The only thing that helped was Aadhya had done more than any of the rest of them. If she wasn’t demanding that I put her first, nobody else had the right to demand it, either. But that didn’t give her or me the right to volunteer them to save everyone. I didn’t have the right, but I had the power, because their only alternative was to quit our alliance, or maybe open up one of the floor drains and jump in, which looked roughly as good a survival plan. And they all knew it, and I knew it, and that meant I was making them do it, just as much as Khamis taking the nice safe center position in his team.

But my only alternative was to tell them never mind, I wasn’t going to save everyone, I was just going to concentrate on getting our group to the gates, and after that I’d help whoever was left. Which wouldn’t be very many. No long tedious graduation ceremonies for us. Historically, according to the graduation handbook, about half the deaths happen before the first person reaches the gates, and the time between when that first lucky survivor gets out and when the last lucky survivor does is close to ten minutes, year after year. I’d be tenderly shepherding my own little flock to safety past a few hundred kids screaming as they were butchered. By the time we got to the gates and I turned back, most of them would already be dead.

I couldn’t stand it either way, which was too bad for me, since there wasn’t a third option as far as I could tell. The way I attempted to make one appear was sitting at the library table like a plank without looking anyone in the face, staring fixedly at the bread roll that Chloe had brought me without eating it. I pretended the stabbing pains in my stomach were hunger, and left it to Aadhya to say, “Okay, let’s figure this out,” to everyone else sitting round the table in the depths of awkward silence.

“What is there to figure out?” Khamis said coldly; he was sitting with his arms folded over his chest, glaring at me so hard that I could tell he was doing it even without looking anywhere near his face. “Are we supposed to be worrying about how to save Magnus, now, too? I don’t think he’s returning the favor.”

Everyone shifted awkwardly, and then Liu said, “Well, he should.”

“What?” Khamis said, but Liu wasn’t talking to him; she’d turned to Chloe. “What if we invited Magnus and his team to join up with us? Wouldn’t they say yes?”

Chloe stared at her. “Well—” She looked at me and then back. “I mean, yes, of course, but—” She stopped and looked at me again, and fair enough, I’d clearly conveyed to her on more than one occasion that I could think of many uses for Magnus, in the line of testing sharp objects and toxic chemicals, so she had a reasonable cause for doubting whether I’d be on board with signing him on. But I didn’t look up. I didn’t feel I had the right to object to any other ideas anyone had, given I’d rejected the one that involved all of them getting to live.

“That’s the only way this can work. Anyone who wants to run the course with El has to join us, really become allies,” Liu said. “It can’t just be El and Orion covering all of us. They won’t be able to do it. We all have to help cover each other so they can fight the worst mals, or save anyone about to go down.”

No one else was really participating in the conversation; almost certainly all just wondering what on earth they were going to do to save themselves while I was busy saving everyone else. But Yaakov had been listening, and apparently he was sincerely giving it a think, because he said, “But if this keeps happening, soon we will have everyone trying to run the course at the same time.” Ibrahim actually blinked over at him in surprise that he was taking the conversation seriously.

“Okay, so?” Aadhya said. “Most years, sure, we’re all trying to get private time on the course. But that’s not the problem we actually have. Did anyone here feel like the course wasn’t hard enough this morning? Even with fifty kids running?” Nobody had, very clearly; Aadhya didn’t even bother answering her own rhetorical question. “Let’s say El and Orion run the course twice a day. Everyone who wants to run with them gets to go once every other day, like we’re all supposed to. Even if literally everyone joins up, that’s fine; the gym can handle a few hundred kids at once, no problem. This isn’t rocket science or anything. We already know that we need allies. If we didn’t team up for graduation, if we all ran solo, practically everybody would die. This is just—the next level. We’re all going to be allies, because it’s worth it to help some rando kid if that means five minutes later, El’s going to be able to stop the volcano from falling on your head.”

“All of which is true right up until we all get to the gates at the same time, and Patience and Fortitude come for everybody at once,” Khamis said, the bastard, and Aadhya looked at me, asking the question I still wanted to run away from while screaming loudly. But it was only fair, after all: if I was making them jump through all these hoops, just so I could be a hero, I had to be a bloody proper one, didn’t I?

“I’ll take them out if I have to,” I said. I was just trying to get the words out without hysterics, but it came out like I was performing deadpan. Half the table thought I was making some sort of joke and gave it a polite laugh by way of telling Khamis to shut up and stop making things unnecessarily awkward, but Liu and Chloe both understood instantly that I wasn’t joking at all, and Khamis was still glaring daggers at me so hard that he presumably could tell that I was thirty seconds from projectile vomiting into his stupid face, and with all of them staring at me, the tittering died off and then everyone went through a round of looking at one another sideways to check Do we think El’s gone off her trolley for good, and then there was a round of uncertainty over whether I was just saying it or whether I had any actual reason to imagine that I could do anything of the sort.

I don’t think everyone had decided yet when Nkoyo said, “We should split up by language. You’ve got the big four, right?” she asked me, meaning English, Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish, and I managed a short nod. I suppose now I had to be grateful for my library seminar after all, and all Liu’s coaching.

