Chapter 2: Cushions

That only got more clearto me over the next few weeks. I’m not an enclave girl. Unlike Orion, I don’t have a virtually limitless supply of mana to pull on for noble heroics. The exact opposite, because I’d just blown nearly half the mana stash I’d accumulated over the course of three years. For more than sufficient cause, since I used it to take out a maw-mouth, and if I never have to think about that experience again it’ll be soon enough, but it doesn’t matter how good my reasons were. What matters is I’d had a carefully planned timetable for building mana over my Scholomance career, and it was thoroughly wrecked.

My hopes of graduating would have been in equal shambles, except for that spellbook I’d found. The Golden Stone phase-changing spell is so valuable outside that Aadhya had been able to run an auction among last year’s seniors that had netted me a heap of mana, and even a pair of lightly used trainers on top of it. She was planning to do another one among the kids in our year soon. With luck I would end up short seven crystals instead of nineteen. That was still a painful deficit to be making up, and I needed another thirty at graduation on top of it, at least.

That’s what I’d planned to use my glorious free Wednesday afternoons for. Ha very ha. The baby vipersac turned out to be only the first of a series of maleficaria that all seemed irresistibly drawn to this specific library classroom. There were mals waiting to leap when we walked in the door. There were mals hiding in shadows that pounced while we were distracted. There were mals that came in through the vents halfway through class. There were mals inside the roll-top desk. There were mals waiting when we walked out the door. I could have avoided learning Chinese with absolutely no problem, just by not doing a thing. The entire pack of freshmen would have been gone before the second week of the term.

The writing was on the wall by the end of our first Wednesday session, in letters of dripping blood, literally: I’d just smeared a willanirga across the entire perimeter of the room, stomach sac and intestines and all. As we all headed to dinner in more-or-less bespattered condition, I swallowed my own irritation and told Sudarat—the enclave girl—that if she wanted more rescuing, she’d need to share some of her mana supply.

Her face went all red and blotchy, and she said, haltingly, “I don’t—I’m not,” and then she burst into tears and ran on ahead, and Zheng said, “You haven’t heard about Bangkok.”

“What haven’t I heard about Bangkok?”

“It’s gone,” he said. “Something took out the enclave, just a few weeks before induction day.”

I stared at him. The point of enclaves is they don’t get taken out. “How? By what?”

He made a big arms-spread shrug.

“Have you all heard about Bangkok?” I demanded at dinner, wondering how I’d missed a piece of news that big, but actually I was ahead of the curve: Liu was the only one at the table who nodded, and she said, “I just heard in history.”

“Heard what?” Aadhya wanted to know.

“Bangkok’s gone,” I said. “The enclave’s been destroyed.”

“What?” Chloe said, jerking so hard she slopped her orange juice all over her tray. She’d asked to eat with us—and nicely, not like she was doing us a favor gracing us with her presence—so I’d gritted my teeth and said yes. “That’s got to be fake.”

Liu shook her head. “A girl from Shanghai in our class confirmed it. Her parents told her little sister to tell her about it.”

Chloe stared at us, still frozen with her glass midair. You couldn’t blame her for being more than a bit freaked out. Enclaves don’t just go popping off for no reason, so if an enclave had just been hit hard enough that it was taken out, it was a sign that some kind of enclave war was on the way, and New York was the prime candidate for being in the middle of it somehow, but after the third time in five minutes she asked for more of the details that neither Liu or I had, I finally said, “Rasmussen, we don’t know. You’re the one who can find out; your enclave’s freshmen must know more about it by now.”

She did actually say, “Watch my tray?” and then got up and went across the room to the table where the freshmen from the New York enclave were sitting. She didn’t come back with much: not even that many of the freshmen had heard about it yet. The Bangkok kids weren’t making any effort to spread the news, and Sudarat was literally the only freshman from the place who’d survived to be inducted. Everyone else in her year had gone down with the ship. Which alarmed all the enclavers even more. Even when enclaves are damaged badly enough to make them collapse, there’s usually enough warning and time for the non-combatants to escape.

By the end of dinner, it became clear that nobody knew what had happened. We barely know anything in here to start with, since all our news about the real world comes in once a year via terrified fourteen-year-olds. But an enclave going down is big news, and not even the Shanghai kids had any details. Shanghai helped start Bangkok—they’ve been sponsoring new Asian enclaves these last thirty years, not incidentally while making increasingly pointed noises about the disproportionate number of Scholomance seats allocated to the US and Europe. If someone had taken out Bangkok as a first shot in coming at Shanghai, their freshmen would’ve come in with clear instructions to close ranks round the Bangkok kids.

On the other hand, if Bangkok had carelessly blown themselves to bits, which happens occasionally when an enclave gets a bit too ambitious in developing new magical weaponry without telling anyone, the Shanghai kids would’ve been given instructions to ditch the Bangkok kids entirely. Instead, they’d just gone—cautious. Meaning even their parents didn’t have any better idea than the rest of us did, and if the Shanghai enclavers didn’t know, nobody knew.

