Katabasis — Chapter no 10

Chapter Ten

Are you all right?” Peter patted frantically at her cheeks. “Alice?”

Alice blinked her eyes open. Peter had pulled her onto the shore. The bone-things were scattered across the shallows, and water fizzed as it sloshed round the chalk. Some bone-things were still moving, trying to get out, but their legs came loose at the joints, and their spines disintegrated vertebra by vertebra. She watched as disembodied fragments kicked, twitched, and then sank below the surface.

Peter grasped her shoulders and shook. “Alice?”

She startled. “Oh. Yes?”

“What’s my name? What’s the date? What is your favorite Beatles song?”

“I’m fine.” Alice frowned. She supposed if she’d lost her memories, she wouldn’t know in the first place. But she at least felt no confusion about who she was, or what she was doing here. She reached for her staircase and found it. She was Alice Law, postgraduate at Cambridge; she studied analytic magick. And Peter was Peter. “Murdoch. Peter Murdoch.

Aboveground, it’s—October second. Third, maybe, I’ve lost track. ‘Mister Postman.’” She shook her head. “How do you know my favorite Beatles song?”

Peter slumped back with relief. “You listen to it all the time at the lab.”

“But I use headphones.”

“Your headphones are very loud.”

“You should have said something!”

“It’s all right.” Peter put his hands under Alice’s back and helped her sit up. “You have very repetitive tastes, however. I wish you’d put on Abbey

Road sometime.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

He stood; she took his hand and hauled herself up. She felt a dizzying rush of blood to her head, but nothing else, nothing to suggest she might have lost some crucial part of who she was. Her temples throbbed, but even

worse was the sharp pain in her upper arm. She glanced down, saw the blood tracks and bite marks all down her front, and reeled. “Lord. Oh.”

“Come on.” Peter slung her arm over his shoulder and wrapped one hand around her waist. “Let’s get out of this rain.”

LEAVING DESIRE WAS VERY HARD GOING. The storm did not seem to want to let them out. The winds whipped at enormous strengths, and the rain hammered so fiercely that breathing felt like drowning. It took great effort even to stand still, for unless they dug their heels hard into the ground, the gusts kept buffeting them toward the doors of the court. Alice could hardly see where they were going; everything was a howling, wet wall. All she could do was dip her head against the rain and press forward one little step at a time, clutching Peter’s arm for guidance. But then it passed, just as quickly as it had come on. The winds died, the rain lightened; a few more steps, and the sky cleared completely. Alice could still see those thunderous clouds above, divided from dusky light by a neat, straight line.

There they made camp, safely in sight of the Lethe, on the border of Desire and Greed. Peter got a fire going. Alice sat shivering madly, drying herself until she felt like a person again.

She coughed. “Could I have some of your water?”

“Oh—sure.” Peter passed over his Perpetual Flask. “I don’t have rabies, or anything.”

“I don’t think you get rabies from water bottles.” She unscrewed the lid.

“We’ll have to share from now on.”

Her own flask had been submerged in the river. Lethe water had gotten into the Pentagrams in its cap, and it wouldn’t replenish any longer.

“That’s all right, so long as we keep together.” Peter cleared his throat.

“So. Now that you’ve had a breather, could I just ask some—”

“No, thank you.”

“But we’ve got to make sure. I mean . . .” He leaned forward, his eyes huge with concern. “Don’t you want to be sure?”

Alice was sure. She’d been probing her thoughts ever since they sat down, looking for gaps. But the pain in her skull had faded now, and nothing had gone with it. Her memory was like a badly locked trunk, straining at the clinch, always full to bursting. She would know if

something had leaked, she thought. She would have felt the release.

“Nothing’s gone, I promise.”

“But how do you know?”

She hesitated.

Don’t you tell anyone. This memory was very vivid. Professor Grimes had only said it once, but once was enough. But how else to explain? She did not want Peter splashing about the Lethe, for he was certainly not immune.

