Chapter 11: Enclavers

Dramatic pronouncementsare all very well and good, but on Monday, two hundred kids turned up expectantly for the next English run, and Orion and I started to hit our limits.

The new course itself was absolutely awful. The gym was full of plum trees on the cusp of blooming, with a soft gurgling brook winding among their roots, the last traces of ice clinging to the banks and a pale edge of frost limning the grass. Sunlight dappled down through the leaves and small birds darted around in the distance, chirps coming from amid the branches, lovely and inviting, at least until we got close enough for the trees to start savagely clubbing us with thorny limbs that shredded most shielding spells, and the tiny birds bunched up into a flock that came at us en masse and turned out to be shrikes.

I tried to hit the whole swarm with a killing spell, but it didn’t work. Just before the spell landed, the cloud of shrikes all burst apart and started attacking us separately. Orion spent the whole run weaving back and forth through the crowd, shooting them down one at a time, but I couldn’t do that: throwing one of my killing spells at a single shrike while it was flying rapidly around a person pecking at them was an excellent way for me to miss the shrike entirely, and kill the person and their three closest neighbors at the same time.

The only thing that saved it from disaster was that everyone did keep helping one another—throwing fresh shields over people who had been clubbed, picking the shrikes out of the sky one at a time if they came close enough, neutralizing the poison clouds that occasionally spurted out of the plum blossoms. I wasn’t useless, either; halfway through, the trees got inventive. A dozen of them pulled up their roots and wove themselves together into a living wicker man. It went crashing about, grabbing enormous handfuls of people and shoving them inside the basket of its own chest, and then erupted into flames with them imprisoned and screaming just as a second batch of trees followed the first.

The shields that everyone had to keep up against the shrikes were totally useless against the tree-basket-men, and even Orion couldn’t make a dent in the things. They weren’t consumed by their own fire, which was presumably psychic instead of corporeal. They just kept merrily burning on, right until I tore them all apart with a handy spell I have for constructing a ritual dark tower. It uses whatever construction materials are in the area. The people inside got dumped out, and the trees got shredded apart and reassembled into a tidy hexagonal tower of solid walls bristling with upcurved sharpened stakes placed at intervals that looked exactly as though the structure was designed to have people impaled all over the surface. Even dodging shrikes, everyone gave it a very wide berth.

Nobody died, but seven people came out with exposed bone, a dozen with severe burns, and two people had lost eyes. A couple of enclaver alchemists grudgingly shared drops of restorative tinctures, which were good enough to heal the damage once they emerged from the gym, and nobody complained if they made it out of graduation alive at the cost of an eye, but it had been a sharp lesson in our limitations. There were plenty of small, quick mals. In fact they were excellent candidates to have survived the cleansing, down below.

In the library afterwards, Magnus pulled Orion aside into a corner of the reading room for a deep heartfelt chat, out of earshot of where I’d been before I got up and quietly snuck after to eavesdrop. “Look, bro, I’m sorry to have to be saying this, I know you’re trying to move mountains here, but—we’ve got to have a plan for when you can’t,” by which he meant, a plan for leaving people behind. That was what every enclaver had.

“If that happens, I guess we’ll have to let the best-prepared fend for themselves, Tebow,” I said, sweet as a poisoned apple, from behind his back. He flinched and glared at me before he could help himself.

But the truth was everyone had that plan: how to recognize when one of your allies had gone down too hard, and it was time to cut them loose and keep going. I’d lived with that plan in my own head for years and years, and just declaring that I was giving it up wasn’t actually a solution to the underlying problem. We needed a plan to save everyone instead, and we demonstrably still didn’t have one. Magnus wasn’t wrong about that.

But we still had a better option than any of the other available ones. More kids kept joining the runs all week long, except in the still-almost-empty Chinese section. One of the former Bangkok enclavers did show, warily, and later in the week, Hideo—calming-waters did beautifully to stop his tics, for half an hour at least, which was plenty of time to do the run—brought a group of three other kids with him, a loser-alliance that he’d had an agreement to follow after in the graduation hall, with no other benefits: even the worst stragglers can get that kind of lousy deal. I think he’d asked them to come and watch him perform with the tics medicated, in hopes they’d agree to let him properly join up, and the prospect of a real fourth brought them—that, or they liked him, and wanted to be convinced.

