Chapter 3: Leskits

“Just so you know,I was going to say yes anyway,” Chloe said miserably, like she didn’t think I’d ever believe her, as she handed me the power-sharer. “Really, El.”

“I know you were,” I said grimly, taking it, but her expression didn’t change; probably my tone didn’t sound very encouraging. So I added, “If you were going to say no, it wouldn’t have jumped us,” a little pointedly, because she should have figured that much out by then. A mal smart enough to have been quietly lurking in her floor pillows—floor pillows she’d probably inherited from a previous New York enclaver—for years and years, conserving its energy and slurping up anyone other than her who was unlucky enough to be left alone in her room—which is the kind of thing enclavers do, invite friends over for a study group after dinner with the understanding that one of them is going to arrive first and make sure the room is all right—hadn’t just leapt at us because it suddenly lost all self-control. It had done it because Chloe was about to get on board with me, meaning that especially delicious me was about to become a much harder target.

Chloe frowned, but she’s not dim, and she’d just had her face shoved in it very firmly, so once she got over the hump of her basic programming, she worked through the implications fast enough that the associated emotions traveled over her face in quick succession. It meant I hadn’t been making everything up. The school really was out to get me, and the mals were, too; I really was as powerful as that implied—her eyes darted over to the still-standing array of grotesque ingredients as that hit—and anyone hanging round me was almost certainly asking to be in the line of fire.

When she got there, I said, “I have a bunch of storage crystals. I’ll just fill them up and then give this back to you.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment; she was still looking at the ingredients on the floor, and then she said, slowly, “You’re strict mana. Is that—because—” She didn’t go on, but that was because she didn’t have to. Like I said, she’s not dim. Then she looked at me and raised her chin a bit and said in a high voice, like she was declaring it to the world and not just me, “Keep it. You might need more.” I was already fighting down the violent urge to scowl at her like a monster of ingratitude when she added tentatively, “Would you—do Aadhya and Liu need them?”

Which made it a request to join our alliance.

I couldn’t even just blurt out a flat unthinking no, because I couldn’t give her an answer to that question without talking to Aadhya and Liu. That meant that I’d have too much time to recognize that the obvious and sensible and even fair answer was yes.

I didn’t want to be allied with Chloe Rasmussen. I didn’t want to be one of the lucky ones whose alliance gets scooped up with enormous condescension by some enclaver with mana and friends and a chestful of useful things to spare, which is of course the goal that most people are actively aiming for when they put together a team without an enclaver already in it. Even if that wasn’t what Chloe meant or what we meant, that’s what everyone would think it was. And after all, they’d be right; we’d get Chloe out, and Chloe’s mana would get us out, and we’d be leaving other people behind who didn’t stand a chance.

But she had a right to ask, when I was here asking for her help to start with, and she’d had the guts to ask, when instead she could just have got clear after paying me back for saving her from the attack that only happened because she’d been willing to help me in return for nothing at all. She was offering more than fair value, even if it wasn’t fair that she had it to offer, and if I still wanted to say no to her despite all of that, Aadhya and Liu had the right to tell me I was being a colossal twat.

“I’ll talk to them,” I muttered ungraciously, and as you would expect, the end result was that three days later I had to add Chloe’s name on the wall near the girls’ bathroom, where we had written up our alliances. Liu also put her name on the Chinese translation next to me, the power-sharer on her wrist gleaming and shiny, and then we all went to breakfast together and I had to hear at least twenty bazillion people congratulating us, where by “us” I mean me, Aadhya, and Liu, for having scored Chloe. We hadn’t got nearly as many congratulations when we’d written ourselves up near the end of last term, even though we’d been one of the first alliances to go on the wall.

To cap it off, Orion didn’t congratulate me exactly, but he said, “I’m glad you and Chloe have become friends,” in an alarmingly hopeful way that was very clearly only one unfortunate literature assignment away from turning into come live with me and be my love, optionally etched onto metal with little hearts around it.

“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, and escaped to the comparative safety of my independent study down in the bowels of the school, where the worst thing that was going to leap at me with devouring attention was a flesh-eating monster.

In a month of school, I’d so far translated a grand total of four additional pages out of the Golden Stone sutras. They contained a single three-line spell in Vedic Sanskrit whose purpose I couldn’t even guess at from the start. It had seven words I’d never seen before which all had multiple translation options. The rest of the four pages was a commentary in medieval Arabic explaining at length why it was just fine to use the Sanskrit spell even though it might seem haram because of the wine used in the casting process. The commentary mostly avoided anything useful like explaining what the spell did that was so great and how the alcohol was meant to be used. Except it didn’t completely avoid anything useful, so I had to dig through the whole frothing thing for the handful of nuggets.

That morning I finally figured out which of the ninety-seven possible meanings went together, and reached the conclusion that the spell was for tapping into a distant source of water and purifying it—something of extremely great interest to people living in a desert and much less so to someone living in an enchanted school equipped with functional if antiquated plumbing. I was just glaring at my finished and useless three-line translation when the furnace vent rattled at my back and a whirling mass of fur and claws and teeth leapt out onto me, exactly as anticipated.

And then it promptly bounced off the shield that I didn’t even have to cast, because Aadhya’s shield holder on my chest had automatically pulled mana from the power-sharer to block the physical contact. Even as I whirled round, the leskit went skidding over the floor into the corner and twisted itself up on its twelve feet. It was odds-on which of us was more surprised, but it recovered quicker; it came at me again and stopped just short to give the shield an experimental swipe, striking a cloud of bright orangey sparks off it.

My normal strategy in a situation like this would have been to distract and run. But by then I could hear screams and more hissing coming from the ventilation: there was a pack of them in the workshop. Leskits don’t usually hunt individually. Mine opened its toothy maw and emitted a loud krrk krrk krrk noise like an angry ostrich—I’ve never heard an angry ostrich but it’s the noise I’d imagine coming from one—and there was some scrabbling in the vent and another one’s head came poking out. It dropped down and the two of them discussed in skrrks for a moment and then charged me together, clawing, scraping more deep flaring gouges in the shield.

