“No way,” said Emrys, and, feeling only a little silly, he poked the notebook. “Uh, Mr. Van Stavern? Is that … is that you?”

The simple blue sketch bulged outward, like glass warping beneath a flame. A second later, Van Stavern’s uncanny eye was blinking, its pupil shrinking in the early morning light. The narrow spine expanded, and the cardstock cover rippled, seeming to sag before snapping into shape, taut and leathery.

“Hm?” said Van Stavern. “What is it? You look as if you’ve just seen an eldritch evocation.”

“I didn’t recognize you,” said Emrys. Of course, Van Stavern had mentioned the relics could disguise themselves, and the Atlas itself was clearly no exception. It was a convincing facade; no one would suspect a worn-edged composition journal of being a sentient spell book. “Were you … sleeping?” asked Emrys.

“Not as such,” said Van Stavern. “Just resting my eyes. Eye. But I’m glad you’re up early. We should take advantage of this respite, before the Yellow Court realizes that the Order isn’t quite as extinct as they believe. There’s much to teach you, and—I’m sorry, am I boring you?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Emrys said through a yawn. He wiped some spittle from the corner of his mouth. “I’m excited to learn more, honest. But my dad’s gonna knock on that door any minute and tell me to get ready to leave.”

“Leave?” said Van Stavern. “What do you have to do that’s more important than this?”

Emrys gave the book a wilting look. “Dude, it’s a Friday. What do you think? I’ve gotta go to school.” He opened his backpack. “And you’re coming with.”

In the end, Emrys opted to put the Atlas in a rarely used tote bag. The inside of his backpack was a mess of pencil shavings, old handouts, and candy wrappers. It wouldn’t have felt right shoving Van Stavern in there, wedged between well-worn textbooks.

He tried to keep a steady gait as he walked to school beside Hazel, determined to keep his hip from banging against Van Stavern with each step. He felt a momentary pang of jealousy; her relic had taken the form of an unobtrusive headband. It fit her perfectly and seemed downright fashionable, as far as Emrys could tell.

It seemed to Emrys that they should have a million things to talk about, but somehow, their walk was quieter than it had ever been. Emrys had the strangest feeling that everything that had happened the night before was just so tentative. Like a web of delicate gossamer, invisible unless you saw it at just the right angle, and no less fragile or impermanent once you knew it was there. Breathe on it wrong, and all that beautiful latticework was just ribbons on the wind.

“Have you heard from Serena?” he asked her. She shook her head.

“She’s not really a morning person,” Hazel said. “I’m sure we’ll talk tonight.”

“I hope she’s okay,” said Emrys, but he wasn’t even sure what he meant. Okay that their whole world had turned inside out? Fine with the idea that her best friend and the new kid had joined a club she wanted nothing to do with? Safe from the Yellow Court and whatever dark forces they revered?

Serena hadn’t seemed okay by any measure when they’d seen her last. At her insistence, Van Stavern had sent the three home the previous night, uttering a muffled incantation before the reliquary’s enormous, spired doorway. To their shock, the door opened back into Van Stavern’s trashed apartment. Once they’d passed through, it closed swiftly behind them.

Swiveling around, however, Emrys had found only a closed broom closet. Inside was an ancient vacuum cleaner and little else. Serena cursed the vacuum cleaner, gestured rudely at the Atlas, gave Hazel a perfunctory hug, and pointedly ignored Emrys as she’d stormed downstairs ahead of them.

He knew he wouldn’t see her at school. Serena went to a private school, the Academy of the Sacred Silence, which sat up on a hill, beyond the reach of the morning mist that clutched at Emrys’s and Hazel’s ankles as if seeking to trip them. Emrys had seen the Academy once, through a gap in the well-kept hedges that served as its border. It had a fountain!

Emrys and Hazel, on the other hand, attended Gideon de Ruiter Middle School, which sat at the city’s lowest point, so that the ever-present mist rolled downhill to gather around the school like smoke from a witch’s cauldron. The sign out front, a great stone slab bearing the school’s name and motto, resembled nothing so much as a great tombstone, and a rusty, sharp-edged metal fence enclosed the campus. The school looked altogether less like a seat of learning and more like a cemetery.

“You’re fidgeting,” said a voice, and Emrys snapped out of his reverie. He had momentarily forgotten Van Stavern was there.

“Weird,” said Hazel. “It’s like literally having an angel on your shoulder.”

Emrys had been fidgeting, tugging on the tote’s straps, which would have made it a bumpy ride for Van Stavern, despite his best intentions. He realized now that his anxiety had been quietly building all morning. His heart was racing, and his mouth was dry.

This was more than the usual school-morning jitters. The whole world had been flipped on its head last night. As the exhilaration wore off, the doubt crept in.

Secret societies. Cursed relics. Emrys had been vindicated for every uncanny belief he’d ever held.

