My ghost bled through the shadows, an icy wind stirring the leaves. Eyes like candle flames shuddering and crescent moon mouth, it had found me as a girl and never let go—the only thing that was really mine. It led me to an overgrown graveyard, pelts of moss eating like acid through fallen tombstones. In the haze of tree-shadowed dark, huge stone towers loomed in the distance, wrapped by vine and tree limb.

The school, Spindle Lost.

Somewhere to learn what good I might be, how to leash the dead for something other than horror or pain. A place to be given something I could never lose.

Soundlessly, a creature lowered herself from the cavernous boughs on a line of silk. Something between spider and girl, mandibles thrust out from between her stretched lips. Long shower of hair falling to brush the ground and thin legs raised in warning.

I’d heard rumors of her, the guardian. Bridge between the school and the wood. The gate separating Old Green and all the knowledge that might be mine.

“This place will not submit to you,” she said. Her voice so young and human, it shocked me. “I know that well. Go back where you came from.”

My ghost pressed close, chill on my skin. Always ready to protect me. To drive everyone and everything away.

“You were here when the school lost the fight to Old Green?” I asked. “Did the forest do this to you?”

She covered her face with two sets of humanlike hands, the skin pale and barbed with hairs. “No, the forest was always merciful. It was the wizards who did this, who sent me to war. All for nothing. Old Green gave me mercy. And then he gave me my old teachers to devour.”

I took a small step back, the ghost whispering static and breathing rot past my ear.

“I’m glad the people who hurt you are dead, Dulce.”

“I did not say they were dead,” said Dulce. “I’ve been feeding on my old teachers for many years now.”

“I’m here to learn. I won’t harm you or Old Green’s forest. A door was opened for me.”

Still hanging upside down, she played with a loop of silk, hands darting fast. “You found an open door, but was it your right to walk through? Is there anyone in this forest who would claim you, or did you come alone, without invitation, vulnerable?”

She looked me up and down, one long limb drifting close. Her dirty fingers traced my sweater, and some pain flashed in her eyes, memory of when she had been human enough for something soft.

Only the ghost hovering over me, blowing dead hate down at her, kept me from running away. I tapped my foot on a half-buried gravestone. “Any of the dead will vouch for me. Can’t you hear how much they have to say?”

She smiled around her mandibles, lips stretched so wide they bled. “Your magic is the same as mine. I too was a student of Dirge. You could apprentice with me instead. If you wanted.”

Loneliness in her voice, but hunger too. Still that dangerous touch lingering on my chest.

“Sorry, Dulce. I’m here for the school.”

“Run along then. But keep out of the deep forest. This is not a human place.”

I hurried through the old cemetery, ghost billowing behind me. I could feel the spider girl staring after, could hear her mouth moving in the silent wood. I ran toward the towers rising in the green-lit gloom. The grave markers trembled when I touched them, the dead wanting pain and memory and voice again.

I had almost left the forest when I saw her. A young woman my age, tall with honey-brown hair, tripping lost in the woods in a sundress and sandals, her legs already bleeding from thorns. So out of place. I drifted back towards her, curious.

“Another like you,” hissed Dulce, reeling herself with long arms through the canopy above. “She didn’t have an answer for who could vouch for her. Too much sweetness and sunshine in her. Not cunning enough. Not like you. I told her to go away.”

The girl was talking to someone who wasn’t there, her voice tense and afraid.

“Is there a door for her to go home? What’s she supposed to do?”

“Feed root and earthworm. Feed beetle and buzzard. Die and enrich the land. Let her be prey for something better.”

“Is that how your old teachers felt about you?”

She recoiled, limbs raised. “It is the way it is.”

I climbed over fallen trees and pushed through branches, my boots breaking open mushrooms and sliding in leaf-rot. I grabbed the girl by the arm before she realized I was there. She shrieked, then laughed, throwing both of her arms around me. Her eyes glassy, flickering fast between things I couldn’t see.

“Are you real?” she asked. “You feel so cold, but I’m spilling magic everywhere. I can’t tell any more. I hope you’re real.”

Her laugh, her fingers twined with mine. People didn’t touch me like that. No one had ever held me like a life preserver, like they were drowning and I was the shore. The ghost curdled behind me, not liking that she was so close, but I ignored it. She needed me. I liked the feeling.

“I’m taking you to Spindle Lost,” I said.

Dulce trembled the leaves above, her shadow falling over us. “Who vouches for her to pass through the wood? Does she even understand what called her here?”

“I chased a figment,” the girl said. Kim, I would soon learn. “I knew it wasn’t real. Nothing has been, lately. But I so badly wanted it to be real. So I followed it in.”

“It sounds like her delusions are vouching for her? Good enough for me.”

Dulce watched us leave. “Never set foot again in the wood!” she shouted. “You are not wanted here,” her voice hoarse with loneliness. I left her in the endless wood, letting her circle the border of the school. Poor Dulce, caught between two places where she didn’t belong.

We walked slowly, Kim clinging to me and flinching sometimes from things that weren’t there. “It’s okay,” I told her. “You’ve found Spindle Lost. School of magic. You’ll learn to master your visions.”

“Bad habit,” she said. Eyes so big and warm-dark, piercing me like sunlight.

“What?”

“Promising it will all be okay when you don’t know if that’s true. Just because you want it to be.”

“I have a lot of experience with not okay. This time will be different.” Her warm hand in mind, I actually believed it.

The forest thinned around us, giving way to pale towers clothed in curtains of moss, dappled with leaf-shadow. A ring of broken and burned buildings collapsing to stone heaps, but beyond them whole towers rising, the wild gardens between full of lounging students in jeans and t-shirts. What was left of the school. If this was a ruin, it was the most glorious ruin I had ever seen.

Other students were already coming to greet us, someone placing a flower crown on Kim’s head and almost doing the same to me before they felt the wrongness of my ghost like tin foil on teeth. They grimaced and stepped back.

I took the other flower crown and pushed it down over Kim’s bangs, overlapping the first. Pink and cream roses braided over her brow. “Trust me,” I said, as if the welcome were all my doing. “Things will be better for both of us now.”