Well, except for whoever had done it. Which was its own source of complication, because if anyone were going to be orchestrating an indirect attack on Shanghai, the top candidate was New York. It was hard to imagine any other enclave in the world doing it without at least their tacit support. But if New York had secretly arranged anything as massive as taking out an entire enclave, they certainly wouldn’t have told their freshmen a thing about it, which meant that not even the New York kids knew whether or not their enclave had been involved, but they—and the Shanghai kids—all knew that if it had been anything other than an accident, their parents were very likely at war outside right now. And we’d have absolutely no way of knowing one way or another for a year.

It wasn’t a situation you’d call conducive to fellow-feeling among the enclavers. Personally, I didn’t mind not knowing. I wasn’t going to be joining an enclave myself. I’d made that decision last year—resentfully—and I wasn’t going to be getting involved, if there was a war. Even if it was just some hideous maleficer going around taking out enclaves, it wasn’t anything to me, except possibly my future competition, according to the unpleasant prophecy that would have made my life loads easier if it would just hurry up and come true.

What I did mind was that Sudarat couldn’t help out with what was clearly about to be my fifth seminar, in freshman rescue. Their enclave’s mana store had been fairly new and small to begin with, and now the Bangkok seniors had taken full control and were desperately trading on it to other enclavers to try and get themselves graduation alliances. They weren’t even sharing with the juniors and sophomores. All of them had just become ordinary losers like the rest of us, scrabbling for allies and resources and survival. Their one big bargaining chip for alliance-building had been the chance of a spot in their fast-growing enclave, which they didn’t have anymore, and they were operating under an aura of creepy uncertainty because no one knew what had happened. The other freshmen hadn’t been avoiding Sudarat because they hadn’t known she was from Bangkok; they’d been avoiding her because they had. She hadn’t even been given a share of the gear that last year’s seniors had left behind. That bag she’d brought in was all the resources she had.

I suppose I should’ve felt sorry for her, but I’d rather be sorry for someone who never had luck at all than for someone whose extreme luck ran out unexpectedly. Mum would tell me I could be sorry for both of them, to which I’d say she could be sorry for both of them, but I had a more limited supply of sympathy and had to ration it. Anyway, I’d already saved Sudarat’s life twice before the second week of classes, despite my lack of sympathy, so she hadn’t any right to complain.

And neither did I, since I was apparently determined to keep doing it.

Aadhya and Liu and I had made plans to take showers together that night. As we headed downstairs, I said to Liu bitterly, “Have you got any time after? I need to get down some basic phrases in Chinese.” You might expect that to mean things like where’s the loo and good morning, but in here, the first things you learn in any language are get down and behind you and run. Which I was going to need to stop the freshmen getting in the way of my saving them. Entirely at my own expense.

Liu bent her head and said softly, “I was going to ask you to help me.” She reached into her school satchel and pulled up her clear plastic pencil bag to show me a pair of scissors inside: a left-handed pair with the remnants of ragged patches of green vinyl still clinging on stickily around the finger holes, one blade notched and the other a bit rusty. Promising signs: they were bad enough that they almost certainly weren’t cursed or animated. She’d been asking round for someone who had a pair to loan for the last couple of weeks.

Her hair was down to below her waist, a glossy midnight black except at the very roots where it was coming in a color that anyone would also have called black, except by contrast to the slightly eerie darker shade of the long mass. Years and years of growing it out, and three of those years had been in here, having to negotiate terms and conditions for every shower we got. But I didn’t ask are you sure. I knew she was, even if only on a purely practical note. Aadhya was going to use it to string the sirenspider lute that she was making for our graduation run, and anyway, she’d only been able to get away with growing her hair that long because she’d been using malia.

But then she’d had an unexpected and very thorough spirit cleanse, and she’d decided she wasn’t going back down the obsidian brick road. So now she had to pay back three years of unreasonably good hair days all at once. We’d been taking it in turn each evening to help her comb out the truly horrific snarls that developed every day no matter how carefully she braided it.

After we were done in the showers, the three of us went back to Aadhya’s room. She sharpened the scissors with her tools, then got the box she’d prepared for the hair. I started the cutting carefully, just taking off a bare centimeter from one very skinny lock of hair held as far from Liu’s head as I could—you always want to start slow when it comes to an unfamiliar pair of scissors. Nothing terrible happened, and slowly I worked halfway up the strand, and then I took a deep breath and went in fast and cut, right at the visible demarcation line between the old hair and the new, and handed the one long section to Aadhya.

“You okay?” I said to Liu. I was making sure the scissors were all right, but I also wanted to give her an excuse to take a minute: I did expect it to be a wrench for her, even if she wouldn’t start blubbing or anything.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, but she was blinking, and by the time I’d taken off half the hair, she was blubbing, in a really quiet way, tears slipping away, and a fat one rolled off her cheek and splatted on her knee.

Aadhya threw me a worried look, then said, “I can definitely manage with this much, if you wanted to stop.” Liu wouldn’t even have looked bad: her hair was so thick I’d had to cut it in layers anyway, with the crap scissors, so I’d started from underneath. You never know when a pair of scissors might suddenly go unusable, and if she was walking round with the top of her head trimmed close and a long weird mullet of hair dangling behind, anyone she asked for a pair of scissors would charge her the earth in trade.