I stared at them from behind it, and then I slowly said, “Exstirpem has pestes ex oculis, ex auribus, e facie mea funditus,” which was a slight variation on an imperial Roman spell meant to eradicate a host of annoyances that are trying to get at you but are temporarily held back—such as, for instance, a mob of angry locals besieging your evil tower of wizardry and torture. I waved my arm in a broad sweeping-away-vermin gesture at the leskits, who promptly disintegrated, along I presume with all their pals inside the workshop, since the screaming I could hear filtering in through the vent died off into a vaguely confused silence.

For another moment I went on staring at what were now two little piles of ash on the floor, then for lack of anything else to do I slowly sat back down at my desk and went back to work. There wasn’t any reason for me to go running out into the corridor, and still twenty minutes left before the bell. After a few minutes, the door—which had done its slamming routine again just a few minutes before the leskits made their appearance—slid back open in what I possibly imagined was a disappointed way. It didn’t even bang all that loudly.

I spent the rest of the period making a clean copy of the original Sanskrit spell, along with a formal spell commentary of my own, including word-for-word translations of the spell into modern Sanskrit and English to help convey meaning, with several possible variations in connotation, an analysis of the Arabic commentary, and notes on the potential usage. It was the kind of stupid flashy work that you only do if you are trying for valedictorian, or eventual journal publication, which is a less violently competitive approach to getting post-graduation enclave interest.

I didn’t need to do any of that. There wasn’t an assignment I had to hand in, and I certainly didn’t need to do the work to cast the spell. In fact, I could’ve done that as soon as I’d worked out the pronunciation. Except, of course, that if I ever took the risk of casting a spell without knowing for sure what it was meant to do, it would definitely turn out to be meant to do a lot of murder.

I did all of that silly make-work because I didn’t want to start on a new section. More accurately, I didn’t want to have the time to start on a new section. Obviously I didn’t have any regrets about spending New York’s mana on wiping out a pack of leskits, saving my own skin in the process, but I wasn’t going to let myself feel happy about it. I wasn’t going to be grateful, and I very much wasn’t going to get used to it, only that was hopeless nonsense; I was already getting used to it. My shoulders wouldn’t stay tense, and I kept forgetting to check the vent behind me, as if it wasn’t the most important thing in the room.

And then at the bell, I went out into the corridor and the crowd of sophomore artificers came spilling out of the workshop, talking excitedly about what had happened to the leskits, and I overheard one of them saying, shrugging, “Comment il les a eus comme ça? J’en ai aucune idée. Putain, j’étais sûr qu’il allait crever,” and I went to my Myrddin seminar in a cloud of outrage as I realized Orion had been in there, and my leskit-clearing stunt had somehow saved his neck, so I did have to be happy I’d been able to do it, and also what had he even been doing down in the workshop with a bunch of sophomores?

“Were you lurking outside my classroom door or something?” I demanded at lunch, as we got in line.

“No!” he said, but he also didn’t offer a remotely convincing explanation. “I just…I had a feeling” was what he served up, and hunched away from me looking so sour and grouchy that I almost wanted to let him off the hook, except my wanting that was so horribly wrong that I didn’t let myself.

“A feeling like you needed to get your arse saved from a pack of leskits?” I said sweetly instead. “My count is up to four now, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t need to be saved! There were only eight of them, I could’ve taken them,” he snapped at me, and he had the nerve to sound actually annoyed, which annoyed me.

“That’s not what I heard about it,” I said, “and if you don’t like getting rescued in turn, you haven’t got a leg to stand on, have you?”

I took my tray and stalked away across the cafeteria to the table Liu was holding. Orion slunk after me and sat down next to me with both of us still mad—you don’t break up a table in here over anything as minor as a violent quarrel—and we both steamed away in silence for the entire meal. We cleared our trays and walked out of the cafeteria at what I thought was meant to be pointedly different times, since he seemed to be in a rush to get out ahead of me, so I slowed down, and when I came out, I spotted him talking to Magnus just outside the doors, and a moment later Magnus held out his hand and I realized Orion was asking him for mana.

“You bag of jumbled screws, you could’ve said you were running low,” I said, after giving him a swat across the back of the head when I caught him down the corridor, just before the stairs. “Also, going after mals when you’re low to try and make up for it is even more stupid than your usual line, which is saying something.”

“What? No! I wasn’t—” Orion started, and then he turned round and caught my hard glare and paused, and then looked awkward and said, “Oh,” like he’d just noticed that was in fact exactly what he’d been doing.

“Yes, oh,” I said. “You’re entitled to a fair share of the New York mana! You’ve probably put in loads more than your fair share just this past week.”

“I haven’t,” Orion said shortly. “I haven’t been putting anything in at all.”

“What?” I stared at him.

“I haven’t taken out any mals this whole month,” Orion said. “The only ones I’ve even seen are the ones I’ve seen you taking out.”

If you can believe it, there was even still a faint accusatory tone in there, but I ignored it in favor of gawping at him. “Are you telling me you haven’t saved anyone all term? Why haven’t I been hearing howls of death and dismay all round the place?”

“There aren’t any!” he said. “They’re all lying low. I think we wiped out too many of them down in the graduation hall,” as if the words too many had any business taking up room in that sentence, “and the ones left are still mostly in hiding. I’ve been asking people, but almost nobody’s been seeing mals at all.”