• • • •

Growing up, my parents were overworked, angry, exhausted. All of us stretched thin and brittle. So when I was eight and my best friend died, I didn’t say anything about it. Just went down to the basement of our apartment building and sat in the dark by the furnace, wrapping myself in noise and heat.

The building was cheap and old and hadn’t been serviced in a long time. In a better place, an inspector would have found the ghost and called someone to take care of it. Instead, I sat with some invisible shape standing over me. Let it whisper into my ear with its rot-sweet breath, heard the click of it biting finger bones with its naked teeth. I imagined it was her, my dead friend, come back to find me.

So I asked, “Where are you? Does it hurt? Do you miss me?”

And the dead thing wrapped its arms around me, rocked me in the dark, and said, Oh honey, no, don’t ask us that, such a sweet warm breathing baby, don’t any of us know, you’ll have to wait, but not long, it’s coming, I will carry you right to the shore.

By the time my father found me in the basement—dragged me cold and barely breathing out of the dark, threw everything we owned into trash bags again and moved that day into a new and worse apartment in a different school zone, all my friends ripped away again and again—by then I had been listening to the dead for months.

My father thought he saved me from it, but the spirit followed us. Lay like a slick of oil on my ceiling at night. Rushed cold over my face and under my bed. Coiled into my shadow, waiting even if only I knew it was there. And when I lost everything I had over and over, that ghost stayed, the only thing I could hold on to. At first, I was afraid, thought it was haunting me. Then I understood. It was me who wasn’t letting go.

At night, the spirit murmured to me about everything it had lost. I didn’t mind. I too understood what it was to see everything you had turn to ash. At school and at home, things got worse and worse for me. My magic growing and under control, but alienating. Until a counselor, knowing I couldn’t afford one of the better magic academies, told me about the lost school in the forest. A place that would take anyone. All I had to do was find it.

• • • •

A freckled, smiling woman took me through the overgrown gardens, the paths overhung with flowering branches and strafed with sun. Through the ring of outermost buildings, just shattered hulks covered in plants, the lower floors sunken pools twitching with insects.

“The school of Silence,” the woman told me. “Study of weather, ruin, and foresight. We haven’t had anyone in that discipline for years.”

And then the grounds became, if not tamed, at least tended. An explosion of wildflowers and knee-high grass in the meadow around the surviving towers. She pointed out the schools and named them for me: Brand with its libraries and forges, an arched bridge connecting it to Key where machinery whirred and clanged. Gleam with stage halls and game rooms. And Dirge with mortuaries, surgical theaters, and catacombs below.

“And then there are the Hunger students,” she said. “The only ones allowed to go into the forest. Feral as foxes.” She laughed.

She brought me to Brand’s library for our interview, a grand space of towering bookshelves made of golden wood and flickering cold-fire lamps on every table. A warm and rustling place, students moving silently in the firelight.

She explained that magic requires a tether, a deep well of emotion to draw on. That everyone’s was different, for some joy or spite or kindness. I knew already, had known for a long time. By the end of our interview, answering her questions about how I’d grown up, what my clearest memories were, how I felt most of the time, she’d sobered up. Wrote things down and crossed them out. Finally wrote the word “loss.”

“A heavy tether,” she said. “But not the worst. Do you know what you want to study?”

“Dirge.” School of the dead, injury, and memory.

“Of course.” All the play gone out of her face now, just hurrying to finish my interview and move me along. But I was grinning, nails digging into my chair, the dark thing leering up from my shadow. For once the world was finally opening its closed hand, offering me something. I would take all it had to offer, the bitter with the sweet.

• • • •

The upperclassmen kept their distance from us. Bumbling freshmen, spilling magic in uncontrolled bursts. The faculty gave each of us only a single, simple spell. The barest taste. Except for me. I had come in tethered already, fully in control of what I could do. Rasmussen, the Dirge headmaster, said we’d just take it slow until I had more practice. No new tricks for me. But it was all so good, just being here with them, all of us learning who we were in this amazing place.

Scrawny Joel like a Disney princess with songbirds beating down to cluster on his shoulders and trill into his ears, his t-shirts spattered in bird shit. Squirrels lounging in his lap and deer creeping out of the woods to eat French fries from his hands. A sleepy, feral glint to his eyes, every night running off deep into the woods where he partied with the other Hunger students until he dropped.

His roommate, Prima, studying both Brand and Key. She called herself an infomancer, TV screens blistering to static fuzz when she walked by, shorting out what little cell signal we could find, making our phones vibrate hot in our pockets. People tended to run away from her. Her tether anger, Prima was pissed that the faculty had taken away all of her electronics when she came to campus, afraid of her broken code getting loose. “Unbelievable,” she said. “They think all my shit’s cursed.” And if you asked if it was, “Well duh, yeah, obviously.” And “Hey, can I borrow your phone?”

Melanie, drab and shrinking small as a mouse, the first student of Silence that the school had seen in recent memory. Here with no peers and no professors, haunting the ruins of Spindle Lost like a prophet in the wilderness. She approached a couple eating lunch, the two of them curled into a bench overhung with wisteria. Mel leaned close and whispered something. The girl didn’t hear at first, asked Mel to say it again, so she took a deep breath and shouted.

“You’re going to break up.”

The boy was stricken, looking up at his partner to see if it was true. The girl laughed, trying to be cool about it, dozens of us stopping to watch. “Everyone breaks up,” she said.

“No,” said Melanie, as they picked up their bags and tried to get away from her, following with short, quick steps. “No, you’re going to break up tonight.”

Melanie went from group to group, glassy-eyed with prophecy and tethered to guilt, unable to help herself. People were grabbing their shit and running away at that point, and I should have too, but I’d gotten distracted by Kim again.

Spinning barefoot on the grass in a too big t-shirt, her hair streaming around her, Kim was laughing and blissed out of her mind at things only she could see. She slipped and fell down, talking quietly into the dirt. And God, she was so gorgeous lying in a pool of sun, so out of it with leaves in her hair, that I had to help her, had to sit her up against a tree and let her lean on my shoulder while I cleaned her up.