It would get her in terrible trouble. But she thought of Peter’s outburst in the Court of Desire, that inexplicable anger—and thought perhaps, out of anyone, Peter might understand.

“I think I’m immune,” she said. “To the Lethe.”

“Immune how?”

She trailed her fingers against the sand. It was so hard to say this out loud. She had been so practiced at saying nothing out loud; it was hard, actually, to find and then speak the right words. Her first impulse was to dance around the truth. “Well, I don’t forget things.”

“We’ve all got good memories, Law, but the Lethe—”

“No, I mean that I can’t forget things.”

“What does that even—”

“Look.” She rolled up her left sleeve and shifted so that he could see the skin around her upper arm. “This won’t let me.”

He looked. Then breathed in, so sharply that Alice blinked and turned away.

Etched in her flesh, in neat white script in a perfect circle, was a permanent pentagram.

Magick never lasted forever. You drew a sphere of influence, you put an object inside, and when you were finished with the spell, you took the object back out. The most talented magicians could create enchantments that lasted hours, even weeks in the case of Perpetual Flasks, but you always needed to bring objects back to the pentagram once they’d lost their charge. What’s more, pentagrams were written in chalk, not ink; by nature, they could not last long. They were under constant threat from vacuum cleaners, brooms, a gust of wind, a sneeze. Every stroke of every letter in a pentagram mattered, and the slightest smudge negated all the hard work of inscribing it in the first place. The best magicians erased their work at the end of every day to prevent accidents the next morning. It was a massive

waste of chalk, but there was no way around it. Magick was ephemeral. You fooled the world for a breath, and then everything went back to the way it was before.

Professor Grimes had made it his career’s work to defy this one basic rule of magick. He wanted to keep the lie going. And he had proven, with Alice, that pentagrams etched in living human skin might keep their charge for a lifetime. Or at least a year and counting—which was all they knew so far.

Peter stared at the tattoo for a long time. He lifted his hands, and when she nodded permission, he poked and prodded, kneading her skin with his fingers. At last he said, “That’s not your handwriting.”

“No. Guess whose.”

Something unreadable passed over his face. “He made you?”

“I wanted to,” she said, and felt a hot vicious thrum in her chest. Yes, this was right, she knew this was true. “I let him.”

THIS WAS HOW ALICE AND PROFESSOR Grimes spent that summer in Italy.

He had started with animals. First rats and guinea pigs, and then cats and dogs shaved down to trembling skin. Animal research rules were laxer in Europe; the streets were littered with strays. Alice spent hours holding cats in place while he worked the tattoo needle over their shaved, bare skin.

She’d been in charge of disposing of the corpses, too; she became familiar with every spazzino collection point in Venice.

But the problem with animal experimentation was that there was only so much that lesser creatures could do. You could make them run in circles, or withstand tests of hunger or pain, but in the end you didn’t really know how much of an impact you’d made. Who cared if a cat remembered which cup a treat was in? Something more expressive would be better. Something that, at least, could talk—that could tell you what the injection of living-dead energy did to a body. Whether it felt like nothing, whether it burned you up from the inside.

Alice always knew it’d be her turn under the needle down the line.

Professor Grimes had made no pretensions otherwise. She had freely given her fully informed consent from the beginning, and in her opinion, that made it all fine. It put her in control. And she trusted Professor Grimes to do it safely, to do it well.

She was so good, both during the procedure and the night before. She didn’t let on how scared she was; how she was having second thoughts. She knew this would only annoy him. When she sobbed from fear she did it in the privacy of her hotel room. Oh, but she did not want to die. She did not want to lose her mind. But she kept this to herself. In the morning she was calm, placid, docile. A perfect blank tablet.

She kept reminding herself: It’s been two whole weeks since we killed a cat.

