the first, that isn't sorrow and isn't quite hope and isn't anything I've got a name for yet.
It raises the hair on my arms worse than the cold off the door ever did.
It sounds, almost, like a woman who has been patient for a very long time and is nearly, very nearly, finished being patient.
I tuck it away with everything else I'm not ready to look at. There's a whole drawer of those now, and the drawer is getting hard to close.
Helena takes her hand off the stone and looks at me, and whatever was naked in her face a moment ago has folded itself back down under the surface, the family discipline that runs in her the way it runs in Callum, the cold that's a kept thing and never a feeling left out where it can be seen.
"You should be the one," she says. "Yours is the only blood in this building that all four disciplines answer to. If anything down there is still listening after all this time, it will listen to you."
Behind us, up the long throat of the corridor, I can feel the others without reaching for them: Felix holding his doorway, three branches deep in some future where this goes wrong; Atlas and Ren elbow-deep in someone else's watching magic, tearing it loose thread by thread; Callum's blood gone quiet and waiting in the old iron; Brittany invisible by the stair, counting the seconds nobody else thought to count.
Five jobs. One window. And me at the bottom of all of it now, my hand coming up on its own.
I think of Nell, somewhere below me, being prepared.
I think of a woman who has been behind this door since before my grandparents drew breath.
I think, of all the ridiculous things, of cinnamon—of the kitchen at home, of every ordinary safe thing this place has spent a year teaching me to stop expecting—and I let myself think it, just once, because I'm about to need everything warm I've got.
I'm still here, though.
I press my palm flat to the cold black stone and let it read me: all four disciplines rising to the skin of my hand at once, copper and charge, cold and flicker, blood answering a question the door asks in every language it has.
And I open the Deep.