“I guess someone’s got joy as their tether. Must be nice.” And I didn’t mean it in a jealous way, because when you looked at someone like Kim, when you saw how well she wore happiness, you wouldn’t want her to have anything less.

“Sorry,” she said, still focusing on something that wasn’t there. She held on to me like I was a pier, like we were bobbing in a lake and if she let go she might never see land again, her fingers digging into my arm. “I’m a lot sometimes. I don’t mean to bother you.”

“You could never bother me,” I said.

“Promises again.”

“Tell me what it feels like.” Always a chill on my skin, the rot in my throat. Always the spirit riding me. What was it like to see the world the way she did, to be free of death and pain and the weight of loss?

She tried to explain it, losing her train of thought, mumbling into my shoulder about music inside you and coming out of your ears, about warmth and light running you over like a train, like going in for a first kiss and you just hang there, almost touching but not quite, breath on your face, waiting forever.

Prima plopped down in the grass beside us, all frustration and needing an outlet, wanting to tell someone something. “Lillian is already tethered,” Prima said. “She doesn’t spill like the rest of us. So you don’t have to worry about her ghosts getting all over you.”

“My ghosts might get on you,” I said. “But they would never hurt you.” A note of command in my voice, the spirit grinding its teeth and leaning over my shoulder, invisible to everyone but me.

“Wish I was tethered already,” Kim said. “Some of this stuff I don’t want to see.” And she laughed again, bright and helpless, like when you’ve been tickled until you can’t breathe.

“Same,” Prima said. “I’m so good at being pissed. What more is there to learn?”

“At least you got some new magic,” I said. “They told me I came in with too much already.”

And then pale-eyed Melanie was in front of us, looking down and clearing her throat. I might have gotten out, but Kim had started playing with my hair, and nothing, not anything, was going to make me move.

“You’re going to hurt each other,” Melanie said. “So much that neither of you will ever be the same.”

Kim laughed. “That’s my roommate. She’s small, but she’s spooky!”

Mel looked at me and said, “Just switch rooms with me. You’re going to anyway. Might as well get it over with.”

“I’m happy to be left out of whatever this is,” Prima said.

Mel turned, noticing her for the first time, and the cold shock of knowing swept over her face again. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh fuck. Prima, I’m so sorry.”

Prima was up and running through the weeds then, shouting, “No, no, no. You can keep it,” while Mel followed, inevitable as sunrise.

• • • •

I was in an Intro to Mediumship class that met at seven in the morning. No new magic, just refining our ear. Learning to sense what was there and let it speak. When Professor Rasmussen asked if I thought I could handle that, the spirit grinning deep inside my shadow, I had to stifle a laugh.

Rasmussen walked around with a duffel bag handing out bits of junk from a shipwreck. Mostly just rivets and screws, some hunks of metal plating. The girl in front of me got a pair of sunglasses.

“When are we going to touch some fucking bones?” a guy behind me asked, and it was over then, our heads thrown back and laughing.

Rasmussen dropped his shoulders in deep, weary unhappiness. “Every year, somebody says it. Necromancy is about giving voice and movement to the dead. To feel what they felt, to sit with them in the most intense moment of their lives, something so traumatic that it left a bruise on reality. I’m sorry you’d rather be getting drunk in a graveyard and writing shitty poetry about it.”

I’ll be honest, that one hit. But the dork behind me was right. I’d been accidentally dredging up spirits of dead animals since I was in middle school, and nothing we were doing the whole first year seemed that exciting. Until everyone had perfect control over their tether, not at risk for spilling dangerous magic all over the place, they wouldn’t teach us anything that might get someone hurt. So here we were, fondling naval salvage.

When Rasmussen finally came to me, he spent a long time digging in the bag before he put something on my desk. A lump of rust small enough to lay across my palm. When I looked closer, a pocketknife before it had lain in the mud at the bottom of the ocean for a hundred years.

“Go ahead,” he told me.

Heavy. Cold when I picked it up, like I’d stuck my hand in an icy lake. A chill that crept up my whole arm. The room darkened a bit, the light contracting away from me. And I felt it then, a memory pure and clean as snow. Some teenager standing on the deck of a ship, staring into a gray glare of sky, wind tearing at his cheeks. Just watching, hand in his pocket resting on the weight of the knife, until he recognized the sound of bombers over the wind. And then, knowing it was already too late, he stared up into that cold sky and waited.

“Anything?” Rasmussen asked.

I nodded.

“Holy shit, let me see.” The girl next to me picked it up. She shook the knife, raised it to her ear like a telephone. Waved it around like she was trying to get signal. “Nothing,” she said. “Or maybe something? Is it hard to tell?”

“Different for different people,” Rasmussen said.

“Not hard to tell,” I told her. “When it happens, it’ll grab your ass.”

We spent the rest of the morning that way, passing around our junk, strange voices of the past rising up to shout into our minds. I heard every one, all of them begging for more life, as hungry as I was.

• • • •

Afterward, I went to wait for Rasmussen at his office when I caught Kim hanging around outside the door. I put my arm around her shoulder, startling her out of some illusory daze. “It’s like you’re at the bottom of a kaleidoscope,” she said. Staring right at my face, eyes straining to focus through whatever haloed me in her eyes.

“Everything okay?” I asked. “You looking for me, or just wandering down the yellow brick road?”

“The Wizard of Oz isn’t really about drugs,” she said. “That’s more Alice in Wonderland, I think. But yeah, no. I’m meeting Rasmussen.”

“Double majoring in Dirge?” I asked. “Want to be study buddies?”

“No.” She looked a little embarrassed. Covered one ear and winced like there was something loud happening in her head. “He’s got the same tether as me. My advisor said it could be helpful to meet with him. See if he has any tips for how to get this under control.”

Rasmussen found us hovering outside his door, looking like he wanted to be somewhere else. “Nice work today, Lillian. You need something?”