Apparently they were convinced, and it was contagious, because the following Monday—after the gym debuted yet another completely unsurvivable course—all of the Japanese enclavers turned up for the Chinese section en masse, bringing their allies with them, which made it suddenly a substantial crowd. The biggest Japanese enclaves all have each of their kids make their own team, with no more than one or two carefully picked potential enclave recruits from among the independent Japanese kids, and the rest of the kids are foreign wizards whom they’ll aggressively sponsor into foreign enclaves after graduation, the idea being to create relationships all over the world. Loads of kids take Japanese and compete for the slots as a result, since it’s substantial help to get into the enclave you actually most want to live in. Mostly people consider themselves lucky to take whatever enclave they can get, even if it means moving halfway round the world from your family.

Some of them had been coming to the English runs before now, since most of them knew both English and Chinese, but it obviously made more sense to come to the less crowded run. They just hadn’t wanted to pick a fight with Shanghai enclave, and who could blame them. Turning up like this was the equivalent of them saying publicly they were convinced that they weren’t getting out alive otherwise, a vote of no confidence in whatever the Shanghai kids were trying to organize.

What they certainly weren’t organizing was runs of the obstacle course, since as far as I knew, no one in the school but me could mind-prison a castigator, which was this week’s special guest star. It took me a full ten minutes of wrangling the thing while it bellowed and roared and thrashed hideous slimy limbs dripping with acid all over the gym, eating enormous holes in the wide spring meadow buzzing with seventeen different swarms of mana-eating insects that everyone else desperately had to keep off. Orion literally had to go across the gym and back thirty-two times in the single run with a net spell, which kept coming apart every time one tiny drop from the castigator’s arms hit it.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Liu offered wearily, that afternoon in the library, as we sat slumped round the table. Orion had put his head down in his arms and was snoring faintly from inside them. The rest of us were trying to think of ways to talk the Shanghai enclavers round. “Nobody will turn down help on graduation day, and the really desperate ones who will need the most help are coming to the run. Maybe we’ll be able to just include them.”

“Yeah, it’s not like they’re going to be useless,” Aadhya said. “They’re doing something. They’re in the workshop all the time; I’ve seen Zixuan in there working with at least a dozen kids every time I go in for supplies.”

“This is nonsense. They are not going to be prepared,” Liesel said. If you’re wondering how Liesel came into our discussions, so were the rest of us, but she was both impervious to hints that she wasn’t wanted, and also hideously smart, so we hadn’t actually been able to chase her from the planning; in fact she had edged her way further up the table at every session. “There are more than three hundred of them and they are not coming to a single run. We cannot yet manage a group even of two hundred properly. Are we useless? Have we not trained? But it is only lucky that no one died this week. And it is still only the beginning! If they don’t start practicing before the end, there will be no hope for them. Put that out of your heads.”

“I suppose you’d like me to just abandon three hundred people, then,” I said sharply.

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, the great heroine is angry. If they want your help they will come. Until then you should worry less how you will save them and worry more how they will get in your way. Now is it possible we can talk about the order of entry? We cannot keep running in without any organization. This is not a good strategy when we are all collaborating.”

She then hauled out four separate diagrams with multiple color-coded alternatives and spread them out on the table. “We must systematically try each of these options over the next six runs. First we will begin with the students with the strongest shielding, and attempt to create a defensive perimeter which can be monitored closely—”

I’ll draw a merciful veil over the rest. Liesel was clearly right, so we couldn’t stop her marching us off firmly in the proper direction, but for my part, I did feel very much like I’d just been put against the wall by the most dragonish dinner lady at primary school.