Liu said, “We’ll write it up next to the gym doors,” and after a very abbreviated discussion, we broke up to start spreading the word.

Aadhya took me in tow—I think she felt I wasn’t to be trusted not to go skulking off again—but she didn’t move quick enough. As soon as I was plausibly but not actually out of hearing range, everyone else started whispering about it and I overheard Cora say, “Orion never found it, and she was so sick that day,” and I told Aadhya, very calmly in my opinion, “Sorry,” and ran ahead to the stairs and down to the nearest loo, outside the cafeteria, where I threw up what felt like most of my stomach lining, and then just sat crouched there over the toilet crying with my hands over my mouth. In here, by the end of freshman year you learn to cry with your eyes open, without making noise. Except of course nothing was going to come after me anyway, because I could kill maw-mouths as long as I had the mana, and there was a New York power-sharer on my wrist at the moment, apparently not to be removed no matter how ludicrous a swerve I took, so what mal would be stupid enough to come after me anymore?

Aadhya came in after a few minutes and waited for me outside the stall. I finally got hold of myself and crept out to wash my face. She kept watch for me until I had finished and then said, “Let’s get started.”

I didn’t stop; I wasn’t going to miss out on the rice pud that for once was actually rice pud. There was a colony of the usual glutinous maggots growing rapidly through the big metal pan, but they’d only got halfway through so far, and I managed to get a bowlful. Ah, the privileges of being a senior. I also got three apples, despite the faint greenish shine you could see if you held them to the light at just the right angle: Chloe had a really brilliant spray that would take off the toxic coating. “Lake, I know you like your walkies, but fewer than twelve people have been eaten this year so far, and five hundred are due to be gobbled in the first ten minutes downstairs. Don’t be a twat. You can run around and play with the mals after the work’s done.” He scowled at me, but the numbers were too pointedly on my side, so he stopped arguing and sullenly took a scoop of the spaghetti Bolognese, and sprinkled it with a thick helping of shaved antidote in lieu of Parmesan.

We gave it an hour after lunch, to let the word spread a bit, before we went down for the first Hindi run. There were perhaps twenty kids waiting: two teams mostly made of friends and trading acquaintances of Aadhya’s, including one girl from Kolkata enclave who knew her cousins. My freshman Sunita had talked her older brother Rakesh into talking his team into coming, which included one wary enclaver from Jaipur.

The handful left over were stragglers, kids who hadn’t got into any alliance yet. There aren’t many Hindi-speaking stragglers. The enclaves in India and Pakistan only have enough spare seats for half the indie kids who would like to come, so there’re brutal exams and interviews before you even get inducted, and even the worst of the kids who make it in are almost always a cut above the straggler level of Scholomance loser. But some parents will spend huge amounts of money buying seats, even if their kids can’t qualify on their own merits. Sometimes those kids turn out to be great at making friends, or sometimes they get better under the pressure, and sometimes they get lucky, and these were the ones who hadn’t.

They’d come down for the run because they didn’t have much hope anyway, so a grasp at any straw was worth it. It was a tiny bit useful just to come here and meet some kids who did have alliances, because those kids might end up with openings they’d have to fill. But they all looked deeply skeptical while Aadhya gave everybody the official lecture that they each had to help anyone they could, or they wouldn’t be welcome to run again. This boy Dinesh with really awful alchemy scars that had melted half his face—an accident it would probably cost five years of mana to fix if he got out of here—stared at her while she was talking as if she were an alien from several galaxies over.

But when we crossed the river for the first time, and the rilkes came out of the half-frozen mud on the banks and lunged with shredding claws for him and the two straggler kids next to him, he went ahead and threw up a shield over them all instead of just himself, which won me the ten seconds of casting time that I needed to finish disintegrating the massive hungerhowl erupting from beneath the ice, which was about to swallow them whole along with the rilkes and several other members of our group.

They all still looked fairly shell-shocked coming out of the gym, but one of them offered Dinesh a drink from a water bottle, and he walked away down the corridor with them. And I came out panting for breath, but nobody had got killed, and I wasn’t a twitchy wreck, either.

Orion wasn’t panting at all, just sullen and bored as he trailed out after me. “You really want to do this twice a day, every day?” he said, with a whinge to it. I have to confess I felt meanly pleased the next day during the first Spanish run when the crazy evil glaciers reared up a few minutes earlier than before, and he tripped, because he hadn’t been paying proper attention. I had to use a telekinesis spell to scoop him out of the giant toothy blue crevasse and toss him—possibly a little more vigorously than necessary—into a snowbank.

“Maybe you do need a bit more practice, Lake,” I said sweetly to him out in the hall as he irritably brushed off the snow and scowled at me. I beamed back and flicked a blob of snow off his nose, and then he visibly stopped being annoyed and started wanting to kiss me, but there were people there, so I glared him off.