He offered her anesthetic before they began, but she refused even a local injection. She knew it was important that she keep talking, responding, throughout the procedure. She had to stay alert, to catalog every part of the experience. She needed to feel every dip of the needle into her skin, every burn of living-dead chalk.

He’d been so kind, so encouraging, as he worked across her skin. He stroked her shoulder every time she flinched, murmuring low, soothing assurances. “You’re grand. You’re doing so well. Sit still for me, darling.

That’s it. We’re almost done.” He stopped when the pain became too much; he let her take as many breaks as she needed. And when he closed the circle and she dropped to her knees, moaning as the living-dead energy rushed through her body, he bent down with her and rubbed circles into her back and gathered her hair behind her head as she vomited blood across the floor.

The experiment was a great success.

When Alice’s fever subsided and she regained consciousness, Professor Grimes held before her a series of slates inscribed with languages she didn’t know, each for three seconds at a time, then requested she reproduce the script on the blackboard. She copied them all without mistake. Two weeks later he asked her to do it again, this time without showing her the slates, and once again she copied them out perfectly.

The week was a thrill of discovery. If her memory had limits, she had yet to find them. She could sit down with six books in an evening and, as long as she read every line carefully, commit them all to memory. Her mind now functioned as an on-call encyclopedia. She couldn’t suddenly read fluently in French or Arabic, but she could, if she sat long enough, flip through mental dictionaries to compile passably good translations. Entire worlds opened before her. She learned Cyrillic, Hungarian, Nastaliq. She learned Linear B.

Of course it hurt. It never stopped hurting; the pain only migrated from her arm and manifested instead as a constant throbbing at her temples. Her mind felt stretched thin, crammed with things she could never dispense with. She had not realized, until that day, how humans needed to forget to function. Now she could not erase from her mind the million awkward encounters of any given day. Misreading the menu. Spilling her wine.

Dropping her wallet, holding up the post office queue. She was already such an anxious personality, and her mind now forced her to relive in excruciating detail every mistake she made with every human being she’d ever met.

But the benefits so clearly outweighed the costs, for what scholar wouldn’t have killed for her perfect recall? It was the age when everyone was getting excited about computing machines, and here Alice had become one. She would adapt; she had no choice.

“Now, you can’t tell anyone about this,” Professor Grimes instructed.

“At least not for a long while. This is very important, Alice. It’s not like the war anymore. The Royal Academy are all so conservative now, and if anyone knew, I would lose my certification. I have a great deal of enemies in this department. Any one of them would use this information to destroy me. There cannot even be a rumor. You must be discreet.”

Which was a blow, actually, because deep down Alice had been hoping to flaunt it all over the world. In her deepest and silliest fantasies, Professor Grimes touted her around the conference circuit like a vaudeville performer.

He would be Grimes the Great; she would be his Dazzling Living Pentagram.

But they were talking serious magick here, and she wasn’t a little girl.

“Of course,” she said, and pulled her sleeve over her arm.

“Very good.” He patted her shoulder. “It’ll be our little secret.”

When they returned from Venice he moved on to other projects. He’d grown bored with testing Alice’s memory after a week. He had confirmed his pentagram worked, and now he could turn his attention to jumping all the little hoops, the years-long process of publishing intermediary proofs before he could do anything useful with this result. Alice was secondary. He stopped checking on the state of her tattoo; by the start of term, he’d stopped mentioning it. Their little secret. And so Alice had to content herself with the mere knowledge that, among all his students, Professor Grimes liked her best. The evidence was written in her skin.

“DID IT HURT?” ASKED PETER.

“Only a little. I did all right.”

She didn’t tell him about the burning. The effect of her tattoo was not unlike how Gothic novels described vampires reborn: all their senses sharper, the world gleaming bright. She remembered waking up to a surge of detail, all etched permanently into her brain at the same time she registered it. Professor Grimes’s face hanging over hers, eager, anxious, a hunger in those sharp, dark eyes she would never forget.