That week, without bothering to mention it to anyone, Liesel also marshaled every creative-writing-track kid out of our runs and gave them marching orders to invent minor cantrips that would do things like highlight anyone in trouble with an aura that would shade from amber to bright red as their situation worsened—not something that anyone in the graduation hall would ever previously have wanted, since it was more or less like putting out a beacon for mals—and automatically mark the ground where a person last saw a mal, to warn off the people behind them. Again, not something anyone would’ve spent mana on in the past. The first I knew about this clever program was when people started glowing all over the place on Friday, and Liesel lectured me and Orion sternly after the run not to even bother looking at anyone who wasn’t bright red.

I’d have had several things to say about her high-handed behavior, except I was lying flat on the floor with my eyes shut trying to convince my heart and lungs that really everything was fine and they should just calm down and keep working, and Orion was sunk over his own knees gulping for air, his entire shirt soaked completely through with sweat. We’d reached three hundred kids in the English run.

All of whom had in fact come out alive, and no one had even suffered a half-dissolved limb in the process, because launching behind a perimeter of the students with the best shielding was, in fact, extremely effective, and so were the new warning systems. By the time I had managed to haul myself up to the cafeteria and fork in my lunch and recovered enough energy to contemplate squabbling with Liesel, I had grimly realized that the only possible grounds on which I could squabble with her were that she was seizing authority that nobody wanted to give her. As grounds went, that had the solidity of a bog. At least she was doing it on the basis of terrifying competence and not just the random chance of affinity.

Anyway any spare energy I might have had for squabbling was soon to disappear. That afternoon we were up to 150 kids in the Hindi run: the Maharashtra kids all finally turned up. They were still keeping as far from me as they could, but they’d come. The next morning the Spanish run had more than a hundred as well. I was pathetically grateful that the Chinese run was still thin; running with forty kids felt like a relaxing stroll by comparison. It was all the more clear that without Liesel’s ruthlessly imposed improvements, we’d have been losing people left, right, and center.

Which didn’t actually reconcile me to her approach. “How exactly have you managed to spend your entire career until now pretending to be a nice person?” I demanded grouchily as I stomped down to the cafeteria on Monday the next week: in our library session after the English run that morning, she’d brought out a long checklist of the many, many things I’d done wrong or inefficiently that needed correcting, all of which she’d carefully observed while somehow managing to sail through the run completely undistressed herself. She was still demanding my attention for a few more of them on the stairs even after the lunch bell rang.

She sniffed disparagingly. “It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists. I must have looked aghast, because she scowled at me and said sharply, “Or instead you can spend years sulking around the school letting everyone believe you are an incompetent maleficer. Do you know how much simpler everything would be now if only you had given us any reasonable time to prepare? Not to mention we would not be having all these difficulties with the Shanghai enclavers! You had better be careful. They are waiting too long.” She flounced on from me to join Alfie and the London kids further ahead in the queue. They all moved back to make room for her right behind him, even Sarah and Brandon, although they were enclavers and she wasn’t.

“She’s a monster,” I said flatly to Aadhya and Liu as we queued. They were both quite shadowy under the eyes themselves: on top of all going in the English runs together, Liu was going with us in the Chinese runs, and trying to push the mana-amplification spell out to cover as many people as she could each time, and Aad was doing the Hindi runs, not to mention they were both actually suffering Liesel far more on a regular basis than I was, since they and Chloe had been doing all the managing. I was grateful to have to spend much more of my time running desperately for my life.

“She’s the valedictorian,” Aadhya said, which was in fact a good point: terrifying ruthlessness is close to a necessary criterion. “Stop picking fights with her. We need everything that’s coming out of her giant brain. We’re all getting wiped out as it is. Even the kids doing only one of the runs.”

I was tired enough myself that I hadn’t really been paying attention, but when she waved an arm round the cafeteria tables where people were already sitting, I could see instantly she was right: anyone who’d been doing the runs with us was more or less slumped over their tray in a way that would’ve been an invitation to be pounced on by at least three different mals in an ordinary Scholomance year. You could literally pick out the lingering objectors just by seeing who wasn’t falling into their vegetable soup. Loads of the kids who’d come out of the English run this morning were literally not eating yet; they were taking turns doing catnaps on the tables.