The Spanish run was almost too easy to be good practice: it was an even smaller group than the Hindi one, just a handful of Puerto Rican and Mexican kids who’d heard about the plan from friends allied with New York enclavers, and one alliance headed by a kid from the Lisbon enclave who was friends with Alfie. But that made it easier to spot who wasn’t actually trying to help anyone else; three guesses who, and no prizes if you got the Lisbon enclaver on the first go. She got huffy and indignant when I told her afterwards she wouldn’t be welcome if she did it again, and that if she wanted the chance, she’d be spending her mana to patch up all the assorted injuries from the run.

“Is that what you think?” she said, sharp with outrage. “I’m following your orders now? I don’t think so. Who needs you anyway? Come on, we’re leaving,” she added to her team, except we’d just finished a course that had made abundantly clear that they needed me, very badly, and her top recruit, Rodrigo Beira—sixth in the class rankings, in sniffing distance of valedictorian—got up from where he’d been crouched on the floor gulping for air and quietly went over to start help tending one of the Puerto Rican girls who had a badly lacerated arm filled with spiky bits of ice that were melting only grudgingly. Enclaver girl stared after him, and then jerked a look at the rest of her team, none of whom met her eyes, and all of whom one after another went to help Rodrigo.

If I was feeling a bit smug afterwards, which I might have been, the afternoon took care of that nicely: when Orion and I went down with Liu for the first Chinese run, there wasn’t a single person there. We waited for nearly twenty minutes, Liu biting her lip and looking sorry. Chinese and English circles are fairly separate in here, since you can go your entire career doing lessons in only one language or the other, but a Chinese-speaking team of kids from Singapore and Hanoi had been among the crowd at the gates two days ago, and Jung Ho from Magnus’s team did lessons in a mix of Chinese and English and had promised to spread the word, which surely hadn’t needed much spreading.

Which meant, I realized when we finally gave up waiting, that someone had sent round a different word: Stay away.

“I asked around a little at dinner,” Liu said that evening. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed picking softly at the lute while I sat against the wall doing crochet in a sluggish desultory way, every stitch reluctant. I looked up at her. “The Shanghai enclave had a meeting of their seniors yesterday, about the runs. After I asked a few people about it, Yuyan sent someone to invite me to meet her and Zixuan in the library.”

I sat up and left the crochet in my lap. “And?”

“They wanted to ask me a question about how you do magic,” Liu said. “I agreed I would tell them, if they told me why they wanted to know.” I nodded a bit grimly; that was a sensible information trade—if also the kind you only carefully negotiate with someone you’re considering a potential enemy. “Zixuan asked me if you have trouble doing small spells.”

I stared at her. If I’d had to guess at his question, that wouldn’t have been anywhere on the list. I’d been braced for the one about what I’d do to get the power for my spells, if for instance I ran out of mana on graduation day, or maybe how exactly I was so good at controlling gigantic maleficaria. Most wizards don’t give a rat’s arse whether I’m bad at boiling a cup of water for tea once they see me setting lakes on fire. “I have trouble getting small spells.”

“You’ve got trouble casting them, too,” Liu said. “I didn’t realize it was important until Zixuan made me think about it, but I did notice—you remember back in August, when we were just starting to work on the amplification spell, and I tried to teach you that little tone-keeper spell first, so you wouldn’t accidentally sing the wrong tone and change the meaning?”

“Ugh,” I said, which comprehensively described that afternoon’s delights, which, yes, had lodged firmly in my memory. I had ten goes at the spell and my tongue felt like it had been clamped in a shop vise before I gave up and told Liu I’d just have to learn the bloody tones properly on pain of blowing myself to bits.

Liu nodded. “It’s meant for really little kids who are just learning how to talk, so you can teach them the ‘yell for help’ spell. I could cast it when I was three.” I must have been gawping at Liu openly with my doubt on my face, because she added, “It’s happening for you with Precious, too.”

My hand instinctively went up to wrap around the bandolier cup on my chest, where she was curled up sleeping. “There’s something wrong with her?”

Liu shook her head. “Not wrong. But it took so much longer for her to start manifesting, and now she’s already a lot stranger than the others. I saw her try to bite Orion once in the library when he was about to put his arm around your shoulders. That means she’s exercising judgment that’s independent of yours. That’s not really a thing that happens with mice.”

I was about to claim that my judgment was perfectly aligned with Precious on the subject of Orion putting his arm around my shoulders or on any other part of me, but Liu gave me a pointed look and I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth.

“Anyway, I also realized, you almost never use normal spells,” she went on. “You’ll even sweep the floor with a broom before you’ll use a spell.”

“My spells are more likely to sweep every living person in the room into the nearest rubbish bin,” I said.

Liu nodded. “Yes. And those are the spells you’re good at, the ones that come easily. So you don’t ever use magic when you can use something else.”

“But how did Zixuan guess all that?” I asked, after a moment. I was having some difficulty digesting the idea. I never do get ordinary spells, and the ones I get are almost always unnecessarily complicated—like those Old English cleaning spells I’d got last term, which turned out to be worthless for trade even beyond being in Old English, because they took twice as much mana to use as the modern cleaning charms everyone else had, and needed more focus besides. I’d assumed that was the school—or, well, the universe—being out to get me, not because there weren’t ordinary cheap spells, for me. I wasn’t sure whether that ought to make me feel better or worse, actually.