And she didn’t tell him about the flood: the vicious procession of memories, the constant random associations, the immense strain it took to sort out what was relevant and what was not. She did not tell him that her vision had become a roller coaster ride through infinite screens, every television show playing at once. She did not tell him that she had to focus, hard, on a simple tomato before her brain recognized it as tomato, and not apple, not dodgeball, not bloody, beating human heart. She did not tell him how easy it was to lose herself in the wash, how it happened every time she let her attention slip. She did not tell him, I have to rebuild a staircase by the hour to keep in mind who I am, where I am, and what I am doing. He couldn’t help her, after all; he could only pity her, and so she just didn’t see the point.

“I see why you never told anyone.” Peter spoke very slowly. He seemed to be mincing words in his head, carefully choosing euphemisms so as to not offend her. “That—that’s a lot to sort through.”

“It’s really not as bad as it sounds.” Alice’s voice took on a defensive edge. She hadn’t meant to share what happened as if it were some great tragedy. She hated when women in her department complained, as if they hadn’t asked to be there. She hated the way Peter looked at her now; his pity made her squeamish. “I mean—he knew what he was doing. He always knows what he’s doing, he never would have taken the risks otherwise.”

This was what she’d told herself in the days leading up to the inscription, as she tried to keep the piled-up bodies of shaved cats frozen in rictus from invading her nightmares. “He was very careful.”

“Did he tell you it was more for your good than his?”

“Of course not.” Alice hated this too, the way people so often assumed that Professor Grimes’s students were infantile cultists who didn’t know any better. “I told you, I wanted to do it.”

Her vehemence seemed to startle Peter, for he held his hands up in apology. “I was just asking.”

“It’s not like he forced me,” she reiterated.

“Yes, you mentioned . . .” Peter was blinking quite a lot. “I’m sorry, I’m just wrapping my head around it all. It just seems so—I mean, I can’t believe he put you in that position.”

Good lord, thought Alice. Not that line.

One time at a conference in New York, a young postdoc from Princeton had engaged Alice in vibrant conversation for nearly thirty minutes about a panel they’d just attended—something that felt validating and comradely, for they were the only two women in the room—before Alice mentioned she worked in Professor Grimes’s lab. The postdoc’s entire demeanor changed then. She shrank back as she looked Alice up and down, eyes crinkled with pity. “Oh dear,” she said. “So you know about the—well, you know.”

Alice knew very well, because this wasn’t her first conference, and she’d heard it all by now. Grimes was evil, Grimes was toxic, blah blah blah. Some contrarian part of her soul was indeed proud to be associated with such a notorious advisor. Everyone else was so boring. Professor Grimes at least had some personality.

Alice had put on her blandest, most innocent smile. “How do you mean?”

The postdoc had chuckled awkwardly. “Surely you know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t, actually—is there something I need to know?”

The postdoc had blinked around the room, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “Uh—I mean—I’m sorry, I just assumed everyone talked. If you don’t—” She stammered over her words then, and this gave Alice some fierce satisfaction. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. That was silly of me.”

“I’d suggest doing less gossiping about people behind their backs, if you haven’t got anything substantial to say.” Alice had felt as if she’d scored some rhetorical victory, though really all she’d done was torpedo a budding friendship. She knew when she flew home she would never hear from this postdoc again, which was a shame, because women in her field were supposed to form alliances whenever they encountered each other. She did not care. Her delight over this burned bridge was probably the wrong

response, though all she could perceive in that moment was that the rush of blood to her head felt good. “But thank you.”

It was this same contrarian attitude that made her say coolly to Peter, “I didn’t get put in positions.”

“Fine, fine, I believe you.” Peter, to his credit, quickly moved on. “So do you think it makes you a better scholar? The pentagram, I mean.”

“There’s benefits, of course.” She hesitated, wondering how to untangle the mass of contradictions that was her memory; how to explain that keeping too much in your mind wasn’t necessarily a good thing, that more often it made her jumbled and confused and weighed down with things she wished had never happened. “I feel a bit—less mortal. Less fallible. Most of

the time.”