“Why are we getting so wiped out?” I said. “Do you think the school’s draining our mana somehow?”

But I looked back and Aadhya and Liu were both giving me the same kind of level, murderous looks I’d seen aimed at Orion in the past. “We’re all being attacked much more in every run than ever before,” Liu said. “It’s not just the extreme maleficaria. At this time last year, the obstacle course only had ten attack stations, all separate. The general melee runs aren’t supposed to start until June.”

“Oh, right,” I said awkwardly, as if I’d just needed to be reminded.

We went through the line and loaded up our trays with bowls of spaghetti—we had to pick out the red mana leeches hiding among them, but we were all used to that—and big helpings of sliced peaches in hallucinogenic yellow syrup that Chloe would probably be able to neutralize for us when we got it back to the table she was arranging. Annoyingly, the last helping of sponge cake they were meant to accompany went just in front of us, to a boy from Venice who had a tidy fishing tool he used to snag it from among the surrounding spikegrubs. Even more annoyingly, once he’d got it, he paused and turned and offered it to me, exactly the way people sucked up to enclaver kids all the time. And Aadhya gave me a jab with an elbow before I could erupt in the boy’s face like I wanted to, so instead I just had to say in as ungracious a tone as I could manage, “No. Thanks.”

“We need to think about it, though,” Aadhya said at the table, a while later. I was sullenly eating the peaches without even being able to enjoy them, and it wasn’t just because the neutralizer gave them a faintly metallic taste. “What if the school is making it harder on purpose? What if it’s trying to wipe you out so bad that it can hit you in a gym run, take you or Orion out?”

“Well,” I said, trying to think how to word it so I wouldn’t get more death glares from the entire table. I was tired, but to be perfectly honest, I’d mostly been whinging. You’re supposed to be tired during graduation training. If you aren’t, you aren’t working hard enough. I was working-a-full-day tired, not falling-into-my-soup tired.

Orion was, and I’d saved his bowl twice so far this meal, but that’s because he was sneaking out to go hunting real mals after curfew. I’d tried to persuade Precious to keep watch on him, but she wouldn’t; the only thing she’d do is insist on coming along anytime I went over to his room to force him to actually get into bed and shut his eyes and turn out the lights before the curfew bell rang. If he did, he instantly fell asleep and stayed down until morning; otherwise he’d be in the cafeteria at dawn, eating from a giant heaped tray before anyone else got there. In case you’re wondering, staying out past curfew is normally a death sentence and probably still was for any other student even in this strange year, but at this point mals were all fleeing Orion very energetically. Mostly he only ever got to kill them in the runs, when one of them got too distracted trying to eat another student and blew its cover.

“Or maybe it wants to kill some of us now in practice, in case most of us do get out,” Liu put in, a perfectly reasonable concern which helpfully relieved me of having to make a bright and cheery point of explaining that it wasn’t that bad really, at least for me.

“What should we do?” Ibrahim said, anxiously.

“Why don’t we just take a break?” Chloe said, which I suppose was the obvious solution if you were someone who had ever had the luxury of being able to take a break. “We could take the rest of the day, skip tomorrow, and Wednesday morning. Nobody would miss more than one run. That’s not much.”

Almost everyone endorsed the idea as soon as it percolated outwards. Even Orion perked up dramatically as soon as he woke up enough to hear it. I assumed he was planning an all-day hunting extravaganza. I personally slept in to the glorious hour of eight, just early enough to still make it upstairs for breakfast dregs if I rushed, and was up and stuffing my hair into a short ponytail when someone knocked. I’d got much more cautious about that sort of thing since my delightful encounter with Jack last year, but with a vat of mana available, that now just meant I kept a nice murder spell on the tip of my tongue and opened the door at arm’s length.

