I know what they were studying.

Last night, I woke up at 3 am to find Andie still awake, bent over Bird’s journal with their dim old flashlight. When they noticed I was awake they looked around at me, eyes like orbs, glinting in the dark.

“I think… I think I cracked it,” they whispered, and we stayed like that, frozen, staring at each other, for a long moment.

Then I said, “show me,” and they slid sideways in their bed to make space for me.

The journal was open on the blankets to a full page of sigils.

“Okay,” Andie said and traced the curve of one sigil with the tip of their finger. “See this? I’ve never seen sigil work like this, it’s been bothering me all week. Individually these sigils are the most complex, contradictory constructions I’ve ever seen. I can’t even totally unwind what they all mean. Usually, you combine symbols in the sigil to reinforce each other, but here, they’re directly combating each other. Like this little shape here means seeking, but if you look at the thirds around the circle, where you should see echoes of the same sentiment instead they put this —” they pointed to a squiggle and a few dashes — “which means emptiness, and then this —” they pointed at a partially shaded triangle, “ — which means evasion. It doesn’t make sense. But then —” The turned the journal over and held it farther away. “If you look less closely at the details, and just look at the basic shape of the whole image, it’s simple. I mean this is basically the first sigil you learn, see?” And when I didn’t see, lol, they added, “It just means the world. See? Simple.”

It didn’t look simple to me, it looks like a bunch of indecipherable circles and symbols, all overlapping.

“It’s like they’re trying to crack the whole language open,” Andie said. “And then, look at this.”

They flipped to the back of the book, to a really scribbled up page.

They make a little square with their fingers and framed a small part of the sigil with them. “See?”

At first I saw nothing, but then, after a moment I realized: “It’s the same.”

“Yeah,” Andie confirmed. “Just smaller, see? Evasion, emptiness, seeking, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And then…” they made their finger frames a little bigger to show me the world. “And then,” Andie said, and made their finger frame even bigger, to show a second, slightly interconnected world sigil. “See?” I nodded, following. And then they pulled their hands off the page all together so I could take in the circles as a whole.

I was expected it to be the world sigil again, encompassing the whole page, but it wasn’t.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

They bit their lip. “It’s not really translatable. It’s just… a wordless exclamation? A yell I guess?”

I stared down at it, and then back up at Andie, who’s eyes were so wide and glinting in the little light that I could see the texture of their eyeballs.

“So…” I began, ready to say that I didn’t understand. But my heart was already racing. I was already turning back through the journal to a page very near the end. In large, jagged letters, Bird had written the world breaks open like an eggshell if you hit it at the right angle — it’s what’s beyond it that’s impossible to breach

The first time I’d read through, I’d thought he was being metaphorical hahahaha. He’s sorta poetic I didn’t even consider until that moment, in the dark, shivering, that he was being literal.

“I think they were trying to contact other worlds,” Andie whispered. I had one of those full body shivers, a chill that prickled the back of my neck.

Now, I could tell you more about the last couple days, and how we’re learning about wizardry, and how annoying and smug Marina has been all week, but I’m gonna be honest. I do not care.

All I can think about is that the night before they died, some strange magic came over the school, and then Bird, Katharine, Rebecca, Oscar and Theodore came streaming into fountain square, elated and successful.

Did they contact another world?

And if they did — I mean if they found another world, if they contacted something

What killed them?