“Sounds nice.”

“But I think more than anything it makes me—well, afraid. Like I’ve cheated my way into being an expert, and by not doing the hours of hard rote memorization, I’ve lost something important. I’ve got this bank of knowledge, but I don’t know how to sort through it. And the payoff’s not as good without the process, somehow. If I didn’t have to sweat for it, it

doesn’t count.”

“Law, that’s deranged.”

She shrugged. “I’m a Grimes student.”

“Certainly that.” He blinked at the fire. His mouth worked several times as he apparently reconsidered what he wished to say, and Alice braced herself for another moralistic recrimination. “Did Professor Grimes—um, did Grimes ever ask you to do anything else that you thought wasn’t right?”

“This is my only tattoo. He never—”

“No, that’s not what I meant. Um.” He began tugging at the frayed edges of his sleeves. He always did that when anxious, she recalled. But that meant he was anxious. This wasn’t about her, it was about him. “Not just illegal. But something—I don’t know. Things that felt unscrupulous.”

Alice thought of the mice in Venice, their miserable, twitching bodies.

The way they shrieked and scurried when she reached to pluck another one out of the cage. As if they knew precisely what was happening on that lab table, as if they knew what that chalk would do. She’d become so good at displacing their spines to give them the quickest, easiest death while chalk burned into their skin; at severing their neural cords before they could fully process the pain. If she’d ever felt ethical compunctions about it, she’d

stopped caring by the end. You got used to just about anything in a lab.

Anyhow, they were only mice.

“No,” she said. “Why? Did he ever ask you?”

Peter kept fretting at his sleeve. He’d worked several threads undone.

Alice was about to smack his hand to make him stop when finally he uttered, “He asked me to get him a human colon.”

“What?”

“Not from, like, a living patient.” He flapped his hands in distress.

“From a corpse. One of the corpses they use for anatomy lessons.”

“They still do that?”

“Of course, how do you think they practice surgery?”

This seemed to Alice far worse than anything she’d ever done. At least her only victim was herself. “Sounds like you violated some rights.”

“The dead don’t have rights.”

“Well, debatable—but how—why—I mean, what on earth, Peter?”

“I don’t know.” Peter shrugged. “In the scheme of things, it just seemed like such a small deal. Maybe that’s how you thought about your tattoo. He was—we were working on something—it never went anywhere, but it seemed for a while like it had some potential. But—well, you know, chalk interacts differently with organic material. We needed a human organ to be sure.”

“You stole a colon.” Alice could not get over this. “A human colon!”

“Well. Three or four.”

“Jesus, Murdoch.”

“I wasn’t going to say no.”

“You could have reported that,” she said. “That’s an ethics violation.

You could have taken it to the dean.”

A silence. They looked at each other, and then burst out laughing.

“Was it very difficult?” Alice asked.

“Actually, no. I thought it might be, but I sort of just walked in and— took what I needed. Three people saw me, so I waved, and they just waved

back.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I know it’s insane,” said Peter. “I probably shouldn’t have done it. It just never crossed my mind to say no.”

“You know, he used to make me type up all his lecture notes,” said Alice. “He’d dictate, and I’d type. I felt like a secretary. Never crossed my

mind to say no, either.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. One time he made me grade sixty undergrad exams in an afternoon because he forgot to do it himself.”

“Well, one time he made me clean up all my chalk dust and weigh it so he could estimate how much money we’d wasted.”

Peter snickered. “One time he threw a fully charged capacitor at my

head without warning.”

“Did it hit you?” Alice asked, alarmed.

“Just my hands. I tried to catch it, I didn’t know it was charged. The shock sent me convulsing on the floor, and my hair stood up for hours. I’d never seen him laugh so hard.”

“He never hurled anything at my head.” Alice couldn’t decide if this made her feel superior or jealous.