I can’t actually coherently describe the level of indignation I experienced. It was one thing for the school to be out to get me, which I think all of us secretly feel is the case from the moment we arrive, and another for the school to be out to get only me, to the exclusion of literally everyone else, including even Orion, even though the school’s hunger was really his fault in the first place. Although I suppose it was getting him by keeping mals away from him. “What do you have Wednesdays after work period?” I demanded, when I could get words out past the incoherent rage.

“My senior alchemy seminar,” he said: four levels down from the library. So he couldn’t come up and give me a hand even if he wanted to, as he apparently very much did.

“What are your first periods?”

“Chinese and maths.” As far away from the workshop level as a senior class could get.

“I hate everything,” I said passionately.

---

“The rest of New York is going to say something if this keeps going,” Chloe said unhappily, perched on Liu’s bed cross-legged with her own mouse cupped in her hands. She’d named him Mistoffeles because he had a single black spot at his throat like a bow tie, which had started looking much more like a bow tie just in the week she’d been holding him. He was also already doing things for her: just yesterday he’d hopped out of her hands and run scampering off into the drain and then come back a few minutes later and offered her a little scrap of only slightly gnawed-on ambergris he’d somehow found down there.

It irritated me: I’d been working on Precious for more than a month and a half now, giving her mana treats and trying to give her instructions, and she still wasn’t doing much but accepting the treats as her due and sitting there on my hand graciously permitting me to pet her. “Shouldn’t you at least be able to turn invisible or something by now?” I’d told her in a grumble under my breath before tipping her back into Liu’s cage. She just ignored me. Even Aadhya had been able to take her mouse Pinky permanently back to her room by now, where she’d built him a massive and elaborate enclosure full of wheels and tunnels that kept getting expanded up the wall. “It just takes time sometimes,” Liu told me, very tactfully, but even she was getting a faintly doubtful expression as the weeks crept on.

Of course, I still wouldn’t have given up a single minute of getting to cuddle Precious even if I could have had them all back a hundredfold in study time. She was so alive and real, her soft fur and her moving lungs and the tiny beat of her heart; she didn’t belong to the Scholomance. She was a part of the world outside, the world I sometimes found myself thinking maybe only existed in the dreams I had of it once in a while. We’d been in the Scholomance for three years, one month, two weeks, and five days.

And in that last one month, two weeks, and five days, nobody but me or the me-adjacent had been attacked by a single mal, as far as we could double-check without making people suspicious. People hadn’t realized yet only because some of the attacks had spilled over into the workshop, which was on the other side of my independent study room, and also it was still early enough in the year that everyone separately thought they were just getting lucky.

“But the other New York kids are going to notice the mana pool getting low,” Chloe said. “Magnus was already asking me the other day if I’d been doing any major workings. I’ve got a right to share power with my allies, but not to let them take it all.”

“We’re all putting as much as we can back,” Aadhya said. “And there’re seven seniors from New York. You have to be putting in loads yourselves. How low is the pool going to get?”

“Well,” Chloe said, in an odd, awkward way, darting a look at me, and then she said haltingly, “We don’t really—I mean—”

“You don’t build mana at all,” I said flatly, from the corner, as I instantly realized what she wasn’t saying. “None of you ever put any mana in the enclave pool, because Orion was putting in enough for all of you.”

Chloe bit her lip and avoided our eyes; Aadhya and Liu were both staring at her, shocked. Everyone’s got to build mana in here. Even enclave kids. Their big advantage is more time, better conditions, people watching their backs and doing homework for them and giving them little presents of mana and all the other things that the rest of us have to spend mana to get. They all have their own efficient mana stores and power-sharers. So by the time they get to senior year, they’re all way ahead. But never having to build mana at all—never having to do sit-ups or struggle through making some horrible doily, because all of them were just coasting on Orion’s back—

And he had to beg mana from them when he started to run out.

Chloe didn’t raise her head, and there was color in her cheeks. Mistoffeles made a little anxious chirping noise in her hands. She probably hadn’t even thought about it since freshman year. The way I already wasn’t thinking about it, day-to-day. And I’d sniped at Orion for needing help, after killing monsters with the mana he’d built up over three years of risking his life.

---

“So what?” Orion said, and sounded like he meant it.

I hadn’t been near his room since last term; I was doing my best to avoid being alone with him at all these days. But I’d put Precious down and walked out of Liu’s room and straight down the corridor to his, without saying another word to Chloe. Orion was there, busy failing to do his alchemy homework, judging by the total blankness of the lab worksheet on his desk. He let me in so nervously that I almost stopped being angry long enough to reconsider being there, but despite him and his mostly futile attempts at straightening up his piles of dirty laundry and books, anger won. It usually does, for me.

I might as well not have bothered, for all he cared when I did tell him. I stared at him, and he stared back. It wasn’t even just him being happy to help the useless wankers out; he sounded like he didn’t understand why I was bothering to mention this odd piece of irrelevant information.

“It’s your mana,” I said through my teeth. “It’s all your mana. Do you get it, Lake? The whole parasitic lot of them have been clinging on your back for three years and change, never putting in a minute’s worth of effort themselves—”

“I don’t care!” he said. “There’s always more. There’s always been more,” he added, and that did come with an emotion, only it was flat-out whinging.

“I’m sorry, are you bored?” I snarled at him. “Are you missing the good fun of saving people’s lives six times a day, the regular dose of adoration?”

“I miss the mana!” he yelled at me.

“So take it back!” I said, and yanked the power-sharer off my wrist and shoved it at him. “Take all of it back! You want more mana, it’s yours, it’s all yours, they haven’t a right to a single drop.”

He stared down at the power-sharer, a half-hungry expression flitting over his face, then he shook his head hard with a jerk. “No!” he said, and shoved his hands in his hair, which hadn’t grown back long enough yet to support the drama of the gesture, and muttered, “I don’t know what to do with myself,” plaintively.