“No,” Liu said, her voice quavery but also absolutely insistent. She was the quiet one of the three of us, usually—Aad could get plenty of heat going when she was annoyed, and if there’s ever an Olympics of rage, I’ll be odds-on favorite to take gold. But Liu was always so contained, so measured and thoughtful, and it was a surprise to hear her even that close to snapping.

Even to her; she paused and swallowed, but whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t going back in the box. “I want it off,” she said, with a sharp edge.

“Right,” I said, and went at it faster, shingling every strand as close to her head as I dared. The glossy strands were trying to tangle round my fingers even as I chopped them off and handed them off to Aadhya.

And then it was done, and Liu put her hands up to touch her head, trembling a little. There was barely anything left, only an uneven fuzz. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over it back and forth like she was making sure it was all gone. She took a few deep watery breaths and then said, “I haven’t cut it since I came in. Ma told me not to.”

“Why?” Aadhya asked.

“It was…” Liu’s throat worked. “She said, in here, it would tell people I was someone to watch out for.” And it had worked, because you can’t afford to have long hair unless you’re a really rich and also careless enclaver—or unless you’re on the maleficer track.

Aadhya silently went and dug a leftover half of a granola bar out of a small warded stash box on her desk. Liu tried to refuse it, but Aad said, “Oh my God, eat the freaking granola bar,” and then Liu’s face crumpled and she got up and put her arms out towards us. It took me a few moments longer than Aadhya—three years of near-total social ostracization leaves you badly equipped for this sort of thing—but they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn’t quite believe in: I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.

But it hadn’t. I was still in the Scholomance, and all the miracles in here come with price tags.

---

I’d only accepted my horrific schedule for the chance of building mana on those glorious Wednesday afternoons off. Since I’d been wrong about how wonderful my Wednesday work sessions would be, you might think I’d also been wrong about how terrible my four seminars were. And then you’d be wrong.

Not one of the Myrddin seminar, the Proto-Indo-European seminar, or the Algebra seminar had more than five students in it. All of them took place deep in the warren of seminar rooms that we call the labyrinth, because it’s roughly as hard to get through as the classical version. The corridors like to squirm around and stretch a bit now and then. But even those paled in awful next to Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, which turned out to be an independent study.

I really could have used a dedicated hour a day of quiet time to work on Sanskrit. The spellbook I’d managed to get my hands on last term was a priceless copy of the long-lost Golden Stone sutras; the library had let it come in range in an effort to keep me from taking out that maw-mouth. I still slept with it under my pillow. I’d just barely managed to fight my way through twelve pages to the first of the major invocations, and it was already the single most useful spellbook I’d ever so much as glimpsed in my life.

But what I got instead was a dedicated hour a day, alone in a tiny room on the outer perimeter of the very first floor, squeezed in around the edge of the big workshop. To even get there, I had to go almost as far as you could possibly go into the labyrinth, open an unmarked windowless door, then walk down a long, narrow, completely unlit corridor that felt like it was anywhere from one to twelve meters depending on its mood that day.

Inside the room, the one large air vent at the top of the wall shared an air shaft with the workshop furnaces. It alternated between whooshing blasts of superheated exhaust air and a steady, whistling stream of ice-cold cooling air. The only desk in the room was another ancient chair-desk, the whole iron contraption bolted to the floor. Its back was to the grating. I would have sat on the floor, but there were two large drainage channels running across the whole room, coming from the workshop and going to a big trough along the full length of the back wall, and ominous stains around them suggested that they overflowed routinely. A row of taps were stuck in the wall overhanging the trough as well. They dripped constantly in a faint pinging symphony, no matter how much I tried to tighten them. Every once in a while, horrible gurgling noises came out of the pipes, and weird grinding sounds happened under the floor. The door to the room itself didn’t lock, but did slide open or shut at unpredictable moments with an incredibly loud bang.

If that sounds to you like an absolutely magnificent setup for an ambush, well, a significant number of mals agreed. I got jumped twice in the first week of classes.

By the end of the third week of term, I actually had to dip into my mana stash instead of adding to it. That night I sat on my bed staring at the chest of crystals Mum sent in with me. Aadhya had done another auction, and now I had a grand total of seventeen of them glowing and full of mana. But all the rest sat there empty, and the ones I’d emptied taking out the maw-mouth were starting to go completely dull. If I didn’t start reviving them soon, they’d become as useless for storing mana as the kind you buy in bulk online. But I couldn’t find the time. I was building mana as hard as I possibly could and cutting every corner possible on my schoolwork, but I was still stuck on the very same crystal I’d been trying to fill back up since last term. That morning I’d been attacked in my seminar yet again, and I’d had to empty it completely.

I had gone back to doing sit-ups sooner than any doctor would’ve told me to, just because the struggle to do them with my aching gut actually made it easier to build mana. But I was pretty much healed up now, and I couldn’t even rely on crochet anymore for real mana-building. I just didn’t hate it as much when I was doing it at night hanging out with Aadhya and Liu. My friends; my allies. Who were relying on me to help me get them out the doors.