“Yeah, just real quick, if that’s okay. I know you and Kim have a thing.”

I followed him into his office. Expecting, I don’t know, cool shit. Tombstones and reliquaries. Stacks of obituaries at least. But it was just shelf on shelf of softbound magical journals and a hell of a lot of old knickknacks scattered everywhere. Brass compasses, fountain pens, letter openers, flasks, half a bayonet, a canteen.

“I just think maybe I could move up to the more advanced classes?” I said. “I mean, you saw what happened today. I’m ready for the real stuff.”

He looked out the window and sighed. “Look, Lil. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. You’re good. But there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know. Have you ever touched a spirit through an object before?”

“Not until today.”

“Then let’s practice that a bit more. Just work on listening. The dead have a lot to tell us.”

I’ve been listening for years, I wanted to say. The ghost lay at my feet, looking up at me. Always chattering. I’d learned to ignore it. Did Rasmussen know? He’d never said anything about the ghost.

“I think I could have grabbed him,” I said, still thinking about that stranded boy, stuck in the memory of his own death. “I wanted to pull him out of there. When do we learn that kind of magic?”

“We don’t,” he said. “Just asking that question is a good a reason for you to stay put. Don’t be in such a hurry.”

“Fine, okay. Hey, you’re kind of a downer for someone tethered to joy, huh?”

“What?” he asked, like not a single word I’d said made sense.

“Kim said you two had the same tether. That’s why you’re helping her. She’s joy, right?”

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

“I was surprised. You don’t seem like that happy of a guy. No offense. Pretty funny, though. Dirge and joy. Not what people think of.”

“It could be worse.” He picked up a brass compass and held it between his hands for a long moment.

I felt the temperature fall. Could tell he was talking to some spirit in the compass, or at least listening to it. Made sure to keep a tight leash on my ghost, already scratching at the floor and trying to pull itself up.

Finally, he said, “Some people are tethered to more self-destructive emotions, Lillian. Resentment. Despair. Even shame.”

“Who?” I started thinking about all the students I’d met, but nobody seemed worse off than Prima. Or Joel, mouth stuffed full of feathers, tethering to a sort of skittish, coyote nervousness. Everyone felt shame, but to have that be the wellspring of all your magic, to have to go deep into that feeling every time you called up power. That would suck. Loss, I understood. Sad songs were the best songs anyway. But I’d never had much use for shame.

“I’m not allowed to say.” Rasmussen struggled to find a way to explain it, already trying to head off any more questions, the compass in his hand again. “Shame is different, Lil. It makes you vulnerable. People can use it against you. You don’t tell people about it.

“Besides,” he said, gesturing that it was time for me to leave. “That’s the reason you take so many ethics, moral philosophy, and psychology classes in high school, right? So you can figure yourselves out and tether to something healthier.”

“They don’t teach any of that in high school.”

“Yes, Lil. That’s the joke.”

But he wasn’t smiling, and there wasn’t any joy on his face. Just an outstretched hand pointing to the open door and a tense twitch in the corner of his eye.

On the way out, I passed Kim, but she was staring at the floor, waiting. Didn’t respond when I touched her shoulder, so I said I’d see her later and headed back to our room.

• • • •

I moved in as soon as Melanie suggested it. Not that I had brought much of anything with me. The rooms in Gleam were all vaulted ceilings and towering windows, thick velvet drapery dividing the space into smaller areas for us to sleep or work. Old traveling trunks for our belongings, mine filled with books of interviews conducted by mediums real and fake, funerary practices from dead religions, and horrendous renaissance medical texts from grave-digging artists obsessed with mapping every vein in the human body (I loved them). Too many mirrors. The air had a haze to it, a golden shower of dust always suspended in the sun. A sleepy, indulgent, sun-filled place, like brunch was a moment you could step into.

I didn’t mean to be nosy. Or I did, but I didn’t mean to do harm. And it wasn’t like Kim told me not to touch her stuff. So I went to her bureau, her antique wingback chair piled with laundry, and started picking up some of her things. Just listening.

A necklace that looked old. Her car keys. Some of her books. One, a yellowing book of magicians’ secrets from the 1950s, spoke to me. Conjured dusty stage halls and clouds of cigarette smoke, the bright amber burn of whiskey. But that was nothing to do with Kim, some leftover touch of the book’s previous owner.

So I kept going. Rings and coins. Silk scarves. Every discipline had their own way into the arcane, and Gleam went heavy on the tools of stage magic. When I picked up Kim’s hairbrush—faded plastic and missing half its bristles—I got a jolt. I hadn’t expected something so new to have it, that special electricity of the dead. The brush Kim used every morning, sitting glassy-eyed in front of her mirror.

Some dead girl’s memory of summer. A green-black lake at night, the ground blurry with wind-whipped reeds. Crickets shrieking at the stars. A white pickup truck and a crowd of grinning boys. She had been nervous and shy, this girl, hands clasped in front of her. She didn’t know them well. Her sister was supposed to be here with her. She wasn’t supposed to have been alone. The guys flipped a keg out of the back of the truck and cranked their tinny stereo. They watched her like wolves.

I didn’t want to see what came next, but the ghost was hard to shake. Clinging to me, wanting to shout her whole heartbreaking story. I didn’t want this one. Had seen and felt enough bad things to last me forever, so I shook her off hard, feeling her slip away.

Kim stood in the doorway, pain spreading over her face for just a moment. “Sorry,” she said, like she was the one who’d done something wrong, taking the brush out of my hands. “Sorry, that was my sister’s.”

And just like that, it all fell into place. Shame. Kim should have been there, and she hadn’t been. That was the well her illusion magic drew from, surrounding her in bliss to block out what she didn’t want to remember or think about. And sometimes painting the world in that memory, a cage she couldn’t escape. Her magic a labyrinth.

“How was Rasmussen?” I asked, needing to change the subject before she realized what I had done. “Did he help with your tether?”

She closed her eyes a moment, invisible sensations crowding around her. “He thinks I should confront it head-on. Let my mind dredge up whatever and not look away. But I don’t think it’s the same for him as it is for me.”