“He said it’s the same way a reviser works,” Liu said. “It abstracts away detail and allows you to operate on a higher scale, control more power. But you can’t use a reviser to do detail work. So—you’re like a living reviser. That’s why you have trouble with little spells, and not really big ones. He guessed because you could channel the power from his reviser so easily.”

“I wouldn’t have called it easy, myself,” I muttered, but that was just grousing. I would’ve quite liked a chat with him myself, actually; it sounded as though he might know more about how my magic worked than I did. “But in that case, they know I’m not lying—they know I really can get them through the course. Why wouldn’t they come?”

“They don’t believe you could really have hidden your power from everyone,” Liu said. “They think New York knew all along, and you’ve been in with them from the start, and just hiding it so none of the other enclaves would know about you before graduation.”

I groaned and thumped my forehead down against my knees. The problem was, I couldn’t see any way to disprove it. It made all the sense in the world from their perspective, which was limited by the language barrier that runs through the middle of the school. Over my four years in here, I’ve shared a class with at least half the kids in the English-language track, and almost none with Chinese-track kids. I know the ones like Yuyan who are doing enough languages that we’ve overlapped once or twice, and the bilingual Chinese-track kids who take their general classes in English to count for their language requirement. But that’s it. Most kids don’t cross over very much to begin with—most group conversations in this school happen either in English or in Chinese, so you hang out with the kids who prefer the same one you do. Liu deliberately chose to spend more time with the English-speaking crowd because she’s working on spell translation, which requires as much fluency as writing complicated metered poetry with lots of long obscure words in a foreign language.

But I crossed over not at all, because I wasn’t in any conversations, period. I went to my classes and spoke to almost no one, ate alone, studied alone, worked out alone, tucked away in my own cramped little cell, exactly as I would have if I’d been deliberately hiding a very bright light under a bushel. The actual explanation, which was that I hadn’t had any alternatives because no one liked me, only invited the question of why I hadn’t made any of them like me by giving them a good look at the aforementioned bright light, thereby getting myself courted by all instead of dangerously isolated.

That was such a good question that I’d literally spent three years aggressively telling myself I was going to join up to an enclave as soon as I got the chance, and then carefully avoiding any possibility of a chance while pretending to myself I was playing some sort of extremely long game. If I’d ever acknowledged to myself that possibly my mum had been right and I didn’t want to join an enclave after all, I’d probably just have lain down and died in hopelessness at the prospect of—the rest of my life. I’d only been able to admit it to myself after Orion, Orion and Aadhya and Liu; after I wasn’t completely friendless anymore.

“I don’t suppose they let you talk them out of it?” I asked, without any real hope. It looked stupid in retrospect even to me, so I didn’t think Yuyan and Zixuan were going to believe it. Maybe someone who’d been among the kids who’d deliberately avoided me, but the Shanghai kids hadn’t any clue that loser-kid me even existed until suddenly I erupted into prominence. And then Chloe and the New York kids suddenly embracing me en masse, offering me an alliance and a guaranteed spot, just because Orion had been hanging around me for a few weeks? I’d thought they were completely mad. It would make loads more sense if actually I’d secretly been part of their crew all along, or at least for a year or more.

Liu shook her head. “They were polite, but I’m pretty sure the other reason they wanted to talk to me was to get an idea if you had tricked me, or if I was trying to establish a relationship with New York.”

I blew out a breath. That was Liu trying to be polite to me, but I knew what she meant was, the Shanghai kids wanted to get an idea if she—and by extension her family—were getting ready to undercut the established Chinese enclaves and make an alliance with New York to get their own enclave. “Which did they pick?”

Liu held up her hands in a shrug. “I told them that I couldn’t prove anything. But you were my friend, and you really wanted to get everyone out, and you aren’t going to New York. So…they think you tricked me.” She gave a small sigh.

It wasn’t even especially paranoid of them. The Asian enclaves have been in a slow and increasingly vicious decades-long wrestling match with New York and London to force them to hand over more Scholomance seats. The Chinese-language track of general classes literally only started in here in the late eighties. Before then, it was English or nothing, even after a good quarter of the school was coming in with some dialect of Chinese as their first language, and it only finally changed when the ten major Asian enclaves, Shanghai in the lead, publicly announced an exploratory committee to build a new school under their control.

Of course, the enclaves didn’t really want to follow through on that threat. The wizard population has been growing steadily since the Scholomance opened, but as of right now, adding a second school and splitting the enclaver population across them would mean they’d have to compete with the Scholomance for indie kids. Both schools would have to sweeten the odds for us—at the cost of their own kids. And that’s apart from the massive cost of building the school itself.

What they really wanted was what they got: more Scholomance seats for their enclaves to hand out, and classes in an easier language for their kids. Not much to ask, but they’d had to make the threat to get it, and the allocation is still a far cry from fair. I’m in here myself thanks to a spot London really shouldn’t still have had to give out, and meanwhile indie kids all over Asia are still doing those grueling exams for the chance to be among the one in two kids who get a place.