I closed up the box and put it away, and then I went out. It was still an hour to curfew, but already quiet: no one hangs out in the corridors senior year. Either they were up in the prime spots in the library, or taking the chance to go to bed early in the last week or so before the mals were expected to come back full-force. I went down to Aadhya’s room and tapped on the door, and when she opened it I said, “Hey, can we go to Liu’s?”

“Sure,” she said, eyeing me, but she didn’t push for details: Aadhya isn’t a time-waster. She collected her bathroom stuff, so we could go brush teeth right after, and then together we went to Liu’s room. She was down on our level, now.

Everyone gets a private room in here, so to squash in each year’s delivery of freshmen, the rooms are arranged cellblock-style, stacked on top of one another with a narrow iron walkway outside the upper rooms. But at the end of term, as the res halls rotate down to their new levels, any empty rooms disappear and the space gets parceled out to the survivors. Often not in useful ways. I’ve had a delightfully creepy and useless double-height room since the start of sophomore year. Liu’s had extended down in this last round, so we didn’t have to climb up one of the squeaking spiral staircases to see her anymore.

She let us in and gave each of us our familiars-in-training to hold while we sat on her bed. I stroked the tiny mouse’s white fur while she sat up in the palm of my hand nibbling a treat and looking around with bright and increasingly green eyes. I was still trying hard to name her Chandra, but the day I’d been thinking of names, Aadhya had said, “You should call her Precious,” then laughed her head off while I whacked her with a pillow, and Precious was unfortunately sticking. Mum’s never actually come out and apologized for saddling me with Galadriel, but I’m reasonably sure she knows she should be ashamed of herself. Anyway they kept forgetting Chandra and calling her Precious—all right, to be fair, I kept forgetting it myself—and pretty soon I was going to have to give up and accept it.

Assuming I was going to have her at all. I stared down at her in my hand because it was better than looking at their faces, and I said, “I’m falling really behind on mana.”

I had to tell them. They were counting on me to be able to pull my weight when it came time for graduation. If I wasn’t going to be able to, they had the right to back out. They didn’t owe anything to a bunch of freshmen they hadn’t even met. Liu might have felt she owed me something for Zheng, but I could be saving just Zheng without laying out a week’s worth of mana I didn’t actually have saved up, and meanwhile she was breaking her back building mana for our team herself.

At this rate, I was going to be lucky if I had enough mana for maybe three medium-power spells, and I didn’t even have any good medium-power spells. The only really useful spell I’ve got that doesn’t need absolute heaps of mana is the phase-control spell I got out of Purochana’s book, and it’s not a great crisis option, since it’s a good five minutes to prep the casting. I’ve used it in a crisis, but only when I had Orion thoroughly distracting the underlying cause for those five minutes, and he’s going to be a bit busy come graduation killing monsters for everyone.

“Zheng told me about Wednesdays,” Liu said quietly, and I looked up. She didn’t look surprised; actually she looked kind of worried.

“This is your weirdo library session? What’s going on?” Aadhya said, and Liu said, “It’s her and eight freshmen, and they keep getting hit with major mals.”

“In the library?” Aadhya said, and then she said, “Wait, this is on top of that horrible independent study and the three other seminars? Does the school have it in for you or something?”

We all fell silent. The question answered itself in the asking, really. My throat felt knotted up right around the tonsils, awful and choking. I hadn’t even thought about it that way before, but it was obviously true. And that was worse, so much worse, than just being unlucky.

The Scholomance has been hurting for power almost as much as I have. It’s not cheap to keep this place working. It’s easy to forget from our perspective when we’re suffering through this place and getting hit with mals on a regular basis, but they’d be coming at every last one of us in a continuous stream, and lots more of them, if it weren’t for all those incredibly powerful wards on every single air vent and plumbing pipe, and all the highly improbable artifice that makes sure there are almost none of those openings in the first place, and despite that we’re all breathing and drinking and bathing and eating, and all of that takes mana, mana, mana.

Sure, the story is, the enclaves put in some mana, and our parents all put in some mana if they can afford it, and we put in mana with our work, but we all know that’s a story. The single biggest source of the school’s mana is us. We’re all trying to save mana for graduation; everyone’s working on it all the time. The mana we grudgingly put into our schoolwork and our maintenance shifts is nothing compared with the amounts we put away for that rainiest of rainy days. And when the mals tear us apart, of course we grab for all that nice juicy power we’ve desperately been saving up, and they suck it out of us, only built up more by all our terror and final agony and struggles to live. The Scholomance gets the spillover, and then thanks to all those wards, it kills off a good healthy number of the mals, too, and it all ends up in the school’s mana stores—where it goes to keep the rest of us luckier ones alive.

So when an enthusiastic hero—read, Orion—shows up and starts saving lives, and the mals start to starve, the school starts to starve, too. And at the same time, has more of us alive in here, breathing and drinking et cetera. It’s all a pyramid scheme, and if there aren’t enough of us on the bottom being eaten, there’s not enough for the ones at the top.

That’s why we had to go down and fix the cleansing mechanisms in the graduation hall: all those starving mals down there, waiting in the one place Orion wasn’t, getting ready to tear the entire graduating class apart because they hadn’t had enough to eat for the last three years. They were on the verge of breaking into the rest of the school because they were all so desperate that they started collectively pounding on the wards at the bottom of the stairwells.