“I know what to do with you,” I said, by which I meant kicking him into next week where maybe he’d have got over himself, only he actually had the nerve to say, “Yeah?” in a challenging, pretending-to-be-suave double-entendre sort of way that lasted only long enough for him to hear it coming out of his own mouth, at which point he went red and embarrassed and then darted a look around the room with nobody but us in it and turned even more red, and I went out of the place like a shot and ran straight back to Liu’s just to escape.

Where I came back in with all of them still sitting there and the power-sharer still in my hand. Chloe jerked her head up and looked at me anxiously. But as far as I was concerned, she could discuss it with Orion herself if she wanted to know what he thought about it. “So what now?” I said, holding it out to her instead. “You want out?”

“No!” Chloe said, and then Aadhya actually hauled a book out of her school bag, the thick kind we call larva-killers, and threw it at me with enough intent behind it that I had to jump aside or it would’ve nailed me in the bum.

“Stop it!” she said. “I think that’s like the third time you’ve asked to be ditched. You’re like one of those puffer fish, the second anyone touches you a little wrong you go all bwoomp,” she illustrated with her hands, “trying to make them let go. We’ll let you know, how’s that?”

I put the power-sharer back on more or less sullenly—let’s be honest, more—and sat back down on the floor with my arms wrapped round my knees. Liu said after a moment, “So the real problem isn’t that you’re using mana. The problem is that Orion’s not putting any in.”

“Yes, all we need to do is find a surefire way to lure him some mals,” I muttered. “If only we had a bunch of tasty adolescent wizards all in the same place. Oh, wait.”

“I’ve got more things to throw over here,” Aadhya said, waving another deadly book—this one had some actual suspicious splotches on its cover—threateningly.

“Maybe we could build a honeypot, like they do for construction sites?” Chloe said.

“Like who does for what?” Aadhya said, and Chloe looked around like she expected me or Liu to be any less confused.

“A honeypot?” she said, more tentatively. “Is there another word for it? You know, when there’s a major project for a circle of wizards, and they’re going to be working for a long time, days, and you don’t want mals to be coming for them? So you have to lure all the nearby mals out and clean them up, like the week before? New York used one for the Tri-State Gateway expansion a couple of years back.”

It certainly sounded brilliant, but only in the sense that it was clearly too good to be true. “If you can lure them places, why wouldn’t you do it all the time?” I said. “Just stick one of these honeypots in the middle of a trap, and no more mals around ever.”

“You’ve still got to do something with them!” Chloe said. “What kind of trap is going to hold a thousand giant mals? We had to hire a team of three hundred guards just for the one week.” That was starting to sound a bit more plausible, and worth considering, and then she added, “Anyway, you can’t just keep a honeypot going all the time, it’s too expensive to run.”

We all stared at her. She stared back. “It’s too expensive,” I said pointedly. “For New York.” I’d seen Orion toss fistfuls of mana-infused diamond dust into his homework assignment potions like it was all-purpose flour. He didn’t even bother to sweep up the leavings from his lab bench afterwards.

Chloe bit her lip, but then Liu said, “But it can’t be that hard to lure mals. They want to come for us anyway, you’re just reinforcing their existing desire.”

“Oh, hey,” Aadhya said abruptly. “How far away did you lure mals from?”

“We covered all of Gramercy Park and one block out in each direction,” Chloe said, which meant nothing to me, but Aadhya was nodding.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Any artifice is going to be crazy expensive to run when you try to push the effect out over six city blocks. But we don’t want to lure all the mals in the school.” We very much didn’t; in fact we all cringed instinctively just because she’d said it out loud. “We just want a few of them for Orion.” She rummaged round in her bag and dug out a copy of the blueprints that she must have made at some point in her career: artificers often get assigned to do detailed studies of the school, since it helps reinforce the workings. “Here.” She pointed to a spot on the first floor. “There’s a major pipe junction here running through the workshop wall. If we build a honeypot and set it next to the nearest drain and run it from there, I bet we’ll catch him plenty of mals even if we only cover a two-foot radius.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “So how does one of these honeypots work?”

We all looked at Chloe. “Um, there’s a container—you need to put in some kind of bait, and then the artifice blows the scent out…” She trailed off unspecifically and shrugged. “I’m sorry, I only know about it because my mom had to do the presentation for the requisition process.”

“The requisition process,” I said even more pointedly, because anything that New York bothered to make you requisition had to be insanely complicated on top of expensive.

But Aadhya was waving it away. “That’s enough to go on. Liu’s right, it can’t be that hard. You just brew up some bait that smells like teenage wizard, and I’ll see what I can come up with to disperse it.”

Chloe was nodding. “How fast do you think you can do it?” she asked anxiously.

“No clue,” Aadhya said, with a shrug.

“And in the meantime, all of New York has to start building mana,” Liu said. “If Orion can’t put in mana anymore, and none of you are, you’re going to run out sooner or later anyway. You don’t want to find out that the honeypot doesn’t work in three months, just when it’s time to start doing obstacle-course runs.”

“But if I tell everyone that we have to start putting in mana because Orion can’t anymore, the first thing Magnus will want to do is run an audit on our power-sharers to see how much everyone is using,” Chloe said. “Then they’ll know why it’s going to be sooner.”

“I don’t think he’ll insist on an audit,” Liu said, with a glance towards me. “Not if you tell them the right way.”

“What’s the right way?” I said warily.

---

The right way was, Chloe whispered around to everyone in New York, that Orion’s girlfriend was keeping him from hunting mals because I didn’t want him getting hurt, and now I was getting suspicious about why the mana was suddenly running low.

The New York enclavers were all as eager for me to learn the truth about the source of their mana as Chloe had been, so they did start quietly contributing after all—which it turned out they could do by the bucketload without even getting anywhere close to their mana-building capacity. That of course didn’t keep them from being grumpy about the work they were doing. I confess I enjoyed catching a glimpse of Magnus stalking into the boy’s bathroom at the head of his entourage, soaked in sweat and red-faced from what I assume was a hearty session of building mana with annoying physical exercise.