But that can’t be fixed any more without starting to take places away from the very top international enclaves in the US and Europe, none of whom want to give up a single one. The next reallocation is coming soon—and there’s a real fight brewing over it. New York and Shanghai and their allies on both sides have been doing increasingly nasty things to one another for the last few years, jockeying for position. It would be a bit of a shocker to find out that a New York ally had gone after Bangkok and literally taken the enclave down, but we can all imagine it. Everyone knows it’s entirely possible that there’s a full-on enclave war happening right now.

Everyone including me, but the truth is, I’ve only known it in a vague background-noise way. All these years I’ve been a loser struggling in the soup; the geothaumaturgipolitical dancing among the top enclaves of the world didn’t matter to me anymore than pariah-loser me mattered to the top kids from Shanghai enclave. But it mattered now, and the more I thought about it, the more of a desperate mess it looked. Of course Yuyan and Zixuan wouldn’t trust me. They thought I was planning to graduate and head straight to New York, where presumably I’d be trying to help kill them and their families. Why wouldn’t I just do for them in here if I had the chance?

“But what’s their alternative?” I said in frustration, having gnawed it over in my head without finding a way through. “No matter what, they still can’t get through the obstacle course without me, and if they don’t get any practice in, they’ll die anyway. I’ll grant you it’s a bad chance, but it’s the only chance they’ve got. Why not give it a go? Or—why not at least send a few minions to give it a go, and make sure?”

Liu shook her head. “The course is in the gym.”

I groaned and lay myself out flat on the ground, staring at the ceiling. The gym, which I’d completely overhauled this past Field Day, in a bizarre and utterly nonsensical use of power which would suddenly make fantastic sense if what I’d been doing was, for instance, arranging some kind of mysterious sabotage of the obstacle course that would force people to put themselves in my power. Ideally in some way that would allow me to maintain power over them even after they left school and went home to their enclaves. That’s the whole idea behind the obstacle course to begin with—giving your consent is necessary to make it work. If some maleficer—some maleficer—managed to wriggle their way into it, that would be an excellent mechanism to use to force people to become their mindless zombie servants et cetera.

“I’m sorry,” Liu said softly. “I did already try asking a few indie kids to come, but…they don’t really trust me.” She put her hand up to run it back and forth over the short spiky fuzz of her head, an unconscious gesture she’d picked up ever since it had been cut. She hadn’t made that many more friends than I had, in her first three years in the Scholomance. Her family hadn’t needed her to network. They’d needed her to stay alive, and keep her kid cousins alive through their freshman year, and she’d been meant to do it with malia. And when you’re just a low-level maleficer, people pick up on that sort of thing and get nervous. “And they do trust the Shanghai kids. Most of them wouldn’t have spots in here at all if Shanghai hadn’t fought for them.”

I’d have debated the purity of the enclavers’ motives, but I’ll grant you that I didn’t have very good ground to stand on, me with my for-granted spot that Mum asked me if I wanted to take. “Do you suppose it would help things if we told them that I’ve actually got a mind control spell that works on masses of people at once?” I said aloud.

“No,” Liu said, positively. Then she said, “…do you?”

I grimaced, enough of an answer. She was right, of course; that’s not very confidence-inspiring.

But if we couldn’t find a way to change their minds—if Zixuan and Yuyan and the other kids from Shanghai didn’t come, if they all stayed away from our obstacle course runs, because they were afraid that it was a massive setup meant to take control of their brains and turn them all into trojan horses—and then graduation came, and they all died, in droves, because they hadn’t had any practice, while everyone who’d followed New York’s lead came sailing out home to their families—then it would in fact turn out to be a massive setup, in result if not intention, and I didn’t think their parents would be particularly interested in what my intentions had been.

I had the attention to spare, because everyone else had already got better. Thanks to Liesel, I was grudgingly forced to admit; she had been waiting right in front of the doors while everyone gathered, and as I got there, she preemptively announced in projecting tones, “We must approach the run differently. Stop thinking how you can help the people nearest to you. Think about what help you can give best, and look for the nearest person who needs that help.”

That was completely unintuitive, and very few people were willing to let go of their alliances quite that thoroughly yet. But by halfway through the run, it was so obviously the better approach that everyone was at least trying to do it. By the end I almost felt as if Orion and I were running it on our own—the same exhilaration except even better, though the run was still a thousand times harder—because the plan was working. Everyone was helping everyone else, saving everyone else, and all I had to do was jump in when anyone’s luck went a bit sour.

There were a lot more kids at the Hindi run in the afternoon, too: Ravi and three other enclavers from Jaipur showed up with their teams, so evidently Liesel’s cooing had paid dividends after all. Still nobody from Mumbai, though; not from anywhere in Maharashtra. That wasn’t really a surprise. Back at the start of freshman year, when all of us who weren’t enclavers ourselves were in the first frantic rush of trying to make friends, the other kids started going to lengths to avoid me by the second time meeting me. But the kids from Mumbai would literally pick up and move away from me without another word as soon as they heard my name.

I don’t know exactly what they’ve heard about me. My dad’s family haven’t actively spread the prophecy round, I don’t think. If they had, surely some of those enclaves I’m supposed to darken and destroy would have taken a much more energetic interest in my well-being, or lack thereof, some time before now. So I assume all they know is that the family were going to take me and Mum in, and we didn’t last a night inside their compound walls.