And Orion—well, Orion’s from the New York enclave, with a power-sharer on his wrist, and his affinity for combat somehow lets him suck power out of the mals he kills anyway. They don’t even come after him, because he has a bottomless supply of mana and an almost equally infinite supply of fantastic combat spells.

But I don’t. I’m the girl destined to make up for him, but who’s obstinately kept refusing to become a maleficer and start killing kids by the double handful, and now I’ve gone the other way entirely. I stopped a maw-mouth heading for the freshman hall. I helped Orion keep the mals from breaking into the school. I was down there in the graduation hall with him, helping to hold up a shield so the senior artificers could fix the cleansing equipment. And now I’m even copycatting his stupid noble-hero routine one day a week.

Of course the school was going to come after me.

And if the Wednesday mals didn’t work—it would try something else. And something else after that. The Scholomance isn’t exactly a living thing, but it isn’t exactly not, either. You can’t put this much mana and this much thinking into a place without it starting to develop a mind of its own. And theoretically it’s been built to protect us, so it won’t just start snacking on kids on its own—not to mention enrollment would drop substantially when that began happening—but of course it still wants enough mana to keep going; it’s meant to keep going. And I’ve put myself in the way, so the school is coming after me, and that means anyone round me is going to be in for it.

“The kids have got to start making mana for you,” Aadhya said.

“They’re just freshmen,” I said, dully. “All eight of them together make less mana in an hour than I can build in ten minutes.”

“They could reset your dead crystals, though,” Liu said. “You said you don’t need a lot of mana to wake those up, just a steady stream. They could each carry one around.”

Liu wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t actually going to solve the real problem. “I won’t need the dead crystals. I’m not going to have enough mana to fill my other empties, at this rate.”

“Then we can trade them,” Aadhya said. “They’re loads better than most storage. Or you know, I could try building them into the lute—”

“Do you want out?” I said, breaking in, harshly, because I really couldn’t handle sitting there while they worked through all the options I’d spent the last three weeks clawing through, trying to find a way out myself, until I’d realized there wasn’t going to be one for me. There was only the one for them.

Aadhya stopped talking. But Liu didn’t even pause; she just said, “No.”

I swallowed hard. “I don’t think you’ve thought—”

“No,” Liu said, strangely hard, and after a pause, she went on more quietly, “I used to take Zheng and Min around all day on a leading string when they were little. At school, if one of the other boys was hurting something like a frog or a stray kitten, they would stop it and bring the animal to me, even though they got teased for ‘being girls’ because of it.” She looked down at Xiao Xing in her hands, stroking her thumb over his head. “No,” she repeated, softly. “I don’t want out.”

I looked at Aadhya, my feelings in a confused knotted mess: I didn’t know what I wanted her to say. My practical friend, whose mum had told her it was a good idea to be decent to losers, and so had been decent to me, all the years while everyone else treated me like a piece of used kitchen roll no one wanted to pick up even long enough to put in the bin. I’d liked her because she was practical, and hard-nosed: she’d always driven a solid hard bargain, the kind you could believe in, without ever cheating me, even though she’d more often than not been the only person who would have traded with me. She hadn’t any reason to care about the freshmen in the library, and she had choices: she was one of the best practical artificers in our year, with a magical lute in the finishing stages that was going to be worth something outside, and not just among students. Any enclaver would’ve gladly snatched her up for a graduation alliance. That was the smart thing, the practical thing to do, and I almost wanted her to do it. She’d already taken half a dozen chances on me that anyone else would have called a bad bet. I didn’t want her to drop me, but—I couldn’t be the reason she didn’t make it out.

But she only said, “Yeah, no,” almost dismissively. “I’m not a ditcher. We just need to figure out a way to get you some more mana. Or better yet, get the school off your back. I don’t get why the Scholomance is pulling this whole complicated stunt on you. You’re not an enclaver, it’s not like you were going to have tons of mana anyway, so why is it so into making you spend the little you’ve got?”

“Unless,” Liu said, and then stopped. We looked over at her; her lips were pressed together, and she was staring at her hands in her lap, twisted up. “Unless it’s about—pushing you. The school—”

“Likes maleficers,” Aadhya finished for her.

Liu nodded a little without looking up. And she was absolutely right. That was surely why the Scholomance had given me that Wednesday session. It was trying to give me—an easier choice to make. The school wanted me to have to make the first selfish choice, to save my own mana, instead of saving a random freshman I didn’t care about. Because then it would be easier for me to make the second selfish choice after that, and the one after that.

“Yeah,” Aadhya agreed. “The school wants you to go maleficer. What could you do if you decided to start using malia?”

If you had me make a list of the top ten questions I go to great lengths to avoid asking myself, that one would have comprehensively covered items one through nine, and the only reason it wasn’t doing for item ten as well was that So how do you feel about Orion Lake had quietly crept onto the bottom of it. But it’s a long way down from the rest. “You don’t want to know,” I said, by which I meant I don’t want to know.

Aadhya didn’t even slow down. “Well, you’d have to get the malia somehow—” she was saying thoughtfully.