And because she seemed like she might fall apart at any moment, because I was so sad for prying and for what I knew, I put my arms around her shoulders and held her, letting her eyelids flutter with all the awful things she couldn’t lock away.

“Sorry,” she said, laughing. “I’m really, really sorry.”

• • • •

Prima was in her dorm room alone, the lights spasming on and off on her entire floor. There was a crackle from the outlets, a smell like burning plastic. Her roommate, Joel, had run off into the woods and hadn’t been back for days, his bed a weird nest of dirty leaves, old clothes, and shed feathers. I wondered if the Hunger professors had to put out traps to catch the feral little weirdos.

“Sup, Lil,” she said. “You and Kim ruin each other’s lives yet?”

She had a cell phone, her finger scrolling fast through a social media feed, the glass turning iridescent and hot under her touch.

“Who gave you that?” I asked. “Are you on Twitter?”

“Someone left it in the bathroom. Anyway, my advisor said I needed to really plumb the depths of my anger. Dive into it like a deep-sea explorer. Social media is helping.”

I turned off the flickering light and sat down in the chair by her bed, leaning away from Joel’s flea-prickled nest. “Do you think they ever get it wrong? About our tether, I mean.”

“It does seem like a shoddy process. A questionnaire? An admissions interview with a counselor? When they first told me that I was anger, I was skeptical.”

I curled into a ball and tried to hold it in. But the laughter erupted volcanic, through my pursed lips and the hands covering my mouth, until tears ran from my eyes.

“Get fucked,” Prima said. “Yeah, well. I had some things to say about it. Got really mad at the interviewer for even suggesting it. And then I took stock of the situation and saw that she might have a point.”

I could barely get out the words. “What did you think your tether was? Generosity?”

“Would that be crazy?” The phone screen went magenta in her hands, a solid wall of bright, dead color. “Honestly, I thought it would be loneliness for me. When I think about my life, I don’t realize how angry I am all the time. I think about how alone I feel.”

“Your lonely nights are over, Prima. Let’s put out some dog treats and get your roommate back.”

She laughed too then, dropping the phone over the side of the bed to splash into the pile of laundry. It made a shrill, hot whine, experiencing a quality of pain and death it hadn’t been built for.

“I think they might have gotten it wrong for Kim. Maybe she can’t tether because she’s coming at her magic from the wrong feeling. I want to help, but it means doing some magic I’m not supposed to. Letting her speak to the dead so she can see that things aren’t the way she thinks.”

“You’re not afraid of what Melanie said? That you two will hurt each other forever?”

I shrugged, still not sure I really believed Mel’s prophecy. “Even if it’s true, I don’t care. Getting hurt is a part of living. I won’t let that keep me from helping her.”

“I’d be afraid that, if it went bad, she might not forgive you.” Prima knit her fingers together, restless without a piece of tech to mess with. “That she might not want to be my friend anymore.”

I smiled. Because, of course, I was afraid of that. But I was so used to losing everyone and everything, I thought I might lose Kim if I did nothing at all. I needed to help her so that she’d want to keep me, so that she’d see she needed me. An ugly feeling, and not one I planned to examine too closely.

“What was Mel’s prophecy for you?” I asked.

“She said that I was going to lose something I cared about. Something big. But she wouldn’t say more than that. I’m afraid I’m going to scrub out or something. That I won’t get this under control, and they’ll send me away. There’s nobody waiting for me on the outside. If I can’t make it here, I’ve got nowhere.”

“You won’t scrub out.”

“You don’t know that,” Prima said. “This place might not be what’s best for everyone. Anyway, be careful with Kim. We’re all pretty fond of her.”

“I just want to help her.”

My ghost had drifted up to coat my back, barely audible mutterings in my ear, sharp and distorted. Could it tell that I was lying? Was it a lie?

“Hey,” I said, “do you know where the Hunger kids hang out? I need a place between the school and the woods. Somewhere that Rasmussen won’t feel me dredging up the dead.”

“Mel told me about a place,” Prima said. “An abandoned tower in the school of Silence. She said that when I needed a place, that’s where I would go.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. But my ghost was wrapped all around me, its chill going deep into my chest, and suddenly nothing about this felt perfect at all.

• • • •

My schedule had me in the library basement for necromancy lab, and I had joked with Prima that maybe they actually did keep bodies down there. When I came down the stairwell with the rest of the Dirge freshmen, it was so much more than I could have hoped for.

In glass coffins set into the floor, rows and rows of corpses. Mummies, maybe, their skins tight against their bones, golden and wrinkled as raisins. Some still in mud-stained clothes from whatever grave they’d been pulled from. In the columns dotting the long, low space, more glass coffins with upright dead, these preserved in a foggy gas that kept them waxy and supple, some with their black eyes still open.

“Former teachers and scholars of magic,” Rasmussen explained in his weary, hoarse voice. “Put your hand on the glass and ask them a question.”

I was on my way to the crunchiest, gnarliest heap of old bones and skin I could find when Kim walked into the room, eyes glazed and flitting between what was real and what wasn’t. I helped her find a place to sit away from all the ritual chanting and incense-wafting and bell-tolling that happened with us.

“Rasmussen’s going to do a demonstration,” she said. “He wanted me to see him use his tether. I’m spilling bad today, Lil. You probably don’t want to bother with me.”

This close to her, the illusory memory was overwhelming. Summer heat and whine of mosquitos. The thick, green smell of the pond. Long grass stalks and thorns scraping against my legs. The dark, shining ribbon of the water. Each turtle coming up for air dimpling the water like a girl about to surface, to shake the water from her hair and stand up and say that everything was okay. Holding up my hands, algae and mud were slick across my palms. I blinked, but it didn’t go away.

“Usually, it’s not like this,” she said. “I’m trying to steer it to a different memory. Need to concentrate on something happy.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place. We’re about to get the party started in here.”

She laughed. “You’re sweet, Lil. You’re kind of a dumbass too.”