Perhaps that doesn’t seem like enough to merit instantly ostracizing me, but the Sharmas have a reputation among the wizards in Maharashtra roughly like Mum’s got in the UK. They’ve produced several acclaimed healers of their own, but what they’re really known for—and how they keep their increasingly large family—is divinatory magic, with a twist. Divinatory magic doesn’t generally work out well for many reasons, but one of them is because human beings aren’t very good at predicting what will make them happy. I don’t mean if you wish for something and then get it twisted in some horrible way like that stupid story about the monkey’s paw; I mean in the same prosaic way that you can sincerely be certain that you’d like a dress you see in a shop, and you buy it and take it home, and then it sits in your closet unused for years while you insist to yourself that one day you’re going to wear it, until finally you give it away with a sense of relief.

Well, my dad’s family have seers who can tell you how to get what will actually make you happy. The most famous living one of whom is my several-great-grandmother Deepthi, who nowadays mostly gets approached in supplication by the Dominuses of enclaves that are in a difficult strategic position, who pay her in the equivalent of millions of pounds for a single brief chat. The legend about her goes that somewhere round her third birthday, she looked up from her toys while her family were idly discussing marriage prospects, and very seriously told them not to worry about it until she graduated from the Scholomance. That was quite baffling to them, since this was 1886, before the cleansing equipment had broken for the first time, and back then the school was only open to actual enclavers. Even enclave kids from Mumbai had to compete among themselves for the six seats that Manchester had begrudgingly allocated to them. Not to mention that it was perfectly obvious to them that you’d never spend a priceless Scholomance seat on a girl.

She was seven years old when London took over, subdivided the dormitory rooms, quadrupled the seats, and threw admission open to independent wizards. By then, her family already knew that if they ever did get a Scholomance seat, they were absolutely sending her, and also they were going to have to find a husband willing to marry in. No wizard family gives away a girl who can accurately tell you about significant future events that are years out.

She was perfectly right about not arranging her marriage beforehand, too. By the time she graduated, her family had racked up enthusiastic offers from virtually every Indian boy who’d been in school with her at any point during the past four years, all of whom she’d quietly given various bits of advice along the way, such as, “Don’t go to your lab section today,” on a day when their usual seat got incinerated in a pipe explosion, or “Learn Russian and make friends with that quiet boy in your maths class” who turned out to be the valedictorian and invited you to join his alliance. There was apparently even a group of boys who offered to marry her together, like the Pandavas or something. She picked a nice young alchemist from an independent wizard family outside Jaipur instead—already vegetarian and strict mana—who had two older brothers and was indeed willing to move in and join the family. They proceeded to have five healthy children, four of whom survived graduation, considerably better than the usual odds, and carried on from there. My father was apparently her cherished favorite great-great-grandchild, out of several dozen. I don’t understand why she didn’t warn him about getting too friendly with that blond Welsh girl in his senior year, although perhaps she did, and he listened as enthusiastically as teenagers ever do to that sort of warning. I would never ignore similar good advice myself if it were given me, of course.

Whatever advice Dad got, he didn’t follow it well enough, and as a result here I am, and here he isn’t. And I’m not a Sharma from Mumbai, I’m a Higgins from Wales, because thirty seconds after meeting me, Great-Grandmother pronounced my quite horrifying doom—well, horrifying for everyone else alive; for all I know, I’d find my own bliss in becoming a grotesquely evil maleficer blasting enclaves into submission. I certainly can’t claim the idea doesn’t have a lot of visceral appeal. So then Mum had to tote me all the way back to the commune because my father’s family were ready to put baby Hitler me to death, in order to save the world that I’m slated to cover in darkness and murder et cetera.

I should note that this is the same family who are so devoted to nonviolence that they turned down a priceless offer to move en masse into Mumbai enclave, because the place wasn’t strict mana and they wouldn’t cheat at so much as the cost of the life of a beetle.

You can see why their rejecting me might make the people who are familiar with their reputation look at me askance. Even lacking the details, it’s hardly unreasonable to imagine there has to be something extremely unpleasant in my future. And at that, no one’s imagining anything quite as extreme as the actual prophecy.

So I quickly stopped trying to introduce myself to any Marathi-speaking kids. In fact I’ve spent most of the past three years with a low-grade worry about what they might tell people about me, which helpfully filled all the hours where I wasn’t worrying about more immediate problems, such as whether I’d get enough to eat that day, or if something were going to eat me.

Of course, now I didn’t need to worry about that anymore. They could have stood up in the cafeteria with an amplification spell and repeated the prophecy word for word, and the people joining me for these runs wouldn’t have trusted me one jot less. They didn’t trust me to begin with; they weren’t here because they really believed I was going to save them. They were joining me because even if I was a vicious maleficer, there still wasn’t any other option for getting in any practice. Surely almost all of them were quietly making secret plans with their allies and other teams for what they’d really do in the graduation hall, and especially what they’d do if I did in fact turn out to be a vicious maleficer.