“That wouldn’t be a problem,” I said through my teeth. She wasn’t wrong to raise the question, since that’s the top roadblock facing most would-be maleficers, and the solutions generally involve spending a lot of time on intimate encounters with entrails and screaming. But my own main concern is how to avoid accidentally sucking the life force out of everyone around me if I ever get taken by surprise and instinctively fire off something really gargantuan. For instance, I’ve got this great spell for razing an entire city to the ground, which will certainly come in handy if I ever turn into one of those people who write furious letters to the editor about the architecture of Cardiff, and I suppose it would do to wipe out any mals on the same floor as me. Along with all the other people on the same floor as me, but they’d probably be dead by then, since I’d have drained their mana to cast the spell.

That did finally stop her; she and Liu both eyed me a little dubiously. “Well, that wasn’t creepy and ominous at all,” Aadhya said after a moment. “Okay, I vote for you not turning maleficer.”

Liu put up an emphatic hand to agree. I let a choked snort of laughter come out and put up my hand. “I vote no, too!”

“I’m even going to go out on a limb here and say that pretty much everyone else in the school will be right there with us,” Aadhya said. “We could ask people to chip in for you.”

I stared at her. “Hey, everybody, it turns out El is some kind of mana-sucking vampire queen, we should all give her some mana so she doesn’t drain us dry.”

Aadhya scrunched up her mouth. “Hmm.”

“We don’t need to ask everyone to chip in for you,” Liu said slowly. “We could just ask one person—if it’s Chloe.”

I hunched my shoulders forward and didn’t say anything. That wasn’t a terrible idea. It might even work. That was why I didn’t like it. It had been almost a month since we’d gone down to the graduation hall, and I still remembered what it had been like with a New York power-sharer on my wrist, all that mana right in front of me like getting to plunge my head into a bottomless well and drink cold water in careless gulps. I didn’t trust how much I’d liked it. How easy it had been to get used to it.

“You think she’ll say no?” Liu said, and I looked up: she was studying me.

“That’s not…” I trailed off and then blew out a sigh. “She offered me a spot.”

“In an alliance?” Aadhya said.

“In New York,” I said, which only means one thing in here: an enclave spot, a guaranteed enclave spot. For most people, if you’re lucky enough to get picked by an enclaver to join their alliance, it means their enclave will look at you, maybe give you a job. Usually four hundred kids graduate each year. Maybe forty enclave spots open up worldwide, and more than half of them will go to top adult wizards who’ve earned them with decades of work. A guarantee of one of those spots, fresh out of school, is a prize even if you weren’t talking about the single most powerful enclave in the world. Aadhya and Liu were both gawking at me. “They’re freaked out over Orion.”

“After you’ve only been dating two months?” Liu said.

“We’re not dating!”

Aadhya made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes heavenwards. “After you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing that is not dating but totally looks like dating to everyone else, for only two months.”

“Thanks ever so,” I said, dryly. “As far as I can tell, they’re shocked that he’s talking to another human being at all.”

“To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said.

I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.”

“Catch up already, girl,” she said, unrepentantly.

---

It’s not that I’d rather have had Aadhya and Liu ditch me to face the rest of my school career alone and desperate instead of asking Chloe Rasmussen for help, but I had definitely managed not to see asking her as an option. I wasn’t actually sure what she’d say. I’d turned down her offer of a guaranteed place in New York, after all. I was still sullen about having to do it. I’d spent the better part of my life carefully planning out my campaign for an enclave spot. It had been a really comforting plan that ended in the fantasy of me having a nice happy long life in a safe and luxurious enclave with endless mana at my fingertips like all the other enclave kids, and by making sure the campaign was long and involved and never quite completed successfully, I’d neatly avoided having to think about how I didn’t really want to be an enclaver at all.

Even Chloe—she’s a decent sort, and better than that if I’m being fair. When the enclave kids started courting me last term—because of Orion—they all behaved as though they were doing me a generous favor by so much as talking to me. All it got them was my violent and unstrategic rudeness in their faces, so they stopped talking to me at all. But Chloe stuck it out. She’s already asked to sit with us ten times this year, and she hasn’t brought any tagalongs with her. I don’t know that I’d have bent my neck the way she did, apologizing to me and even asking to be friends after I bit her head off. I’m not sorry for doing the biting, I had more than enough cause, but I still don’t know that I’d have had the grace.

Oh, who am I lying to? My supply of grace wouldn’t overflow an acorn cap.

But Chloe’s still an enclaver. And not like Orion. All the New York kids have a power-sharer on their wrists that lets them exchange mana and pull from their shared storage, but Orion’s is one-way, going in. Because otherwise, he’ll just pull as much mana as he needs to kill the nearest mal and save other kids. It’s so much of an instinct for him that he can’t actually stop himself. So the son of the future Domina of New York doesn’t get access to the shared mana pool, although he sure gets to contribute, not to mention come running if any of them get into danger.

Chloe’s one of the kids who gets the benefit of all that power he puts in. She doesn’t need to budget her spells. She throws up a shield anytime she feels anxious. If a mal jumps her, maybe she has to keep her head and figure out what spell to use on it, but she doesn’t have to worry that she can’t afford to cast it. When she came in as a freshman, on top of bringing in a bag of the most useful magical items that wizardry can devise, she inherited a massive chest crammed full by more than a century’s worth of other kids from New York, each of them bringing in a new set of useful items and making others in here—items they can afford to leave behind, because when they get out, they’re going home to one of the richest enclaves in the world. And they do get out, because they’re the worst targets in the room when we get dumped into the graduation hall, and there’s lots of tasty losers available to be the cannon fodder.