Orion was standing there looking a bit nervous, carrying a large mug of tea and an alchemy lab supply box heaped with three buns, a small glass full of apricot jam and butter pats that were starting to permanently intermingle, a bowl full of congee with a whole egg on it, and a half-green clementine. I stared at him and he blurted, “Would—would you—have breakfast with me?” and then realized as the words left his mouth that he hadn’t made the situation horrible enough and added, “On a date?” in a squawky warble.

I slammed my hand down on the door of Precious’s enclosure, where I’d tucked her in with some sunflower seeds, and latched it shut just in time. I ignored the furious chittering and squeaks from inside and blurted back, “Yes,” before anything resembling good sense could assert itself.

I had to work extremely hard not to think better of what I was doing, even as I followed Orion through the corridors. I couldn’t even distract myself by watching for attacks or traps; nothing with a mind, right or otherwise, was attacking Orion lately. He’d grown three inches so far this year, at least, and his shoulders and arms were straining every seam of his t-shirt, and he’d showered and his silver hair was dark and curling round his neck, and I was having to devote really enormous effort to ignoring that I was being a truly colossal wanker, when I suddenly realized where we were, and stopped, everything forgotten in appalled outrage, on the threshold of the gym.

Orion didn’t even break stride. He sailed onwards through the doors and into the half of the gym that was left over from the obstacle course. The famed cherry trees had appeared this week and were just getting ready to make a proper scene, tiny pink and white buds dotting the dark limbs.

I almost couldn’t believe he’d done it. I went after him blankly, waiting for him to explain this was some sort of joke, which would itself be in poor taste. He just stopped under one particularly laden tree and earnestly began spreading out a ragged blanket for our picnic, while I stood staring down at him, trying to decide if he was literally insane, and whether I liked him enough to pretend he wasn’t. I had already liked him enough to drink the horrible tea-stained hot water he’d brought me, so the answer to that was almost certainly yes, but I wasn’t sure I liked him enough to picnic in the gym with him.

It’s just as well that I was too appalled to move, I suppose, because that’s why I was still on my feet when Orion looked up and saw something coming. I had no idea in that first moment what it was he’d seen; his face didn’t actually reach any kind of positive or negative expression, he only focused on something behind me. But I knew that something was coming at my back, and that I hadn’t heard it or picked up on it. That was warning enough.

Even as I turned round to find out what it was, my hands were already moving in the shielding spell that Alfie had given me, two weeks ago. I’d bitterly made myself ask him for it, knowing he’d say exactly what he said, “Of course, El, delighted.” Bollocks. It had to be one of the best spells even his London enclave family had, worth loads in trade. In here it would probably have brought more than my sutras, since a decently skilled senior could cast it during graduation, and the sutras wouldn’t do anyone any good until they got out alive.

It wasn’t a shield spell, really. It was an evocation of refusal—not to be too boringly technical, an evocation is more or less taking something intangible and bringing it into material reality. What the evocation of refusal produced—in Alfie’s hands—was a neat translucent dome roughly seven feet across. As long as he could hold it up—casting alone he could manage as long as three minutes, which is an eternity in the graduation hall—he could refuse anything he didn’t want inside, including mals, hostile magic, flying debris, loud farts, et cetera. And while there’re plenty of spells that will let you seal out the world, the extremely special quality of this one was that it let in all the things you did want, such as oxygen untainted by any poison gas in the vicinity, or healing spells from your allies. I’d seen Alfie use it for the first time back during our run against the evil ice mountains. He’d brought it out several times since then to save random other kids’ lives. He wasn’t one of the enclavers who whinged about helping other kids; his grace went both ways, or maybe he’d secretly internalized the fantasy of noblesse oblige, because he’d dived wholeheartedly into the project of rescuing everyone in his path.

But when I cast the evocation, I got a globe nearly twelve feet across, which showed every sign of staying up for as long as I bothered to keep it going, and after I put it round something, I could move the globe and all its desirable contents, meaning I could scoop up a double handful of kids and deposit them in a different spot on the field, no mals included. That was a game-changing move. I could claim that was why I’d asked for the spell, for everyone’s sake, but that would be bollocks, too. I hadn’t known for sure what I could do with it when I asked him to give it to me. I’d just known it was a really top spell, and I could see that it had room to grow—the kind of room that I could fill up.