“It was only just the capacitor,” said Peter. “That one time. The rest was mainly, you know, verbal.”

“Right. You’re not cut out for this. You’re a waste of funding. You don’t seem like you even want to be here.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s fond of that one. One time he said offhand that I was

worthless until I learned German.”

“Did you?”

“I bought a phrasebook that afternoon and stayed up all night.” Peter’s voice hitched, and she shot him an alarmed look, before she realized he was breaking up not with sobs but with giggles. “Then I greeted him with ‘Wie geht’s’ the next morning, and he—and he looked at me like I’d gone mad.”

“Lebensmüde,” said Alice.

“Sitzfleisch,” said Peter.

This sent them into hysterics.

“God.” Alice pressed her hands against her face. They came away wet.

She was crying from laughter. This had never happened before; she did not know that people actually cried from laughter. “If anyone heard us talking they really would report it all to the dean.”

“Oh, I know! Inappropriate faculty-student relationships. Abuse of power. That sort of thing.”

“I hate that language. It makes it seem like we’re children.”

“Helpless victims.”

“Didn’t know what we were getting into.”

“Eyes wide shut.” Peter glanced sideways at her. “You know, I went to

his funeral.”

“No, really?”

“Not the real one. Not with his family, or anything like that. Just the university memorial service.”

Alice remembered seeing the invitation, staring at it for a very long time, and then ripping it into tiny shreds. “I guess I forgot to go.”

Which was an obvious lie, as she did not forget things, but Peter did not

press. “Right, I didn’t see you there.”

“So how was it?”

“It was so odd,” said Peter. “They were giving these eulogies about how kind and magnificent and generous he was—basic stuff, you know, they could have been describing anyone. The master called him a legendary teacher. Helen Murray got up and uttered all these platitudes about what a great mind he was. You know what he used to say about her behind her back?”

“That she was a spousal hire pretending to be a scholar?”

“Well—that too. But also, Thatcher without an ass.”

Alice snickered.

“Anyhow,” said Peter, “the whole time I was thinking, we’re the only ones who knew him. All of him. The good, the bad, the hilarious, and all the contradictions. The honest part of him. He was only ever his real self in the lab. Even at his very worst. Even when he was frustrated, when he was being a bully, all that. All he cared about was finding the truth. He wept and prostrated himself before the truth. And we got to know that part of him. I feel very lucky for that.”

“God.” Alice dragged her palms down the sides of her face. “What a

tyrant.”

“But he was our tyrant.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, we’re in Hell because of him.”

“For him.”

“Right.”

They looked at each other with the brotherly fondness of foot soldiers, ones who had been on a very long journey, united by their love for a common general. Alice wondered if the Athenians felt like this, when they stumbled home after the sacking of Troy, when they’d left their wives and

children behind for a decade, when they’d only ever done it all for Agamemnon. They couldn’t say if the battle had been worth it, or even what it was all for. But surely the trials, the extreme experiences that no one else in the world could understand, had to count for something. There was a kind of virtue in that ability to withstand extremes. Proof of character.

Something like that.

And maybe they were Grimes’s foot soldiers, infantrymen of a dying order. He certainly made them feel that way. Magic was out of favor, he liked to tell them, one of the signs of a decadent civilization. He went on this rant so often they knew it by heart. Men used to be giants, and with every next generation the decline grew. Aristotle invented logic, Euclid geometry, Kant systematic reason. The gains of thought after were marginal. No one invented whole systems anymore; they could only fiddle with what came before, if they could even grasp the ancients well enough to fiddle. Their generation was the most decadent and stupid of all. Grimes’s generation were at least war magicians; they had pushed the field forward by leaps and bounds in its practical applications. But Alice and Peter’s cohort quibbled over philosophical details. They made flashy gadgets for toy companies. The best among them sought residencies in Vegas; the worst among them became consultants. No doubt, magic was on the decline. And this was merely a symptom of a world where children did not read but sat drooling before a screen; where artists splattered paint at random and thought themselves Michelangelo’s equal. Theirs was not a world of learned men; it had no attention for sustained inquiry; the people of their age only wanted tabloids, gossip, entertainment. Civilizational collapse, impending apocalypse—they forgot the greatness of their forefathers, they were trapped in pointless little debates; they could not get out, no one knew how to think anymore. At this point in the rant he was always drunk on wine, and more powerful for it; and they were rapt, guilty as accused, desperate to prove him wrong. How could they become giants? It would take genius, he told them; immense effort; a monastic dedication to rise above the detritus of their addled world and see clearly above the clouds. Could they do it?