I can’t forget that whenever I’m with her. Or more honestly, I do forget it after a bit, and I don’t want to. I find myself wishing she’d just gone on being awful, so I could go on being awful back. It feels unfair for her to get to have real friends, the kind of friends who don’t care about how rich you are and how much mana you have, and also have all the mana and the money and the eager hovering sycophants on top of it. But whenever I really get into that mean sour squirrely thought, I immediately get the sensation of Mum looking at me with all this love and sympathy, and I feel like an earthworm. So hanging about with Chloe is a constant roller coaster from guarded to relaxed to resentful to earthworm and back again.

And now I had to ask her to let me in on the mana pool, because if I didn’t, I’d be laying out Aadhya and Liu and all the freshmen in the library, and possibly everyone else in the school if I ever do screw up one fine morning when a rhysolite tries to dissolve my bones or a magma slug squirms up the furnace vent and launches itself at my head. I’d have even less excuse for being resentful of her than I’ve already got. I half wanted her to say no.

“Wait—do you mean you’ll take the spot?” she said instead, sounding hopeful about it, as if I was meant to think that it was on perpetual offer, and I could claim myself a place in New York anytime I liked.

“No,” I said, warily. I’d come to her room—I didn’t want eavesdroppers for this conversation—and the whole place made me feel twitchy. She had one of the rooms above the bathrooms, where the opening to the void is overhead instead of out one wall. On the bright side, you never need to worry about falling out. On the downside, you’ve got an endless void over your head. She’d dealt with that by putting up a canopy of opaque cloth with just one spot open over the desk. Anything at all could have been hiding above it or in the folds.

She’d also kept all the standard-issue wooden furniture that I’d almost immediately replaced with thin wall-mounted shelves that didn’t provide loads of dark corners. She even had two half-empty bookcases: her room had just gone double-width in the last reshuffle, which I could tell because she had a bright cheerful mural painted over the wall alongside the bed and was still working on continuing it onto the new space. It wasn’t an ordinary painting, either; I could feel mana coming off it. She’d probably imbued the paint with protective spells in alchemy lab. Even so, I kept my back to the door and didn’t come far into the room. She was snuggled in doing some reading on one of three luxuriously plush beanbag chairs amid a pile of other cushions, and I didn’t trust a single one of them. My hands were itching to pull her up out of the heap before it suddenly swallowed her whole or something. “I’m just asking to borrow mana. I’m running out.”

“Really?” she said dubiously, like that was an extraordinary thing to imagine. “Are you feeling okay?”

“It’s not mana drain or a pipesucker,” I said shortly. “I’m using it. I’ve got three seminars, a double independent study, and once a week I’m stuck with eight freshmen in a room and things try to eat them.”

Chloe’s eyes were all but popping before I’d finished. “Oh my God, are you nuts? A double independent study? Are you making a last-ditch run for valedictorian? Why would you even do that to yourself?”

“The school’s doing it to me,” I said, which she didn’t want to believe was possible, so I spent the next ten minutes standing there with metaphorical cap in hand while she earnestly informed me that the fundamental intent of the Scholomance was the shelter and protection of wizard children, and the school couldn’t act contrary to that intent, as if it didn’t toss half of us to the wolves on a regular basis, and also that the school couldn’t violate its standard procedures, which it also did on a regular basis, and after she had laid out those lines of argument, she finally wound up triumphantly at, “And why on earth would it be out to get you?”

I really didn’t want to answer that question, and I was already sick of hearing her trot out the enclave party line. “Just forget I asked,” I said, and turned to go; she was going to turn me down anyway.

“What? No, El, wait, that’s not—” she said, and even scrambled up out of the heap to come after me. “Seriously, wait, I’m not saying no! I’m just—” and I gritted my teeth and turned round to tell her that if she wasn’t saying no, she could get on with saying yes, or else stop wasting my time, except instead what I did was grab her arm and yank her sideways onto the bed with me as the cushions did have a go at swallowing her whole, and me along with her. Her own beanbag chair had split open along one seam to let out a gigantic slick greyish tongue that swiped across the floor towards us. It moved horribly fast, like a slug on a mission, and after we got out of the way, it kept going and swiped over the doorway, leaving every inch of the metal coated and glistening with some kind of thick gelatinous slime that I was confident we didn’t want to touch.

I always keep my one decent knife on me; I already had it out and was slicing fast through all the canopy ties along the wall over the bed, so I could yank it down to envelop the slug-tongue. That bought us a moment, but not a very long one, since the fabric almost immediately started to hiss and smoke: yes, the slime was bad. I didn’t recognize this particular variety of mal, but it was the kind that’s smart enough to play a very long game, waiting until it can take a victim without sparking suspicion. The dangerous kind. A glistening tip was already wriggling out through the first dissolving hole in the canopy, but Chloe had got past her own instinctive shriek and was grabbing a pot of paint from the rack at the foot of the bed; she threw the paint over it. A gargling noise of angry protest came from under the disintegrating canopy, and it rose to a higher pitch when she threw on another pot: red and yellow streaming together over the silky fabric, staining through and running off in rivulets, coating the thrashing tongue.