I had the smooth dome of it up over me and Orion before I finished turning round, which was good, because we very much didn’t want any of the literally twenty-seven different killing spells and deadly artifices that came flying at our heads, five of them backed by a true circle working. I don’t think I could have blocked or turned them all any other way. But none of them could make it through the impenetrable no thanks very much of the globe. Most of them just dissolved. The more elaborate workings slid down to where the globe intersected with the floor, and dissolved into a frustrated cloud of churning smoke in a dozen different colors that ringed us, bubbling and seething, until one after another they finally dissipated.

By then Orion was standing up next to me, staring out of the shimmering wall into the faces of the thirty-two kids who’d just had a really good go at murdering us. I recognized Yuyan at the front, and Zixuan was standing with the circle—all of the Shanghai seniors, in fact, along with their allies, and a dozen other kids I was pretty sure were from Beijing and Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

It didn’t surprise me at all, except that I’d been taken by surprise. I ought to have known it was coming. But Orion just looked confused at first, as if he didn’t understand how they could possibly have made such a bizarre mistake. It took the grim disappointment on their faces as they watched their spells dissolving to drive home the idea that they’d meant it.

I imagine they were very sorry about that a moment later, and so was I, because that made him angry, and it turned out I’d never seen Orion angry before. Not really angry. And I realize I haven’t one metacarpal to stand on here, but I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t even the one he was angry at. For a horrible moment I had the vivid sensation that I wasn’t holding the dome up to protect him anymore: I was keeping him away from them.

“Lake!” I said, trying to make it sharp, but it came out with an awful wobble I didn’t like. I couldn’t help it. His face looked all wrong, his lips peeled back in a snarl and a faint glimmer of eldritch light coming through his eyes, so much mana gathered for casting that you could almost see it with the naked eye, like a fist clenching. I had a clear and terrible vision of him just mowing gracefully through them, the way he did with a horde of maleficaria, conscious thought going entirely out of it until everything—everyone—was dead.

But thankfully, he grated out, “They wanted to kill you,” and despite my visceral horror, I managed a spark of indignation over that, just enough to light up my ever-helpful reservoirs of irritation and anger.

“I don’t seem to have been in any danger!” I said. “What were you going to do, I’d like to know. Probably get your bones dissolved into goo, if you’d had it all to yourself. That’s up to eleven for me, by the way.”

It distracted him from the confrontation, just long enough to crack his own fury a bit. “Eleven!”

“I’ll write out the tally for you later,” I said, managing a decent façade of coolness. “Now let’s pack this up and go and have our picnic in the library, like normal people. What are you going to do otherwise?”

That was a wrong question to ask, because Orion looked back at them and still clearly felt that kill them all was a perfectly valid response—and when I say perfectly valid, I mean that he was an inch away from going at them, and I hadn’t any idea what to do, but the choice was abruptly not mine anymore, because people literally started appearing round me in bunches, starting with Liesel and her crew: Alfie with his face screwed up in strain, holding up his own casting of the evocation of refusal as they flew in through the doors.

It wasn’t just them, though; other teams were all shooting into the gym around us with the bungee quality of yanker spells going off, all of which I realized after an incredulous glance were keyed off the shield holder on my belt. Ibrahim and his team appeared; even Khamis had come, with Nkoyo.

And more to the point, Magnus and his team sailed in, along with Jermaine and his; then a team from Atlanta, another from Louisiana—and in minutes, what any outside observer would’ve said was going on was that the New York and Shanghai enclavers had squared off, with their various allies, all of us ready to tumble down into the open waiting jaws of Thucydides’s Trap together. It would be at least as effective at killing wizards off as a horde of maleficaria, especially once any survivors went home and told their parents that the war everyone was half expecting had started here on the inside.