But it all came with an unexpected edge. The Yellow Court. The whistling assassin. Other-dimensional beings trying to poke holes into the world? Emrys had already been plenty worried about the state of the world before all that.

Hazel instinctively touched the stone sign as she passed onto school grounds, and Emrys followed suit. The granite felt almost silky, worn smooth by the elements—and by the touch of thousands of hands over the years. As legend had it, the last sixth grader to pass the front entrance without touching the school sign had been cursed with spectacularly bad luck. No one seemed to agree on what exactly had befallen the student—in his short time at the school, Emrys had heard everything from “failed every pop quiz for a year” to “crushed by the retractable bleachers”—but the entire sixth grade seemed to make it a point to touch the entry stone each morning.

Emrys didn’t believe every superstition was true. But he also believed in being safe over being sorry. What could it hurt to touch the stone every day?

As long as he remembered to wash his hands.

“Look,” Hazel said, and Emrys saw immediately what she’d noticed. There was a police cruiser parked out front, in the lane reserved for buses. Two police officers stood beside the entrance—if not for the cruiser, Emrys would have missed them entirely, because they weren’t in uniform. They wore dark suits, their badges clipped to their belts and their guns hidden from sight. But Emrys could see the holster straps beneath their suit jackets.

Guns did not put him at ease.

“What?” said Van Stavern. “Why have you stopped?”

“The police are here,” answered Hazel. “They look like detectives. They’re talking to the guidance counselor.”

“Do you think they found your apartment?” asked Emrys. His heart beat faster. “Do you think they’re here for us?”

“Absolutely not,” said Van Stavern. “I told you, there were … contingencies in place. No one will come looking for me.” The spell book chuckled. “If the police came sniffing around every time a member of the Order went missing under mysterious circumstances, we’d have been exposed eons ago.”

Hazel scowled. “Is that supposed to make us feel better?” she asked. “We’re in the Order now.”

Van Stavern sniffed. “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said. “You have me to guide you. Just act natural. You aren’t guilty of anything, after all.”

Emrys tried to take the sorcerer’s words to heart. But he couldn’t help thinking how they’d left their fingerprints all over Van Stavern’s apartment. Emrys had ripped a hole in the floor! What had he been thinking?

Back in his room, Emrys had plied Van Stavern for details about what had happened late into the night, but Van Stavern had a gift for vague answers and cryptic mutterings that discouraged continued questioning. The interaction had done little to put Emrys’s fears to rest.

As they passed the detectives, Emrys’s palms began to sweat. He suddenly remembered every time he’d ever broken a rule in his entire life. And the spell book on his shoulder (technically stolen while trespassing in a crime scene, he remembered) felt conspicuous and heavy. He fiddled with the strap unconsciously.

One of the detectives—a tall, reedy man with sallow skin—looked up from his notepad as they passed. Emrys could feel the man’s eyes on him, but he resisted the urge to look back. He willed himself to act natural. Whatever that looked like.

When they’d crossed the threshold into the school, he finally risked a look over his shoulder. The detective was writing something in his notebook. He didn’t seem to have noticed Emrys at all.

Their first-period teacher, Ms. Joanna, opened the school day with an announcement. “A student has gone missing,” she said. “An eighth grader, Brian Skupp. He was last seen on school grounds earlier this week. The police believe that he ran away.”

That explained the detectives. Emrys felt a momentary rush of relief—they weren’t there for him—then a stab of guilt for thinking of himself first. He looked across the aisle to Hazel, who appeared somber, but not especially troubled. The name didn’t seem to mean any more to her than it did to him.

“If you have any information, please speak to the school’s student success coordinator, Mr. Maple—or any adult.” Ms. Joanna smiled, her pale white face beaming. Ms. Joanna was always smiling, even when it was inappropriate—as was often the case when discussing American history. It seemed calculated to put her students at ease, but it often had the opposite effect on Emrys. “And Mr. Maple has asked me to remind you that his door remains open should you experience any negative emotions or feel otherwise triggered as a result of this situation. Now, if you’ll open your textbooks to page eighty-two …”

Emrys felt a disorienting sense of vertigo, as he did whenever he was pulled from a macabre or weighty subject. He tried to shake it off—willed himself not to spiral over thoughts of Brian Skupp or the Yellow Court or whether Van Stavern could breathe okay in that tote bag, if he needed to breathe at all—and as he dug through his backpack for his history textbook, he saw his phone’s screen was lit.

Emrys took the phone from his bag and saw he’d missed several texts from Serena. He tried to read them surreptitiously, but he was too slow.

“Emrys! Is that a phone I see?” said the teacher, smiling even as she admonished him. She shook her head as if amused. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take that off your hands, young man.”

Someone across the room said, “Ooooh, new kid’s in trouble,” and Hazel grimaced in sympathy while the rest of the class laughed. Emrys’s face burned as he looked up at Ms. Joanna, who stood above his desk, hand outstretched.

“Uh, sorry,” he said, handing over his phone.