“Don’t believe me? Come here.”

I pulled her to one of the glass coffins. We knelt together, the other students giving Kim’s illusory spill a lot of space. Pressed my hands over hers onto the thick glass plate. “Hey buddy,” I said. “What’s the happiest thing you can remember?”

The spirit’s mind rose through the glass and met us. A Key graduate, every racing thought loaded with tangents on gear-width and spring tension. He brought us back to a moment when he’d been a child in an antique shop. All dark wood and brass, pressed close and looming, him navigating the narrow aisles trying not to touch, though every porcelain and cloth figure screamed to be touched. Into the back of the store where old grandfather clocks were piled, every face keeping different time, all the hands moving and clockwork ticking. Alive as a hive of bees. How reaching up to one—chipped white paint with heavy gold numbers, silver hands—he stumbled. Toppled forward and knocked it down. How the clock fell and shattered, dumping its guts of springs and gears over the floor. And in that bright moment before he knew he’d done something terribly, terribly wrong, it was like the world had opened up and he had seen inside to what it was made of, how it all fit together. He reached forward and picked up a tangle of gears and springs, still ticking and jumping, unraveling in his hands.

The vision ended, a taste like rot in the back of my mouth, a headache pressing against my eyes, vision swarming with dark motes. A normal part of doing business with the dead. Kim was surprised, looking at me with gratitude and maybe even some envy, her memory chased away for now.

“Lil just nicely illustrated something for us,” Rasmussen announced. “Ask the dead something they aren’t interested in and you might get only a few words. But tempt them with something they care about, and you’ll get a lot more.”

He raised his arms, waiting until he had everyone’s eyes on him, even Kim’s. A short incantation mumbled under his breath, and then a surge of magic broke from Rasmussen and washed through the room like a wave.

The dead jolted behind their glass, branch-like hands scraping for a way out. Heads turning towards us, their eyes black pools or mere ragged hollows. Their jaws stuttered, teeth hammering together in a hard, clacking chatter that beat through the room. Dozens of voices unleashed, pressing into our heads, the spirits desperate to tell what they knew.

Secrets and petty rivalries, unproven magical theorems, confessions and old grudges. Begging for news, but news of themselves. They wanted to know if they were remembered and loved, if their families still lived, if the things they had cared about were still kept. They poured it all out, us on our knees with our hands over our ears, drowning in their need.

And only because Rasmussen had talked to me about it, because I had my suspicions now, I could pick out the undercurrent of his tether. His own shame at something he had done, welling up and pushing the magic. Enough juice to make the dead dance, a river of self-loathing unending.

He stopped it with a closed fist, the dead falling still. “There’s your bones,” he said.

Rot stench was strong in the room, filling my mouth and making me gag. Like I had swallowed something putrid. Hard to stand with the tendrils of magic and feeling still wrapping me, my eyes wet. It had been fucking amazing. Exactly the kind of magic I had come here for.

When I turned to Kim, she was already at the door, headed back up the steps and out.

I caught her on the main floor, kids with stacked books and scroll cases gagging and covering their mouths at the scent of the death still hanging over us. She was shaking, starting to spill again. The floor under her feet was slick with dark water and tendrils of weeds.

I held onto her as we went into the sun, the landscape bending to a pond in the middle of an overgrown field. The wind cold and sun bright. An empty place, swept clean like nothing had ever happened here.

“It’s okay,” I said. “None of this is real.”

She pulled her arm away. “But it happened. It’s as real as anything.”

I’d spent enough time listening to the dead that I couldn’t argue with that. I couldn’t see the library or the campus green, even the sky the wrong color, the horizon cupped by the wrong trees. My ghost held me, close and cold. And some other spirit too, heavy and silent as a cliff of grief, hanging invisible over the illusion.

“Rasmussen hasn’t been helpful?” I asked.

“Maybe. I’m not sure. If that’s what it takes to get my magic under control—letting all that in—I’d rather not have it at all.”

“I think they’re wrong about your tether. You’re not ashamed—you’re haunted. You have been for a long time. I can help you put the dead to rest. And then, who knows what you might feel?”

She gave me a long, steady look, eyes wet and desperate. “Promises again.”

“I’m ready. I’m tethered. I’ve spoken with ghosts my whole life. Let me try.”

The illusion began to collapse around us, Spindle Lost’s pitted stone buildings rising over our heads, its shaggy trees dripping acorns. Kim closed her eyes, still lost in Gleam magic. But she reached for me, let me take her hand and guide her back to our dorm.

I took it as a yes.

• • • •

I got the hairbrush and went to where the campus dissolved into ruin, the forest clawing apart the manicured gardens and courtyards, trees rising from within crumbling dorms and pale towers robed in green. I found the dark, vine-strangled tower that Mel had told Prima about, its stairwell half caved in. A good quiet place for me to exorcise the spirit. Away from everyone else in case Rasmussen found me, or it just didn’t work, or something went bad.

Prima had insisted on coming too, just in case I hurt myself. We climbed the old tower steps, bats rustling in the dark above us. “There’s no Wi-Fi here,” she said. “No cell signal.”

“You don’t even have a phone.”

“I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”

When we reached the top of the tower, Melanie was there too, sitting on the edge of the window with sunlight falling across her face and hair. She motioned to the center of the room, swept clean and ringed in salt.

“You knew we were coming, I guess.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But I’m always here anyway. I can watch the rain and practice my seeing. Figure out which things are worth telling people about and which I should keep to myself.”

“They have you out here all alone?” Prima asked. “Not even a teacher? Do they hate you or something?”

Melanie considered it for a bit longer than I thought was necessary. “I’m just the only one right now. It’s okay, though. There will be more Silence students soon.”

I sat down in the center of the tower floor, the stone laid in nesting rings of black and white. I held the hairbrush and felt the spirit moving within. I had thought about bringing some material—cremation ash, grave dirt, contaminated water—but Rasmussen hadn’t covered reagents with us yet. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if I’d had it.

“I hope you’re not here to talk me out of this,” I said. “Prima has already tried, just so you know.”