The mal pulled the tongue back in through the hole and back under the canopy, making a lot of ugly squishing and gurgling noises underneath that unfortunately sounded less like death throes than a mild attack of indigestion. “Come on, quick,” Chloe said, grabbing another pot of paint and jerking her head towards the door, but halfway there, we ran out of time; there was a large gulping noise and the whole canopy, paint and all, was sucked into the slit of the beanbag chair with a slurp of tongue, and then the whole pile of beanbags and cushions heaved itself up together and came at us in a humping rush.

There was no chance Chloe had been stupid enough to inherit that entire pile and never even move the pillows apart over the course of the past three-odd years, so that meant it was the kind of maleficaria that can animate wizard possessions, and it was also the kind of maleficaria that had a corporeal flesh-digesting body of its own—each of which is a significant branching on everyone’s favorite cladogram from Maleficaria Studies, meaning it was actually two separate mals that had formed some kind of wonderful symbiotic relationship. Trying to take out two mals at once when you don’t know what either of them are isn’t what you’d call easy. The only way to do it, at speed, was something grandiose—the kind of thing that would eat a heap of the mana I had left, and if I blew it all on Chloe and she didn’t pay me back, I’d be saving her, choosing her, over everyone else who needed me.

Or I could just have—waited. Chloe had thrown the paint over the slime to neutralize it, and she was already sliding the door open. The cushion-monster was lumping straight towards her back: it would get her before she got ten steps onto the walkway. If I held back until it caught her, I’d be able to make it out the other way and get clear. She wasn’t even looking to see if I was behind her. She hadn’t looked back when we’d been in the stairwell, either, fighting together to try and keep the argonet from getting into the school. She’d taken off to save her own skin. Aadhya and Liu had stayed with me, but she’d abandoned us. And she’d just spent ten minutes telling me at length that I was making up reasons why I needed mana, which is to say reasons why she shouldn’t feel bad about saying no to me.

“Get out of the way!” I said through my teeth, and pointed at the cushion beast. Chloe darted a look back that went wide when she saw the thing coming at her. She gave a terrific heave and shoved the door and flung herself out into the hall even as it slid open, where she collided bodily with Orion, who was already off-balance because he’d been holding on to the door handle from the other side. She took him down to the floor beneath her in a heap.

The spell I used was a really terrific higher-level working I’d just learned in my Myrddin class. It had taken me a solid week to plow through the antique Welsh manuscript—time enlivened by the many lavish illustrations of the way it had been used by a tidy-minded alchemist maleficer to flay the skin off hapless victims, neatly drain their blood, pop the organs into separate containers, and then the flesh into a desiccated heap, leaving behind the cleaned bones.

The incantation did a remarkable job of whipping off the outer layer of cushion covers and beanbag chair casings, sending them into a beautifully folded pile that might have come straight from a laundry. That step briefly exposed a glowing translucent sac full of tongue and undigested canopy and, gruesomely, a half-digested person. Thankfully the face was already unrecognizable, even before the sac shredded into a stack of inch-wide strips of some vellum-like material, and dumped the whole tongue out flopping onto the floor. The tongue proceeded to roll up into a very thin spongy mat, a huge puddle of viscous fluid squeezing out of it, which after a moment of alarming uncertainty and struggle finally separated into three different liquids: one ectoplasmic, one clear, and one sort of jelly-pinkish, which all leapt like graceful fountains into the emptied paint cans on the floor. The excess more or less reluctantly went down the drain in the middle of the room.

Orion was trying to fight his way back up, hampered because Chloe was frozen not halfway off him, staring open-mouthed at the elaborate dismemberment. To be fair to her, it was more of a show than I’m letting on. When I cast spells, there are usually copious side manifestations, generally designed to convey to anyone watching that they should probably be fleeing in terror or alternatively dropping to their knees and doing homage. The whole dismemberment happened in roughly the span of half a minute, and there was a lot of futile but violent thrashing involved, along with wailing disembodied shrieks and gusting flares of phosphorescence as the apparition bit went. After it was all over, everything was left neatly lined up in a row, exactly like the supply shop of an alchemist maleficer’s dreams. The remnants of the last victim had also separated themselves tidily into cleaned bones, flesh, and scraps of skin, in line with the bits of mal. The skull was sitting atop the pile of bones with thin trails of smoke coming out of the sockets. And as the finishing touch, the spongy roll that had been the tongue wrapped itself into a square of the fallen canopy, and another strip of canopy tore away and tied a little bow around it before it rolled into the line.

I’d jumped on a chair to get clear of the various gushing fluids, and the last wafting clouds of phosphorescent smoke were winding around me. My mana crystal was glowing with the power I’d had to pull, but I wasn’t casting a shadow, which meant I was probably glowing myself. “Oh my God?” Chloe said, a little faintly, sort of like a question, frozen in place.

“Hey, can you get off?” Orion said, sounding a bit squashed.