But after a month of what I suppose they found unbearable suffering, they all began to interrogate each other in accusatory ways about mana use, and meanwhile the honeypot project ran into a serious snag. Aadhya had made up a special incense burner, a set of nested cylinders of different kinds of metal, with holes punched carefully in each one to control the path that smoke took through them. Chloe had mixed a dozen small batches of mana-infused incense and left them out around a drain in one of the alchemy labs during dinner. We came down afterwards—warily—and picked the one that showed the most signs of having been poked at with various appendages, including a snuffler’s face, which had left a distressing imprint roughly like a lotus seedpod.

“Great, let’s go,” Orion said promptly; he would have grabbed the cylinder off the table and headed straight for the door, but Aadhya put out a hand against his chest and stopped him.

“How about we don’t try it out for the first time next to a big junction going straight down to the graduation hall,” she said. The rest of us all agreed heartily. The diameter of the school’s plumbing is open to a determined interpretation, and if we were deliberately luring mals, our intent would actually be helping them squeeze themselves through.

Orion sat on a stool in visible impatience, tossing the burner from one hand to the other, while the rest of us discussed the best place for a trial run. We finally settled on the lab itself, on the grounds that the incense had been out here for a bit already, and we didn’t want to carry it through the corridors to somewhere else, possibly accumulating a trailing horde in the process.

Aadhya put the incense into the burner, fussed with the positioning of the cylinders a bit longer, and finally said, “All right, let’s give it a shot,” handing it to Orion.

We all backed well off towards the door while he did the honors. He lit the small blob of incense—“Ow,” he said, burning his fingers with the match, which he was more worried about than the possibly impending mals—and dropped it into the middle of the cylinders. Then he put the burner on the lab stool and set it right near the drain.

The first threads of smoke came out and visibly wafted over the drain before dispersing. Orion hovered over it eagerly, but nothing came out. We waited another few minutes. The smoke began to pick up, making a thin stream that circled the drain and went down into it. Still nothing.

There had been a couple of small agglos in the lab, stealing the floor leavings—we’d ignored them as they’re quite handy when fully grown, and completely harmless otherwise—which had started slowly humping their way towards the drain to escape when we’d come into the room. While we were still waiting, they reached the drain and kept going, straight through the thickest smoke, showing no interest in it whatsoever.

Orion looked over at us. “Shouldn’t it work on them? They’re still mals.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Chloe said, a bit nasally. The burner was certainly doing something; even all the way back at the door, the air was taking on the same distinct aroma that regularly wafted out of the boys’ loo.

Aadhya frowned and took a few cautious steps towards the burner. “Maybe we should,” she started, and that was when Pinky stuck his head out of his carrying cup and gave a loud excited squeak. Aadhya had made each of us a bandolier-style strap with a cup attached, for the mice to ride around in during the day, since Liu wanted us to keep them with us more often. Before she could stop him, Pinky leapt directly out of the cup on her chest all the way down to the floor, raced over to the stool, scampered up the leg like a tiny streak of white lightning, and did a full-body flying lunge for the cylinder and knocked it onto the floor. While we were still yelping, Mistoffeles and Xiao Xing emerged from their cups and made their own mad dashes to join him.

Theywere certainly interested in the incense. Together they spent the next half hour rolling the cylinder around the lab in mad glee, sending it under cabinets and tables and squirming out of our grip every time we tried to grab it or them. It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good at not being caught. There was a lot of swearing and yelling and banged elbows and barked shins before we finally managed to get the cylinder away from them and put the smoke out, at which point they collapsed in exhausted furry lumps with their paws curled and glazed expressions that somehow conveyed dreamy pleasure on their faces.

Chloe drew several thick lines through the incense recipe in her notebook, and Aadhya disgustedly dumped the set of cylinders into the scrap bin. When a first experiment goes that far awry from your expectations, it’s usually not worth the risk to keep going. It means you’re missing something quite important, and in this case, we had no idea what the something we were missing was. So if we tried again with just minor tweaks, we’d expect it to go wrong, and at that point, not only would it go wrong, it would almost certainly go wrong in a much more dramatic and possibly painful fashion.

The only positive outcome was my getting the first sign that Precious was actually becoming a familiar. She hadn’t joined the frenzy; instead, as soon as Pinky went for the burner, she’d run up my shoulder and jumped onto a high shelf of the lab, where she tipped a large beaker over herself and sat there disapprovingly watching the other mice having fun with her tiny forepaws held over her nose. After we put out the incense, she climbed back into my bandolier cup and pulled the lid firmly on top of herself and made clear that she was coming home with me instead of going back to the group cage in Liu’s room with the other stupefied mice.

So that was tidy, but the honeypot project was back to square one.

Meanwhile the New York enclavers weren’t my only problem anymore. Everyone else was starting to look into the pattern of mal attacks, or lack thereof. We all spend a great deal of time thinking about mals and what they’re going to do. Almost half our freshman and sophomore courses are devoted to the study of maleficaria, their classification, their behavior, and most important, how to kill them. When mals start behaving unexpectedly, that’s bad. Even if the unexpected behavior is that they’re not leaping out to kill you anymore. That usually just means they’re waiting to leap out and kill you at a much more opportune moment.

The next Wednesday, at the end of our cheery library death seminar, Sudarat waited until the kid on my other side got up and then said softly to me as we packed up to leave, “A girl from Shanghai asked me if our class had been attacked again.”

We were getting into striking range of midterms by then, and a grand total of twenty-three people had been killed so far the whole year. More than half of them had been freshmen blowing themselves up in shop or poisoning themselves in alchemy lab, which was barely like dying at all by our normal standards. The others—bar one—had all been cafeteria mistakes. Even that was radically below the usual rates, since almost everyone could afford to cast sniffer spells and brew antidotes, since they weren’t getting jumped by maleficaria.