That was what made Liesel’s edict so important. It wasn’t possible to go through a run, even just one single run, with everyone round you all working to their own strengths and your most urgent needs, and not realize how much better it was than anything we could manage in a private alliance, even the very best. It was so much better that even if it turned out that I was a vicious maleficer and planning to cull some substantial number of the class, they were all probably still better off sticking to the strategy and accepting the risk of me instead of the risk of everything else down there.

That became just as clear to the kids in the Hindi run as it had to the ones in the morning, and word kept spreading. On Saturday morning there were almost eighty kids for the Spanish run, and that afternoon, the first five kids did finally turn up for the Chinese run. They were all stragglers.

There’s no single thing that marks someone out as a straggler. Sometimes it’s just bad luck—you’ve been jumped too often, blew all your mana fighting off mals, and now you haven’t anything to contribute to a shared pool. Sometimes it’s even worse luck—you’ve got an affinity for something truly useless, like water-weaving. That’s tidy on the outside, you’d make a fortune helping enclaves with their sewer lines, but you won’t have the chance, since it doesn’t do yourself or anyone else any good in here. Sometimes you’re just not very good at magic and not very good at people—you can get by with one or the other, but if you haven’t either, you’re in trouble.

I’ve tried not to think about what it would be like—the idea of having to wade into the graduation hall all alone, the mass of the crowd breaking for the gates ahead of you, a sea of people with plans and friends and weapons, warding spells and healing potions, and the maleficaria all around already beginning to rip kids out of the mass, shredding them into bones and blood—running because your only hope was to run, knowing that actually you hadn’t any hope, and you’d die watching other people going out the gates. I spent three years trying not to think about it, because I thought that was going to be me.

In this case, one of the poor bastards had developed shakes that occasionally interrupted his spellcasting, probably aftereffects of a poisoning, or perhaps just trauma. There’s no shortage of that in here. Another one of them had Chinese about as good as mine, which was a bad sign given that it was presumably the language she’d been taking classes in for all four years. It’s not actually worth it, statistically speaking, to send your kids in here if they aren’t properly fluent in English or Chinese to begin with, which generally also is a sign they’re no good at languages. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a wizard they are otherwise: they’ll be at too much of a disadvantage when they can’t keep up with their general subjects. You’re better off keeping them at home, guarded as best you can, teaching them in the vernacular they do know. But some families try it anyway.

And in fact none of the five were any good during the run. The wisdom of our crowd is vicious, but it’s rarely wrong. The boy with the shakes, Hideo, would’ve been a quite good incanter, except that he’d have died twice during the single run when he interrupted his own invocations. But it didn’t matter; with only five kids in the run with me and Orion, we still all sailed through.

Afterwards I made myself tell Hideo, “I’ll get you a potion that will hold you for the run.” My mum’s got a recipe for something she calls calming-waters. She makes a monthly batch to give to wizards who’ve got muscle spasms brought on by overcasting—when you try to cast a spell you haven’t quite got enough mana for, you can make up the difference out of your own body, but it often has side effects that are brutal to get rid of. I was reasonably certain it would work for his shakes, too.

The sticking point was, I couldn’t actually brew it myself. I had to ask Chloe to do it for me. I gave myself the reward of a silver lining: I asked Orion to come down to the labs, too. He got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic, and then gave me a look of wounded disappointment when he discovered that Chloe was coming, which was exactly why I had asked him. The next time I asked, he’d be sure to ask if there was going to be any company, and then I’d have to say yes or admit I was asking him on a date, which I absolutely wasn’t going to do. It was the best protection against myself that I could come up with.

He was even more annoyed when it took us three hours to get the bloody thing concocted. Chloe kept asking excellent questions like, “Do you grind the scallop shells fine or just pound them to coarse bits?” and “Do you stir clockwise or counter?” none of which I could answer except by pantomiming Mum doing it, trying to remember with my body, and then guessing as best I could. I’m rubbish at alchemy in general, and I’m rubbish at healing in general, too, so the combination is almost always a disaster. The last time Mum tried to teach me, the test drop disintegrated a chunk the size of my fist out of the floor of our yurt.

“That can’t be right,” Chloe said, looking into the seething angry yellow boil in the pot, which indeed did not look anything like calming-waters.

“It’s not,” I said grimly. “I think I got the timing of the salt and the sulfur wrong.”

She sighed. “We’ll have to start over.”

“Oh, come on,” Orion moaned outright. In justice, which he wasn’t going to get from me, it was take four.

“Stop complaining,” I said. “Pretend you’re staking us out as bait. The two of us alone in this lab are as likely as anyone in the entire school to get jumped.” Judging by her sidelong look, I’m not sure Chloe really appreciated my argument.

The fifth attempt actually came out vaguely resembling the cool green-blue it was meant to be, only with a thick streak of muddy yellow-brown winding through it. I had absolutely no idea what we’d done wrong at that point, but Chloe very cautiously dipped in a lock of her own hair, rubbed it between her fingers, then sniffed it, and finally just barely touched it with her tongue. She made a face and spit into the sink and said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it,” then cleared the decks with a brisk cleaning spell and dived in once more. She went much quicker this time, and I couldn’t even spot what she did differently, but when she was done, at the end the yellowy mud streak got swallowed up smoothly and vanished away, and a single drop on my tongue was enough to tell me she had got it.

