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Felix is crawling back across the grass from where he dropped the lamp, soaked to the waist, with one sodden card stuck to his sleeve. He peels it off and turns it over in the lamplight and looks at it, and I know from his face that it's only a card.

Then he comes the last of the way on his knees, takes both my hands, and shoves them up under his sweater, flat against his bare stomach. He flinches at how cold they are but holds them there anyway. I can't even feel his skin, but I can feel him shaking.

Callum doesn't even try. He sits on the bottom of the front steps, the only part of Concordia still standing, with his bleeding face turned towards the hole and his hands open on his knees.

Ren gets up and goes to him. Kneeling in the grass in front of him, he tips Callum's face towards the lamp with a finger under his chin to look at the cut, and his hand goes still when he understands that he can't close it.

Ren has closed every cut any of us has gotten since Helena healed him. Now he pulls his sweater off over his head, folds it into a pad, and presses it to Callum's cheek with the flat of his hand, and Callum lets him.

I think about Helena all last winter on the stone floor of the Down Deep, my thermos of soup going cold between us while she taught me to take a spell apart without breaking the thing it was wound around. Small and exact, she told me, every single time. A scalpel, not a hammer. Then she walked down here tonight and took a hammer to the whole Well.

I'm so angry at her I can't breathe around it. But I also keep seeing her hands go into the water without her stopping to brace herself, and the blood running out of them. And I keep seeing her sit down at the bottom of those steps and fold her hands. She wanted to be there when Cordelia went. She didn't want to be anywhere after.

Somewhere on campus, every first-year is free. The rune has nothing to drain them into anymore. All the kids I never got to went free in the same instant, and none of them will ever know why the ground shook them out of bed tonight.

I wanted that. I came down here for exactly that.

Every other mage at Nyxhaven has nothing now, though. Every spell, every conductor, every knife and die and stylus went dark in the middle of the night. It's all gone because Helena lost Cordelia in 1930 and told me she was done waiting, and I didn't believe her.

And mine is gone. It was the first thing I was ever really good at.

I try to find one single thing to be optimistic about, and for the first time in my life, I can't.

32

CALLUM

The campus wakes up in the morning with no magic at all.

We spend what's left of the night next door at Callister, which has been shut up all summer. Everly still has her key, and everything we own is at the bottom of a hole in the lawn. Ren stitches my cheek at dawn at Callister's kitchen table, with a needle and thread from a sewing kit in Everly's old room and a bottle of cooking sherry from the pantry, because there's nothing else. His hands are perfectly steady. "Hold still," he says, and that's all he says the whole time. When he's tied off the last stitch, he tapes a bandage over it, goes upstairs, lies down on the floor of his room, and doesn't come back down.

His door is open when I pass it on my way out. Ren is on his back on the rug with his hands folded on his stomach, looking at the ceiling, and Felix is lying on the bare boards beside him, shoulder to shoulder, with his deck.

He's turning the cards over one at a time and laying them face up on his chest—the Tower, then one of the black ones he inked himself. He looks at each of them the way he used to look at a future, waiting, and then he turns over the next, because none of them shows him anything.

"Morning," he says without lifting his head. "We're having a lie-down. It's very exclusive."

"Is he all right?"

"He's breathing. I'm keeping an eye on it, since he can't anymore." He turns another card. "Ren's teaching me how to get up without knowing the odds on breakfast. So far the lesson is mostly lying here."

Ren doesn't say anything. He takes one hand off his stomach and puts two fingers on the inside of Felix's wrist, over the pulse, the way he used to when he could hear it from across a room. Felix stops turning cards and lets him.

I stand in the doorway longer than I mean to. Then I leave them there.

Outside, the air smells of wet leaves and nothing else. Until this morning I didn't know how much of this campus I could feel without trying: spells going in every building, and under all of it the dead, warm and quiet. Now I can't feel any of it.

On the steps of Kingsley, a Tempest sophomore holds her conductor over her head, trying to call up a breeze. Nothing comes. She stands there with her arm up until it starts to tremble.

The infirmary doors are propped open with a chair, and the line runs out onto the path: students holding towels to their hands and heads, a boy with his arm in a sling made from his blazer. Through the open doors one of the healers is explaining to someone, too loudly and too patiently, "We'll have to use stitches. Yes, the ordinary kind. With a needle."

No one knows what happened. On the library steps, a Mors boy I don't know is holding forth to a small crowd.

"It was the grimoire," he tells them. "It's always the grimoire. My father said so."

"It was the families," the girl beside him snaps.

"It was the end of the world," someone offers from the back, and no one tells her she's wrong.