Could they restore the valor of the old, could they keep the faith?

They promised him that they would.

The point was that Professor Grimes hadn’t tormented just anyone.

He’d tormented them. Because they were strong enough to withstand it.

Because they kept the faith. Because they were special, and worth the

effort, and because whatever they became when he was done with them would be so dazzling.

Perversely, it made her glad that Professor Grimes had been just as insane with Peter. It made her feel less . . . wrong. This was evidence, at least, that she wasn’t the only one Professor Grimes did this to. And she wasn’t the only one who found it worth it to say yes.

And really, this was the challenge in anticipating which court of Hell Professor Grimes had been sentenced to. For all his crimes, there was a part of Alice that was deeply convinced he’d never done anything wrong. Only what was good for her, what any student needed from a teacher.

“You should get some sleep.” Peter pulled a thick paperback out of his rucksack and shuffled until his back rested against the wall. He drew his knees up, then rested his elbows atop them. “I’ll keep watch.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. I brought Tolkien for company.”

“Give me two hours, then. Wake me up and we can trade.” Alice pulled the blanket over her shoulders and settled down. She felt very loose and empty then; not only from exhaustion, but also from relief. She felt a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She felt she no longer had to hide.

Thank you, she wanted to tell Peter. For listening. But her eyelids were like weights, and she couldn’t more than think the words before she fell into the dark.

“ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.” Peter shook her awake. “Mind if I take a turn?”

“Go on,” she yawned, and smiled as he pulled as much of the blanket over him as he could.

“It’s my feet or my chest,” he said. “I have to choose. Which do you think?”

“Probably protect your feet. You never know what’s going to come up

and nibble those toes.”

“You wouldn’t defend me?”

“Your legs are so long.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t see them coming.”

She pulled out a book of her own—it was Proust’s turn at last—and Peter curled onto his side. Moments later his breathing deepened, and his

mouth went slack, and he curled in on himself in a way Alice couldn’t help but find endearing. He was all angles, Peter. Long floppy limbs knotted together in an absurd, unbalanced mess.

Peter looked so funny when he was asleep: eyebrows furrowed, mouth downturned as if he were clinging to slumber with resentful concentration.

His eyelashes were very long. Alice had always marveled at Peter’s lashes.

She had never seen such long lashes on a boy. They made her want to run her knuckle against their tips, just to feel their brush—so soft, she imagined, like butterfly wings.

What went on in that head of his? She felt a pang in her chest then; the ache of an old, tantalizing, unsolved problem. She had never been able to figure him out. She knew better than to think they’d made some great breakthrough this evening, that they were now the best of friends. Peter had a talent for making you feel like this, like he was the only one in the world who understood you, and you him. Like you two existed on a plane of your own. Then the next morning he would act like a complete stranger. As if you had never spoken at all. She had been through this whiplash many times before. She knew better by now.

Still she felt very close to him at that moment—if not for the secrets they’d disclosed, then at least for the simple fact that she had not spoken like this to him, honest and unguarded, in so very long.

A hot flush rose to her cheeks. It was certainly the effect of Hell, its endless dunes and terrors and all its attendant deprivations, and the fact that Peter Murdoch was the only being in the entire realm who wasn’t insubstantial as breath. Still she could not rid herself of the fancy to lean down and put her palm against his cheek.