“I know.” She got off the windowsill and came to stand over me, looking sad. “Even if I told you it was a bad idea, you’d just do it anyway.”

“Well. Okay then. Everyone stand back, I guess.”

More footsteps on the stairs behind us, and then Kim stepped into the tower. Her hair was wet, and she wore shower slippers. She looked okay, less lost in Gleam and more determined. I felt my resolve falter a bit. Putting myself in danger, I was ready for. But I hadn’t wanted Kim close to this.

“I’m testing out a new luck charm,” she said, a rabbit’s foot on a silver chain around her wrist. “So far, all the luck’s been bad. But this time, I came across you guys. Maybe I’m getting the hang of this.”

She sat down next to Prima, smiling but wringing her hands. I thought about asking her if she was sure she wanted me to do this, but I hadn’t exactly asked before I took the brush. Best to get it done then.

“So we’ve got Melanie to tell us if anything bad is going to happen, Kim to bless us with her good luck, and Prima to let me know if the Wi-Fi comes back. Let’s do it.”

“Something bad is going to happen,” Mel said. But she said it so quietly, mostly to herself, and I was already sinking down into the brush and its memory.

It was quick, easy, the spirit wanting someone to listen. It spoke in a blistering flurry of images, everything freighted with blame and anger. A nasty mess of feeling that burrowed inside and made you feel lousy, responsible, ashamed for letting her go alone to get hurt and die.

So much that I didn’t want to see. The bruises on her arm from when they dragged her into the boat. The cans sloshing around below their feet. The oars sailing through the air, thrown away, and the boys laughing, pressing in, their sour breath. So much anger. So much pain before the shock of cold water, the struggle back to shore in the dark. The disorienting turn in the dark water, under a dark sky, her legs kicking for bottom and finding nothing. The boys calling her to swim back to them, but she fled, not realizing that they had drifted back to the shore. A night that closed on her from above and below.

I’ve been telling you for weeks.

Melanie, her voice sounding a world away. But it was too late now.

I inhabited the spirit of Kim’s dead sister, just like I had the poor dead boy on the naval ship. But this time, instead of sitting with the spirit and his feelings, I tried to shove Kim’s sister away. Pushed her deep into the still dark where all things sleep. Into a place where her anger wouldn’t matter, where the pond and what happened there shrank small as a grain of sand tumbling in the ocean of forever.

I felt her hands on my arms. Her fingers digging into me, dead face close to mine. Her hair wet with pond water, face so much like Kim’s, only younger and sharper. The eyes dead, dull and gone and staring at me.

No, the spirit said. I won’t let you forget what you did.

I tried to push her off, struggling to tear myself away. Watched her climb over me and through the memory, into the light of the tower. When I could open my eyes again, could feel the solid stone under me and warm summer air on my face, there was screaming.

On the ceiling above us, the dead girl hung in the air, pale and crackling like static. She pointed down at Kim, shouting in a voice like metal tearing. You weren’t there. You said you would be there, and you weren’t. You always left when I needed you, always let me get hurt. Now you want to forget? You’ll never forget.

Kim fell to the floor, covering her ears and crying, her dead sister coming down for her.

I felt Prima call up a tower of anger, a hurricane of force and focus. But we hadn’t been taught real magic yet. She didn’t have anywhere to put it. There was nothing to do, no one coming to save us. The vines on the walls crackled and burned up, shriveling in her desperate fury.

Melanie watched me, waiting.

Fuck. Just me, then.

My ghost, curtain of teeth and terror, hovered over me. I was holding it back, had spent years holding it back. Second nature now to keep it from lashing out at the world. I loosed it like an arrow, right at Kim’s dead sister.

“She’s trying to hurt me. Go get her.”

The spirit struck the dead girl, swelling dark and shaggy. Visible to my friends for the first time now. Smoky tendrils of it twined around my arms, pouring off me like smoke. Kim and Prima recoiled, pressed back to the walls, though Mel watched like she’d already seen this before.

The two spirits tore into one another, keening until my eyes glazed and my ears bled. I felt my ghost starting to dissipate, and the fear of that loss swept through me, filling me with power. I ran to Kim’s sister and grabbed her, like plunging my hands into cold, brackish water. I sent the memory of her fall from the boat cascading through her like a bomb.

“Fuck off. For good.”

Dirge magic exploded through the tower, turning my hair white and shriveling the nearby trees to dead, brown stalks. Rot smell so strong that Prima threw up, cursing me between heaves. Echoes of what I had done radiated through campus and into the forest. No way to hide this from Rasmussen now.

A sharp crack. The hairbrush snapped in my hands. I’d broken the ghost’s link to the brush, to Kim. But the ghost hadn’t dissipated, hadn’t fallen into the infinite sea and let herself be carried away. She swelled huge and hungry, hands stretching out to cover the door in inky darkness and cold.

We’ll all be together now, the ghost said. Together, like sisters, we’ll take care of each other and remember, always remember and get what we deserve, my Kim, you and the good friends you made us.

My ghost picked up the ragged shreds of itself, gnashing its jaws, ready to fight again. But it was thin, barely visible in the sun. Needed time to remember its own pain and put itself back together.

Kim’s sister wrapped her elongating arms around us, the temperature dropping, that static voice blistering our heads. And then Dulce, the spider girl, silently folded herself through the window. She stood over me on her spindle-thin legs and faced down the howling ghost.

“No one claims you here.” Her voice as soft as wind. “Not even your sister will speak for you. Go.” And the feeling of Dulce’s tether whipped through us with the release of her magic. A small, pleased feeling like the first sip of coffee or the touch of a soft sweater, her power called up by ordinary joy.

It took a moment for the shock and cold to wear off, for my ears to stop burning from the sound. The ghost was simply gone. Mel bent down, trying to get Kim to drink some water. Prima wrung her hands and mouthed fuck over and over, looking up at Dulce.

“Dulce, you know you aren’t supposed to be here,” Rasmussen said.

He stood in the doorway, eyes locked on the spider girl. One hand out protectively, as if he might cover us.

