Page 74 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

It runs out of her chest just under her heart, thin as a hair, and straight down through the floorboards into the dark under Concordia.

I start to unwind it.

I go small and exact, the way Helena drilled into me on her floor all winter with her cords and her voice in my ear telling me to do it again. Scalpel, not hammer. I find where it's pulled tightest and ease it loose, a little and then a little more, but every time I let go it pulls itself tight again, so I just don't let go.

Ren holds Josie's heart steady under my hands. I can feel him doing it, a sure pressure on the other side of her ribs. I draw the magic up out of the lines myself and spend it as fast as it comes.

The work costs me, the way it always does. The cold gets into my fingers first, then my wrists, and then it just keeps climbing.

Josie talks the whole time, eyes shut, her voice a little too bright. "My mom's beagle eats socks. Like, as a lifestyle. He's had surgery for it twice, and my mom says he's the most expensive thing she's ever owned, which is saying something, because she owns a boat."

"That's a very committed dog."

"My roommate labels her food in the fridge and then eats mine. With the label still on hers! Like I wouldn't notice." She's quiet for a moment. "There's a boy in my Sanguis seminar with a gap in his front teeth. He let me borrow his ritual knife on the first day, because I forgot mine."

"Is he cute?" My voice sounds strange to me, far away, like it's coming from the next room over.

"So cute. Is that a stupid thing to care about right now?"

"No," I tell her. "Honestly, that's the least stupid thing anyone's said in this house all week."

Felix laughs from the doorway, very softly, for the first time since enrollment.

The lamp burns down, and Brittany gets up, fills it, and sits back down. Felix slides down the doorframe until he's sitting on the floor, but Atlas never moves. His hands stay on my shoulders the whole time, and whenever I stop to shake out my numb fingers, he reaches around me and wraps his big hands over mine until they ache their way back to feeling. Eventually I can't feel them anyway. I keep going.

It comes out all at once at the end. The last of it lets go and slides out of my hands, and I feel the line go slack and drop away into the floor, down through the crossing into the dark, until it's gone.

Josie gasps, her eyes flying open. For a second she just lies there, and then she starts to cry.

"I can breathe." She presses both hands flat to her chest. "I didn't... oh my God. I can breathe. I didn't even know I couldn't."

Bending down, Ren puts his ear close to her and listens with his eyes shut, his hands on her face. I hold my breath and watch his mouth.

"One heartbeat," he says. "Just hers."

Atlas lets out a long breath behind me, and in the doorway Felix tips his head back against the frame and closes his eyes.

The windows have gone grey. I'm so tired that when I try to sit back on my heels I tip right over sideways, and Atlas catches me before I hit the floor.

"I'm starving." Josie wipes her face on her sleeve. "Is that weird? I'm so hungry."

Brittany goes to the kitchen. When she comes back she's holding the box of Cheerios, and she stops in the doorway beside Felix, just looking at it, because Nell ate out of that box on this floor the last time we did this.

Then she walks in, pours Josie a bowl, and hands it to her before going back to the far end of the blankets and opening her notebook. She writes Josie's name on a clean page with the date beside it, then draws a line through it, straight and neat, pressing hard enough that I can hear the pen on the paper.

By the end of the week, Brittany is running the whole operation.

She keeps a list of every first-year on campus in her small square handwriting, fed by the Vitae kids, who hear about everyone who walks into the infirmary, and by the Storm Daughters, who seem to know everything about everyone at all times, which is frankly kind of terrifying.

They bring first-years down to the boathouse after dark in pairs, then I walk them across the lawn one at a time. Every one of them stops dead halfway across the grass and says some version of what is that.

The only one who doesn't is a Fulmen boy who never makes it to the grass. He's waiting at the end of the boathouse dock when Ren and I come down for him, and when he stands up, he slips on the wet boards and opens his palm on a cleat. Ren kneels on the planks with the boy's hand in both of his, and nothing happens, because the dock is out over the water and it cuts Ren off from the lines. I see him realize it a second before I do.

"Off the dock," he says, and walks the kid back along the boards with his hand clamped over the cut. As soon as their feet hit the dirt at the end, the cut closes under his fingers.

"Don't get hurt on bridges," Ren tells him.

The boy looks back at the dock. "That's a dock."