This horrified her. She blinked and cast her eyes about, searching for literally anything else to do. Anything to stare at other than Peter’s face, his splayed and ridiculous form. He had a habit of casting one arm above his head as he slept like Christ in a painting; chin upturned, awaiting salvation.

Lord. What an accident of nature. Astonishing that human beings had evolved over millennia, just to end up like Peter Murdoch.

A packet of notes peeked out from his bag. She glanced at the top and snorted. It was just like Peter to keep his notes in an unbound, unorganized bundle of loose papers.

Curious, she tugged them out. She’d always enjoyed reading Peter’s work; it was fun to see where his thoughts matched with or diverged from

hers.

The first two pages were sketches of pentagrams—four failed ways to get to Hell, and one that succeeded. She recognized those theorems; she’d spent weeks puzzling through them herself. She felt the thrill of the familiar as she traced his work, as she glimpsed at what stage and how he’d solved the same riddles she had. Peter’s process was, of course, brilliant. Several of his solutions were far more elegant than hers, and at one stage he’d bypassed a thorny formula she’d struggled with by apparently intuiting the solution. In the end, he’d settled on the same method she had— Ramanujan’s Summation, with Setiya’s Modifications. No wonder he’d realized immediately what she was up to. All their work was the same.

The last several pages were pure logic. She almost flipped past them— she hated logic and was only passingly fluent because taking Fundamentals of Logic had been a degree requirement—but something about the final page made her stop.

He’d circled and underlined the last formulas several times over. It was so unlike the rest of his handwriting—hurried, scrawled, most of it barely legible—that these conclusions must have been of great importance.

She flipped back up to the previous page and read the derivations again, taking care this time to decipher it all as best she could. The endeavor hurt her head—she’d taken logic before her tattoo, and she barely remembered what half the symbols were—but at last the scribblings solidified into a

certain shape.

It was a spell for organic exchange.

Her hands went sticky with a sudden, cold sweat. She rubbed them hastily against her shirt, glancing backward at Peter. He hadn’t stirred— which shocked her, for her heart seemed then to beat so loudly it was

deafening.

When had he come up with this?

She’d seen these proofs before. She’d herself chased down equations for living exchange into the most obscure corners of the library, from alchemical scribblings of Samarkand to Wittgenstein’s lost notebooks (not lost, it turned out, only hidden in a special room in the faculty library and under constant lock and key). She’d given up on exchange after a week of searching because it seemed so clearly like a dead end, and all the references kept turning up lost, destroyed, or misplaced. She should have realized someone else had gotten to them first.

Here, right before her, was the final piece of the puzzle that she’d never been able to solve.

Professor Grimes’s name on the left. And at the bottom of the page, under the right side of the equation, the thing that had first caught her eye: her own name, written in clear, bold letters. Then underlined twice. Then punctuated with three question marks.

That was undoubtedly Peter’s handwriting. She’d seen him etch her name so many times before. On labels. On stacks of papers meant for her to grade. In the corner of the chalkboard, on little jokes meant for her. Dear Alice. Ha ha. Always the same spidery letters, always fully capitalized; always the c looping into the e.

You could not perform organic exchange on yourself. This was an inviolable axiom of magick. The pentagram required the sustained consciousness of its user to take effect. You needed a human mind present, willing to believe in the logical contradiction. No pentagram that deliberately destroyed the magician would take effect. You could only rend yourself apart by accident.

You could not, in effect, use magick to kill yourself. Alice knew this to be true. She had looked into the matter, as it were. You could use pentagrams to eviscerate a soul, but you had to do it to someone else.

If Alice.

She clamped a palm over her mouth, so Peter would not hear her panicked whine.

There was only one possible interpretation for what she was looking at.

Peter intended to trade her soul for Professor Grimes’s.

Peter was going to trap her here in Hell.

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