Death number twenty-three was the only upperclassman, a junior-year charmer named Prasong who’d been another former Bangkok enclaver. He had been very unhappy to discover he wasn’t an enclaver anymore, and he’d made himself obnoxious enough in the years he’d been one that he found sympathy and friends in very short supply. As he couldn’t see any other way to continue in the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed—or to reliably continue living, for that matter—he made the decision to go maleficer. And obviously the best and safest way for him to get a big helping of malia stored up, enough to see him through graduation, would be draining it out of a group of unsuspecting wide-eyed freshmen.

If that sounds unimaginably evil to you, I should mention that it wasn’t to us. Most years there are somewhere between four and eight kids who go for the maleficer track, and since most of them haven’t planned it out carefully in advance and brought in a supply of small mammals, targeting younger students is their standard order of business. We’re all warned about it quite prosaically in the freshman handbook, and told to be wary of older or more successful kids showing too much interest in our activities. I owed my own charming gut scar to one of them, the late unlamented Jack Westing, who’d also done for Orion’s neighbor Luisa back in our sophomore year.

Sudarat was the only freshman that Prasong could talk to without arousing suspicions. He didn’t even have to go out of his way—she was going as far out of hers as she could to maintain her connections to the older Bangkok ex-enclavers. Even if all that got her was a chance to sit with them in the cafeteria once in a while, or the last hand-me-downs they couldn’t sell as seniors, that would still be better than nothing. So all Prasong needed to do was agree to let her fill an empty seat at his table for a single meal. She must have told him enough about her weird library seminar to convince him it was the perfect meal: eight freshmen in an isolated room with no witnesses around. I assume she didn’t mention me.

A few days later, he snuck upstairs just before the end of lunch period and laid down a flaying hex circle on the floor under the desks.

It wasn’t very good. You can’t exactly look up malia-sucking hexes in the library; officially there aren’t any malicious texts available in here. That’s nonsense of course, I’ve stumbled across at least a hundred of them. But anyone who went looking for them would probably have harder luck getting one. Anyway, Prasong wasn’t as ambitious as dear Jack. His hex was good enough to rip off a substantial patch of skin on his victims, opening us up so he could pull a tidy bit of malia out of us through our pain and horror, and I imagine that was all he wanted. Actually killing eight wizards at once, even freshmen, is no joke for a budding maleficer; the psychic damage would’ve left him visibly marked in the ominous sorts of ways that make your fellow students—particularly your nearest neighbors—gather up a sufficient group to put you down before you get any more bright ideas that might involve extracting mana from them.

Unfortunately for him, I noticed the hex before I even crossed the threshold. I assumed a construct mal had done it; some of the more advanced kinds can draw spell inscriptions, although usually not very well. That didn’t rule out this example. I could’ve done better without half trying, and that’s exactly what I did: I grabbed a piece of chalk off the nearest board, rewrote half the sigils to turn the spell back on the original inscriber—correcting the various mistakes and adding a few improvements while I was at it—and invoked it with contemptuous ease and barely an ounce of mana. I was even a little smug that the first attack of the afternoon had been so easy to deal with.

I only found out who had cast it at dinnertime, when people were gossiping energetically about how Prasong’s skin just completely flew off him in the middle of the language lab and how he ran around in circles screaming wildly until he died of massive blood loss and shock.

I won’t say I was sorry. I won’t. I vomited after dinner, but it was probably something I’d eaten. Sudarat left the cafeteria looking moderately ghastly herself. She and all the kids in the library had known at once what had happened: I’d made a point—smug, smug, smug—of showing them the hex circle, what it was trying to do to us, and how I was cleverly turning it back on the creator. She’d been extra quiet in the couple of weeks since, which was saying something. This was the first peep she’d let out in my direction since.

“From Shanghai?” I said slowly.

Sudarat nodded, a small jerk of her head. “Some people from Bangkok heard,” she said. “About the attacks we’ve had. Some other people. When I told…” She trailed off, but I’d got the picture. When she’d told Prasong about the library attacks, other older Bangkok kids had been at the table, too. And now her former enclave mates were using her as the source of useful gossip to pass along, just to score a few points. Just like all of us loser kids do, because you can’t know which of those points is going to be the one that gets you through the graduation hall gates.

“What did you tell them?” I said.

Her head was bent down towards her desk, the short blunt edge of her hair hiding her eyes, but I could see her lips and throat work when she swallowed. “I said, I didn’t remember. Then I said no.”

She was learning, the way every loser freshman learns. She’d understood that they weren’t asking out of consideration for her: they were hunting for information that was valuable to them. She understood that they were sniffing around after me. But she hadn’t learned the full lesson yet, because she’d done the wrong thing. What she should have done, obviously, was find out how much the information was worth, and sell it to them. Instead, she’d lied to protect me, to someone who had hope to offer her: hope of help, hope of a new home.

Thoughtful of her, although I’d have been happier if someone from Shanghai hadn’t been suspicious enough to be asking her questions in the first place. That meant a raft of bad things. For one, the seniors in Shanghai enclave were actively trying to figure out what was going on with the mals—and they had nine students in our year alone, not to mention all their allies. For another, they already knew that our library session had been attacked by a mal at least once, which made us unusual this year. They were surely trying to put that information together with any other known mal attacks, which would be the handful that had spilled over into the workshop from my seminar room. As soon as someone found out that there was a single-person language seminar held next to the workshop that was getting attacked, and the single person happened to also be the only senior in the library room that was getting attacked, that wouldn’t be a difficult blank to fill in.