The drop wasn’t enough to keep away the burst of sour jealousy: I couldn’t brew calming-waters, my own mother’s recipe, and Chloe could. I’d have had to drink a triple dose to clear that taste out of my mouth.

But she made a big batch and we bottled it into thirty vials. It would take care of Hideo for the rest of the term, and leave enough over for anyone who panicked on graduation day: there were usually a reasonable number of unexpected freakouts. Orion lugged the crate downstairs to Chloe’s room for us and threw me one last reproachful look before flouncing off to go hunting, since I very firmly parked myself into one of the beanbags and made clear I wasn’t going anywhere alone with him.

Chloe bit her lip and didn’t say anything, but she continued not to say anything even after he left, which wasn’t usual for her. It was clear she could have happily used a dose of calming-waters herself to stop worrying: Is El going to take Orion away from us. I didn’t want to think about that myself, as letting the idea into my head was likely to lead me in the direction of many terrible decisions. “Were you always planning to do alchemy?” I said instead, by way of distracting us both. “Aren’t your parents both artificers?”

“Yeah,” Chloe said. “But my grandma’s an alchemist. She started by teaching me to cook, when I was about ten. She was really happy that I wanted to learn; my mom and my uncle never did. She got in for working on the cafeteria overhaul,” she added.

For all that the food in here is mostly awful and regularly contaminated, we’re lucky to have it. Originally the Scholomance cafeteria dispensed a nutritious slurry three times a day—thin and watery enough to pass through the very narrow warded pipes—and if you wanted it to be something else, you had to transmute it yourself, which no one could afford to do.

Actually making a particular food out of something else with magic is almost impossible, because you aren’t just interested in how you experience it in your mouth: you want the food to work as nutrition for your body once you send it down into your stomach and forget about it. If you turn a box of nails into a sandwich, you might think you’ve eaten afterwards, but you’ll be wrong. And for that matter, if you turn gruel into bread, you’ll generally be wrong then, too, because gruel and bread aren’t actually that similar as far as your digestive enzymes are concerned. It has been done, but only in alchemy labs funded by enclaves, by the kind of wizard who will finish their Scholomance training and then go off to spend ten years in a mundane university getting advanced degrees in chemistry and food science.

You can start with something that technically qualifies as nourishment and then just put a sensory illusion on it, but the illusion will break down as soon as you start chewing. The result is generally more unpleasant than just choking down whatever you started with. The only practical solution is to selectively transmute whatever parts come into significant contact with your senses: you lose the nutrients out of the bits that were transmuted, but that sends the rest successfully down.

However, that’s loads more complicated and expensive mana-wise than just waving a hand and turning, say, a stick into a pen, where you don’t care in the slightest what’s happening on the molecular level as long as you can write with it. Not even enclavers could afford to do it on a regular basis. Most kids came out more or less malnourished, and everyone spent most of their weight allowance bringing in food. It was enough of a factor in deaths that after ten years or so, the decision was made to open up a hole in the wards for transporting in small amounts of actual food, enough to give everyone our thrice-weekly snack bar visit.

But shortly after World War II, New York and a consortium of the US enclaves swooped in and very cheerfully took over the school—London wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight—and they hired a batch of those chemist-wizards who went into their labs and developed a food-transmutation process to run on the slurry that was an order of magnitude cheaper than the best solutions before then.

Evidently Chloe’s granny had been one of the alchemists who had made it possible—good enough to get a place in New York enclave for the work. I already knew her dad had been allies with her uncle, during graduation, and he’d got in by marrying her mum. So her dad and her granny had been indie wizards who’d made it in by clawing and scratching and working themselves to the bone; her family weren’t high up in the council or anything, they were relatively new. No wonder she was so anxious about not losing the Domina’s son.

But I couldn’t say anything to reassure her. I wasn’t coming to New York. I wasn’t making her grandmother’s bargain, not even the better version of it that I could have struck. So if Orion wanted me more than he wanted New York, I suppose I was going to take him away, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it, either. Not after the way they’d treated him, raised him to be their hero instead of just another kid. I’d spent most of my childhood yelling at Mum for not taking me into an enclave. It hadn’t occurred to me what any enclave would do with someone like me, what they’d want of me, what they’d tell a kid too young to resist them, just to get what they wanted.

I wasn’t going to give in to them. I wasn’t going to give in to anyone: not Magnus, not Khamis, not Chloe, not even Orion, if he asked me himself. I wasn’t going to give in to New York, to any of the enclaves, and most of all, I wasn’t going to give in to the Scholomance.

After I left Chloe in her room, I walked alone to the gym. The doors were closed today: there were no runs on Sunday. On the other side, the low grinding and clanking noises were going steadily as the obstacle course went on rearranging itself to try to kill us, all in the name of making us stronger. I stood in front of them listening for a long time. I could; nothing tried to jump me. “That’s right,” I said, aloud, defiantly. “Don’t even try. You’re not going to win. We’re going to get everyone out. I’m going to get everyone out.”