– “Miss Osaron, I’m not sure you understand the severity of your infraction.” 

Cali picked at her nails. She’d been meaning to go to the zoological library for days now—she’d thought that millipedes molted, but she hadn’t expected the resultant shed skin would be so sticky. It looked a bit like the stuff on the Teargates, oil-slicked and just the slightest bit wrong. Remnants crusted up around her cuticles. 

– “Miss Osaron?” 

– “Hm?”

Cali sat up, blinking.

– “Apologies, I—” 

– “You’re facing expulsion, Calliope. I would think that that merited at least a fraction of your attention.” 

Cali nearly laughed. Attention had never been her strong suit. Not when there were so many interesting things to hear and be heard by.

– “I’m listening, Rector.”

Rector Amalia sat back in her seat, seemingly mollified, sleeves (in just-so Elham College burgundy, stained at the edges with soot in what seemed to cali a rather forced display of subject matter expertise) tumbling over the arms of the chair.

when she’d been called up to the rector’s office, she’d been largely unconcerned by the seeming severity of the request for a meeting. the thing, the matter of it, was already done. there wouldn’t be forgiveness for it, not from elham or the rector. what remained was the amelioration, the bandaging of her circumstances. that, at least, she had always been good at. it was even easier with people. they all thought of themselves as petty gods, anyway.

– “Your roommate reports that you’ve performed an illegal summoning. We have her testimony on the matter, but I would prefer if you explained yourself before we proceed.” 

– “Illegal?” 

– Careful.

Cali bit back a retort—it wasn’t that the voice was unpleasant, per se, it was just close. Near, but not in the abbreviated way that the tangle of voices usually was, as though they had to pass through layers of dense fabric to reach her. Nothing about Kitten could be ignored.

– “You recognize that under subsection—“

– “Summoning isn’t illegal.”

– “No, but there are protocols. Bylaws—what you brought forth is not—“

Most members of the academy favored some form of magical lighting, but there were ascetics and religious types who still swore by flame. The delicate, green-glass kerosene lanterns scattered throughout the office caged small, seemingly untouchable flames—all of which guttered dramatically. The Rector paused, her elegant eyebrow arching.

– “Well. You see the problem we have. Ungoverned principles are foremost among—”

– “But he’s not ungoverned. That’s the—the deal. I have the keys. It’s not as though he could take control.”

Cali considered herself a fair liar, but she felt her expression twist. there were hundreds upon hundreds of easily referenced firsthand accounts in the vaulted archives below them that could prove her wrong.

– “You have plenty of other summoners, plenty of oracles, too. I don’t see what’s wrong with my situation, in particular.” 

– “Most of our summoners operate from a registry, Calliope. You know this.” 

– “But the registry is…”

Boring was the word. Not only had the registry failed to convey the broad depth of entities Cali knew were available—beyond available, they were right there and so loud as to be deafening half the time—the list had also been largely sanitized. The Hand were apt to issue writs barring passage for anything even remotely interesting.

– Interesting? Flatterer, you.

– Shut up, slug. 

From what she could tell, Kitten wasn’t even a banned entity—the words she’d spoken to bring him forth weren’t ones that she’d recognized. That was the trouble with summoning by instinct, rather than by learning. She’d spoken to oracles before who described a similar weakness. It was hard, sometimes, not to give in to the pulse of otherness. Summoners that came to the trade through training often failed to understand the fact that there wasn’t much looking to be done, when it came to other worlds. everything was palimpsest. it was just about finding the layer you could most understand.

The Rector’s patience, already thin, seemed to evaporate altogether.

– “At this point we have two options. We start from scratch—send the thing packing, scrub the ritual from your notes. Or you leave the school.”

When she’d called Kitten for the first time, there had been a Tear. A place in the ritual where the world went concave and then bloomed, suddenly, horribly, with enough force to rip apart the space between worlds. In the spare moments between before and after, she’d nearly bitten clean through her tongue, and her palms still bore crescent scars where her nails had pressed into the flesh. This moment felt similar—everything moving slow and quick, all of her body awake and desperately aware in a way that made her want to throw up on the Rector’s neat leather portfolio. 

– “Sorry—can I have a moment? I just…”

She reached over her shoulder, the Rector’s protests dim against the ringing in her ears, to unhook the toggle clasp that kept the flap of her pack closed. 

– Finally. You’ll have to get a new one of these, I think. Too cramped. 

Kitten unspooled from the pack, draping his now-familiar weight over Cali’s shoulders like a foul feather boa. Every movement from his many legs pulled the fabric of her shirt—she could feel the sharp points of each digging into her skin. A thin line of drool landed on her collar as he settled himself in.

Seeing him made him more real, sometimes. She’d spent so long living on glimpses—snippets of conversation from voices that weren’t there, pleas echoing across the planes of her dreams. Kitten had a clarity that all the others she’d ever contacted had lacked. Just the pressure of his many legs on her shoulder was enough to banish the buzzing sense of nausea. 

– Can she fly, do you think?

A reedy antenna prodded her chin, redirecting her attention. Rector Amalia had managed to contort herself nearly perfectly to the exact shape of the nearest window, and seemed to be attempting to press herself into the glass. Notably, the windows in the tower were magically sealed—exam season being what it was, no chances could be taken. As she cringed away from Cali and Kitten, the Rector muttered under her breath, the cadences moving to the watery rhythm of ritual magic. 

– Ah. Shit. 

– “Fuck.”

Cali stood, pulling Kitten behind her, shielding his body with hers. the walls of the office took on a rosy, pinkish cast, as the taste of licorice invaded the air. She closed her eyes, wincing. everyone summoned differently, even when they did it by the book. kitten’s arrival had brought moss, and brimstone, and the lightning taste of ruination.

still. Even when it was directed at her, even when it was to send away rather than pull forth, the familiar atmospheric pressure of a summons was enough to make her smile. 

In the end, the expulsion was purely administrative, a matter of reputation if nothing else—it would have been a bad look for the academy, if people knew a rector had managed to accidentally send a student to a Hell. even a nice one.