I had no idea what would happen when the information all came out. The other New York kids might decide to cut Chloe and us off from the pipe. If Orion wasn’t supplying them with fresh mana anyway, they didn’t have a lot to lose from ditching his “girlfriend.” And that could—would—be the least of it. If people worked out that the school was gunning for me in particular, they’d want to know why, and if they couldn’t turn up a reason, someone would probably decide to poke me with a sharp stick to find out. If they didn’t just decide that it was a good idea to give the school what it wanted.

So, my midterm study sessions were exceptionally cheery.

Except actually they were. The shine of studying with other people still hadn’t dulled for me. We’d cleaned up Chloe’s double-width room, and found new stuffing for the cushions—if you think we’d turn up our noses at reusing some perfectly good and comfortable cushions just because they’d previously been home to a pair of monsters and a half-digested fellow student, you haven’t been paying attention—and we gathered there almost every evening, with a little basket in the middle where our mice could snooze between getting petted and even occasionally fed a treat by anyone invited to join us.

It was almost never just the four of us. Whatever subject we wanted to cover, it was a sure bet we could get in more people for the asking. I had plenty of help for Arabic: Ibrahim and a couple of his friends were happy to come by and give me advice as the price of admission. Nkoyo came almost every night, too, and she was doing that general Sanskrit seminar I’d expected to get. Thanks to their help, I was making some real headway on the Golden Stone sutras: just that week I’d actually got to the first of the major workings.

Except, ugh, that was a lie. It wasn’t their help, not really. It was the time I had because I didn’t have to desperately watch my own back every second of the day. It was the energy I had because I wasn’t constantly scrabbling to build mana. And it was their help, too, only their help and the time and the energy all came from the same thing, and that was Chloe’s help, Chloe’s bountiful generosity, and I didn’t like it. Except of course I did like it loads, I was just bitter and sullen about it, too.

But I couldn’t manage being bitter and sullen on the day I turned the page and found myself looking at a gorgeously calligraphed heading that I didn’t need to translate into Being the First Stone upon the Golden Road to understand what it was saying: This one’s really special, with the Sanskrit incantation set in a finely bordered window on the page, every character flavored with gold leaf and paint in the main curves. Even at a first glance I could pick out bits of all the other spells I’d gone through so far: the phase-control spell, the water-summoning spell, another one I’d just finished working through that was for dividing earth from stone; they were woven together and invoked as part of the overall working.

I didn’t just stop being sullen. I stopped worrying about mana, about what was going to happen when and if my cover was blown; I stopped working on my midterm assignments and ignored the rest of my classes entirely. For that whole week, in every waking minute that I wasn’t actually stuck in session or killing mals, I was working on the sutra. Even during meals I had my head in a dictionary.

I knew it was stupid. My midterm assignment for the Myrddin seminar was a long involved piece of Old French poetry that was sure to contain at least three or four useful combat spells I could probably use during graduation. Meanwhile Purochana’s great working was on the scale of architecture and probably needed an entire circle of wizards to cast anyway. The Golden Stone sutras were meant for building enclaves, not killing off mals: it would only do me any good if I lived long enough to get out of here.

But if I did—then I could offer it to groups like Liu’s family, like the kibbutz that Ibrahim’s friend Yaakov was from: established communities of wizards who wanted to set up their own safe, sheltered places. The Golden Stone sutras probably weren’t the best way to build enclaves anymore, otherwise more of the spells would have survived into the modern day, the way the phase-control spell had, but it would be a sight better than having to mortgage your entire family to another enclave for three generations just to get access to the spells, much less for the resources you’d need to use. And Purochana’s enclave spells probably weren’t going to be as expensive as the modern spells, either. No one was building skyscraper enclaves back in ancient India: even if you’d imagined one, you couldn’t exactly call your local builders and order some steel girders and concrete.

So my golden enclaves wouldn’t be as grand as a top modern-day enclave, but who cared? It would still keep the mals from getting to your kids, and if you had that, if you had safe, at least you’d have a choice. A choice that someone could make without being Mum. You wouldn’t have to suck up to enclave kids and bribe them. They’d still have advantages, they’d still have more hand-me-downs and more mana, some people would still court them, but it wouldn’t be everyone, desperate to survive. They wouldn’t get piles of free help just for dangling the slim hope of getting into their alliances and the even slimmer hope of getting into their enclaves.

I liked the idea; I loved the idea, actually. If this was how I’d bring destruction to the enclaves of the world, I was on board with my great-grandmother’s prophecy after all. I’d take Purochana’s spells and spread them all over the world, and I’d teach people how to cast them, and maybe they wouldn’t like me, but they’d listen to me anyway, for this. They’d let me stay in the enclaves I helped them build, and I’d make it part of the price that they had to help others build them, too. Either they’d donate resources, or they’d make copies of the spells, or train teachers—

While I was busy putting the world to rights in my spare time, what I wasn’t doing was any of my other schoolwork. I completely forgot the midterm assignment for my Proto-Indo-European seminar, and I would have been well on the way to outright failing if it hadn’t been for Ibrahim; when I remembered it on the Monday night before the due date, with less than one hour to curfew, he brokered me an emergency trade with an enclaver from Dubai that he’d got friendly with. He and I had sat near the Dubai kids in the library for one evening last term. They all still gave me dirty looks if we passed in the corridors, and he’d made one good friend and four nodding acquaintances. Story of my life. But now I got to benefit, because when I yawped in alarm, that night in Chloe’s room, Ibrahim said, “Hey, Jamaal’s probably got a paper for that.” It turned out that Jamaal was the youngest of five, and had inherited a priceless collection of hand-me-down papers and schoolwork for nearly every class he might possibly have taken, and more besides. I handed over a copy of the paper I’d written about the water-summoning spell and got back a nice, solid essay handed in for the PIE seminar of ten years ago.