I had no idea how to stop it. One look told me Orion wasn’t going to be any help: he was going to be the spearhead. Magnus had already led the New York kids to form up behind him. And the only people who weren’t there were Aadhya and Liu and Chloe, presumably because whoever had organized this protective scheme—three guesses, all Liesel—had known that they’d tell me about it in advance, thus denying her the satisfaction of getting to rescue me.

As if things weren’t bad enough, at that very moment the school jumped on the bandwagon, too: we all paused as we heard the grinding of the obstacle-course machinery disengaging—the way it did at the end of each week before the place reconstituted itself, only it was twice as loud when we were all inside at the time—and then the entire floor beneath our feet lurched and went pliable, open to reshaping.

We’re all on alert for anything like a potential advantage, so everyone started grabbing for it immediately. Like the opening rounds of some strategy game where everyone’s trying to establish their positions before they start lobbing bombs. The green hills swelled and heaved like rolling waves as everyone tried to re-form them into handy things like trenches and fortifications. It felt like trying to surf a continental plate over the ocean with nothing more to steer by than a horse bridle.

And as soon as I came up with that metaphor, I realized I only had one possibly useful working: the one and only spell I’ve ever successfully written by myself. It’s also the one and only spell I’ve ever tried to write, because what I produced in that shining burst of creativity was a spell for setting off a supervolcano. I burnt the parchment instantly afterwards, but the spell has remained firmly lodged in my mental catalog along with all the other most horrible spells I’ve ever seen.

I pulled mana in on one breath and spread my arms out on the exhale, chanting the opening incantation. Two glowing ley lines branched out over the floor to either side of me and began spiraling over the entire floor like the arms of a galaxy, and everywhere they touched was abruptly and vividly in my head, brought under the power of my incantation. Everyone else kept trying to hold on to the small chunks they’d managed to control, but the spell ruthlessly tore them away and gave them to me, until I’d got the entire gym seething and shuddering in my mental grip.

And round then, the better incanters all began to realize where my spell was very clearly going—namely straight for some kind of gigantic mass-extinction-level eruption that would take out everyone in the room and quite possibly all four floors directly overhead.

“What are you doing?” Magnus yelled at me in absolute panic—he was in fact quite a good incanter—and there was a perfectly clear tipping moment when everyone in the gym stopped worrying about the other side and started worrying about me.

As well they should have, since I’d hit the end of the opening incantation, and once I started into part two, there wouldn’t be any stopping it. I halted with my whole body clenched up around the gathered power and flattened the gym out with both my hands, so abruptly that half the kids fell over as hills vanished from beneath them and trenches popped them up into the air. Everyone still on their feet was backing away from me, eyes wide with horror, and I snarled at all of them universally, “Stop it. Just stop. If I wanted you dead, if I wanted any of you dead, you’d be dead! Rú guǒ wǒ xiăng nǐ sǐ, nǐ men sǐ dìng le!” I translated, in my flabby Chinese.

Which was so patently true under the circumstances—since I was having to work extremely hard to not kill them all—that it made a visible impression all round. Well, as much as it could while everyone was actively terrified that I was in fact about to kill them all. At least they had certainly stopped worrying about doing any killing of their own. Even Orion had got over being enraged and was just standing gawking at me—in an infuriatingly starry-eyed way, in his case, demonstrating his continuing total lack of judgment and sense.

When I was satisfied that everyone had stopped, I let my control over our alarmingly malleable surroundings slide slowly out of my hands, hills and valleys lurching themselves back into place, trees unfolding up from the ground in an unnatural fashion as they crept back into the illusion. Untangling from the spell took me nearly fifteen minutes, but absolutely no one did anything to interrupt or distract me; a few kids even went to the gym doors to stop anyone else coming in. I was shaking when I’d finished, nauseated. I’d have liked to go lie down in a dark room for a significant amount of time, but I gulped air and grated out, “What I want is to get you out. To get all of us out. Do you think you could pull your heads out of your collective arses and help?”