Dulce touched me in the chest with a long, barbed leg. “She called me. Didn’t you hear it?”

Rasmussen lowered his hand and stared up at Dulce. He wasn’t afraid. He was sorry, his eyes full of it. “Me and Dulce are going to talk alone for a little while. Go back to your dorms, children.”

Prima made a noise. “I’m nineteen.”

“Like I said. And, Lillian, you can wait for me in my office. We’re going to have a rather longer talk.”

The others were already out of the tower, running back to the safety of campus. I followed, trying to catch up to Kim, to say either “I’m sorry” or “You’re welcome.” But she was long gone, vanished in the dense press of gardens.

Mel caught up with me and grabbed my shoulder. “You don’t have to look for her, Lil. She left the school. You aren’t getting her back, you know.”

“What? No, I don’t know, Mel. You’re the one who knows. You’re the one who pushed me into this, all of this, from the very beginning. Why would you do that?”

She was crying now, teeth gritted with frustration. “You would have done it anyway. There was nothing I could do to stop you. I just wanted everything to hurt less.”

The heaviness of what I had done, how bad I had fucked everything up, collapsed in on me. I rushed back to our dorm, hoping Mel was wrong. But Kim wasn’t there. I sat on her bed in the sunlit beauty of Gleam’s dorm, holding one of her old shirts. My ghost coiled around me, bloodied and aching but still whole. The only thing that was mine. Maybe the only thing that ever would be. I put everything I could carry in my bag and headed out.

Every school has its own portal back to the world. In Gleam, you walk behind a curtain. Key has a proper door out. I’ve heard in Hunger, you turn into a bird and let something swallow you. But in Dirge, we have the old well house. A dark tunnel into the earth, shine of water at the bottom. I only hesitated a moment, remembering Rasmussen’s tone when he said we’d have to talk. I already knew the score, knew I was about to lose the school just like I’d lost everything else. Why put it off?

I closed my eyes and fell in.

• • • •

Rasmussen caught up with me six months later.

I was taking odd jobs busting ghosts. I still didn’t know how to exorcize the dead, so I sent in my spirit, letting it trash them and run them off. The fight with Kim’s sister had made it stronger, harder to rein in. It held me when I slept, kneading me like a cat, leaving nail marks down my arms.

Wherever those unmoored ghosts ended up, whatever new problems they were making in the world, I tried not to think about. I got paid regardless, landlords happy I was able to boot the unwelcome spirits driving down their property values.

I wondered if someone like me, a shitty medium with too little training, was the reason I’d found my spirit and been haunted as a child. Maybe someone had chased it down to the building’s basement and left it there, hoping no one would find it. Maybe I was making the world worse, one traumatized kid at a time.

I walked through the cavernous floor of an old warehouse, lights flickering, the cement spotted with rat shit. A pack of rowdy ghosts were tearing apart inventory and spoiling food every night. Down one of the aisles, Rasmussen leaned against a storage rack, waiting for me with his arms crossed.

“Are you going to run away?” he asked.

My ghost clawed my shoulders, spreading bruises down my arms, ready to fight again. I strained to hold it back. “What do you want, Professor?”

“I’ve come to bring you back to Spindle Lost. We’re about the start a new semester. You’re eligible for more advanced classes now. Clearly, you need the education if this is how you’re planning to get by.”

“I can’t come back. After what I did. I ruined it for myself.”

“Loss for you, shame for me. I failed Kim as much as you did. There’s no way out of living with our mistakes. She tethered. Did you know that? After you made her face her sister’s ghost. She doesn’t spill magic anymore.”

“Tethered to shame.” I thought of her again, how I’d first seen her so vulnerable and sun-loved and sweet in Old Green’s forest. How badly I had wanted to keep her. “I wanted better for her than that.”

“That was never up to you. People’s tethers are mostly baked in. Almost impossible to change. It took me years to accept mine.”

“I wouldn’t feel right being back. After I took that from her.”

He sighed, looked like he was weighing whether to tell me something. I spotted the compass clutched again in his hand. “You didn’t take Spindle Lost from her. Kim is already back in classes. Though, she doesn’t want to see anyone. The Gleam faculty helped her knit some pretty thick illusions. She comes to classes, listens to lectures, turns in her work, eats in the cafeteria. And no one even knows she’s there. I’m told she’s doing well. I tried to reach out, but she doesn’t want to see me either.”

“Why does that feel even worse? Maybe I should just let her have the place.”

“For God’s sake, Lil. Just say yes. Melanie already told me you would.”

I laughed in spite of myself, a strange mix of anger and guilt and exhaustion. “I actually miss her. Prima too. The school. The feeling that I might be able to hold on to something.”

“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. There will always be loss. You feel it more than most, but it comes for everyone. That doesn’t mean you give up on living.”

I thought of the spider girl, her strange new life and how much had been taken from her. “How do you know Dulce?”

“We were classmates during the war with Old Green. She was my best friend. I’ll never forgive myself for what they did to her, for not stopping it.”

And there it was, the key to his shame and the force behind his power. Knowing that he blamed himself for what happened to Dulce, that such an ugly, hot, painful feeling fueled his magic, stunned me. He was right. Some tethers were worse than loss.

When he handed me a leather bag full of grave dirt, I took it. Reached in and let the black, wet earth coat my hands.

“Make a circle on the floor. Before we go back, you have to lose one more thing.”

The spirit shrank down into my bones. I knew this was coming, had known it couldn’t last forever. I had fantasized about waking up one morning to have its cold weight gone, the ghost finally bored of me or settled into its final sleep. But now, at the moment I would finally be free of it, I started to cry.

“Maybe I can keep it? Get it under control?”

“Some things we need to lose.”

He squeezed my shoulder in sympathy and motioned for me to sit. Helped me smear a circle of dead earth around me. I gathered my frightful ghost in my hands, its crackling voice rising, eyes blooming open with cold, electric light.

Will it hurt? the ghost asked.

“Oh, poor thing. My best thing. No. Not you. Only me.”