30. Callum #2
I should have known they wouldn't. You can't kill what was never alive, and these were never alive—errands, not soldiers—so all I've done is knock them off their feet.
The smoke gathers itself low along the stone.
It does not re-form, and it does not come back at me.
It pours away, down the corridor and past me, away from the fight, sliding for the black mouth of the deeper stair.
I watch it go and the cold drops through me clean to the soles of my feet.
"They're going to her." I say it to no one.
To all of them. To the four threads I can't feel down here, to the men clawing up out of the Reliquary, to Grey, wherever she is in this dark.
"They're not made to fight. They're made to carry.
They'll reach her in minutes and she'll know everything.
Every step we took. Every door we opened. All of it."
There was never going to be a clean way out of this.
I knew that on the stairs. I've known it, if I'm honest, since the morning in her office with my hand flat on her table, known that whatever we did tonight, she'd be three moves ahead, because she has been three moves ahead of me my entire life.
The only thing that's changed is that now I can feel her hand on the back of my neck instead of mistaking it for my own hand.
That's the whole of what this year did to me. It didn't make me free. It taught me to feel the leash.
And somewhere under my ribs, one thing has finally stopped answering to her.
Small. Quiet. Mine. It's the choosing itself—not the plan, not the odds, just the fact that I looked at what she wanted and did the other thing anyway.
It's going to get the four of them killed, and I would not undo it.
I've turned it over a hundred nights in the dark with my hands in my lap, and it comes out the same every time: I would rather lose them choosing this than keep her by staying obedient.
I knew it. I came anyway. I chose this anyway.
The working is finished.
I feel it lock—a pressure arriving behind my eyes hard enough to make them water, my heart slamming once, twice, against my own ribs like it already knows what's coming—and my mother lifts the shaped killing-dark of it level with my chest. Her face does the small flat thing it does when a decision is made and only the execution is left.
"You always were sentimental," she says. "I tried to train it out of you. I see now I should have tried harder."
The dark draws back to strike.
Atlas comes through the wall itself, not the door.
The carved Bolingbroke stone to my left—a hundred years of it—blows inward in a crack of white.
The sound rings straight through my ears.
Stone dust rains down the back of my collar.
The dark itself flinches. He's through the gap before the rubble lands, lightning still crawling off his shoulders, the smell of weather breaking and ozone and that old grief in the charge that's only ever been his—and for one absurd second, he's the best thing I've ever seen in my life.
Twelve hours ago he had me by the collar against the brick of the frat house, storm cracking off his knuckles an inch from my jaw, and I let him, because half of what he was screaming was true and I don't lie to myself about the half that is.
We have wanted to kill each other since the first week of my life that he was in it.
We nearly managed, last night. I carry a burn under my collar shaped like his hand, and he carries a bruise from mine, and through the whole of it neither of us said the other's name once.
He doesn't look at me now.
He throws a fist of storm—not at her, at the spell, at the shaped dark hanging off her hand.
The lightning catches it across its middle and breaks it clean off its feet.
The point of it that was aimed at my chest scatters wide, harmless, smoke and spent charge.
The backlash cracks the floor between us and throws her a full step back, the first ground she's given all night.
For half a second I'm clear. Alive. Bleeding, my shoulder screaming, one arm half-dead at my side, but alive, with the killing spell gone to nothing in the air.
Atlas is already past me.
He doesn't slow, doesn't speak, doesn't spend one motion of that storm on me or on the woman who just built a working to put me in the ground.
His head is already turned toward the deeper stair, toward the cold throat of it, toward the center where the rings are closing around the one thing he came down here for.
Toward her. He came through a wall to break the spell off my chest, and it wasn't for me—it was because I stood on the line between him and Grey, and now I don't, so he's gone, down into the dark where none of us can feel the others.
I should follow. I will follow.
I take one look back at my mother first. I don't decide to. My body does it on its own, same reflex as the shadow reaching for her earlier. It always reaches for the thing it shouldn't.
She's bleeding. The backlash opened a thin dark line across her cheekbone, running toward her jaw. She lifts two fingers and touches it the way you'd touch a stain on a sleeve. Checking the damage, not the wound.
Her dark has guttered low around her, knocked back, gathering for the next thing.
For the length of one breath my mother is a woman in a cracked room with blood on her face and her working broken, and I wait—in spite of all of it, in the worst oldest part of me that has been waiting my whole life—for the thing on her face to change.
It doesn't.
She isn't built to smile and she doesn't try. The flatness stays exactly where it was, and that's worse than rage would be. Worse than grief. Worse than anything that would tell me there had ever been a door in the wall.
She looks at me across the broken floor with her own blood running down her face and not one degree of difference in her eyes.
What's there is so level, so entirely unbothered, that the cold of it goes deeper into me than the spell would have, finding the exact same spot behind my sternum the four-year-old has always kept open for her, and settling there.
It reaches the four-year-old. It always could.
"Go on, then," she says. "Run down to her. You think this is the part where you've won."
The dark gathers at her feet. Behind her, the rings have not stopped closing.
"You think you're the first of mine to choose wrong?"