I still had to rewrite the essay in my own handwriting, and while I was doing that, I got annoyed at some of the dumb things it said and ended up changing about half of it, staying up until all hours. I fell asleep on my desk and had to work on it the next day during my independent study. Afterwards I shuffled into the PIE seminar, full of unjustifiable resentment, and as I stuffed it into the submission slot still yawning, an eldritch vapor wisped out and went straight into my wide-open mouth.

Forget any preconceived notions you might have of gigantic Cthulhian monstrosities. Eldritch-category mals are actually relatively fragile. They hunt by driving people insane with enchanted gases that fill your senses with the impression of untold horrors, and while you thrash around screaming and begging everything to stop, the mal creeps out of its hiding place and tries to hook your brains out through your nose with its partially embodied limbs.

The problem with using this clever tactic on me was that there really isn’t an untold horror that the human brain is capable of experiencing that’s worse than being enveloped by a maw-mouth. So the vapor made me flash back to that particular experience, and I reacted just as I had at the time, which can be summed up as me yelling die immediately you horrible monstrosity with enormous and violent conviction. Only this wasn’t a maw-mouth, it was just a drippy ectoplasmic cloud, and I slammed it with the full force of a major arcana murder spell like someone trying to light a match with a flamethrower.

My handiest killing spell doesn’t kill things by destroying their bodies, it just goes straight to extinguishing life on a metaphysical level, so that’s what spilled over. More or less, I informed the eldritch horror it had no business existing with so much aggression that I shoved it entirely out of reality, and I then went on from there to try and insist that a whole lot of the stuff around it should also stop this absurd pretense of continuing to exist.

This was especially awkward because a lot of the Scholomance doesn’t exactly exist. It’s made of real material, but the laws of physics get quite flexible in the void, so most of that material has been stretched thinner than it should be, the engineering doesn’t meet the regs, and the number one thing keeping it up is that we’re all believing in it as hard as we can stare. And that’s what I took out: in one horrible moment, I made the four other kids in my seminar extremely aware that the only thing between them and howling nothingness was a tin can held together by happy thoughts and pixie dust. They all screamed and tried to get to safety, only they couldn’t, since they were carrying the lack of belief along with them, and the seminar room and then the entire corridor started to come apart around them.

The only thing that stopped us taking out a massive swath of the school was that I hadn’t stopped believing myself. Still half groggy with eldritch vision, I stumbled after them out of the room into a corridor which was starting to bend and warp like aluminium foil under the weight of the entire massive school above it, and in my confusion I thought it was just me being drugged, so I shut my eyes and told myself firmly that the corridor was not by any means wobbling and put out my hand to the wall with the expectation that the wall would be there and solid, and so it was again. I yelled after the other kids, “It’s fine! It’s just eldritch gas! Stop running!” and when they looked back and saw that the corridor was fine around me, they were able to persuade themselves I was right, and then they started believing in the school again.

A moment later, I realized that actually I’d been wrong, because as soon as the corridor stabilized, the Scholomance slammed the door of the room shut and sealed it away behind a permanent hazard wall, which are normally reserved for lab rooms on the second floor where there’s been an alchemical accident so horrible the deadly effects won’t resolve for a decade or more. As the hazard wall shot down from the ceiling beside me, almost taking off my thumb in the process, I startled and glanced over long enough to catch just half a glimpse of the excessively real wall of the seminar room beyond it, crumpled into accordion folds. That’s how I worked out what I’d done.

I didn’t really know any of the other kids in the seminar. They were all languages-track seniors like me, of course, and one of them, Ravi, was an enclaver from Jaipur, so the other three had sat round him, the better to offer him help on his papers and exams. None of them had ever spoken to me. I only knew Ravi’s name because one of the others was a blond German girl named Liesel who had a violently annoying habit of cooing “Ravi, this is extremely excellent,” every time he let her edit his papers. It made me want to hurl a dictionary at both their heads, and all the more so because I’d seen her submitting a paper once—that’s how I knew her name—and that one peek had been enough to tell me she was probably going for valedictorian and at least ten times smarter than him, since he wasn’t even smart enough to have figured out that she was the best in the class; he usually gave his papers to one of the other boys and wasted class time flirting with her and staring at her breasts.

Of course, brains aren’t everything in all circumstances. Ravi was able to convince himself everything was fine a lot quicker than anyone else; by the time I got over to them, he was recovered and saying with easy assurance, “We’ll go to the library. We can’t be marked down if the classroom’s been shut. You’re welcome to come,” he added to me, in a tone of lordly generosity, and had the gall to gesture to the corridor, indicating that I was to take point position in exchange for the condescension. What made it even worse was that just a few weeks ago, without Chloe’s power-sharer on my wrist, I’d have had to do it and be grateful for the lucky chance of company.

“If I’m taking point for a walk mid-period, I’ll go by myself,” I said, rude. “Especially since none of you thought of mentioning the eldritch shine.” They’d all been in class before me. Since none of them had been attacked handing in their own assignments, they’d clearly spotted the signs—there’s a sort of faint iridescent glitter to the air near an eldritch horror that I wouldn’t have missed ordinarily—and pushed their own papers in from a distance. None of them had said a word as I’d stepped up to the slot myself.

“You’ve got to have your own lookout,” one of the boys said to me, a little defiantly.

“That’s right,” I said. “And now you can have yours.”

“What was that?” Liesel said suddenly. She’d been looking at the stabilized walls and the hazard door with a lot more suspicion than the rest of them, which she’d now translated into staring at me. “That spell which you used. Was that—La Main de la Mort?”

It had, in fact, been La Main de la Mort. She’d obviously done French at some point, assuming she hadn’t grown up bilingual anyway, and it’s not a hard spell to recognize; there’re not that many three-word killing spells. The difficulty of casting it isn’t learning the words, it’s just got a really extreme amount of the je ne sais quoi that a lot of French spells have: you’ve got to be able to toss them off blithely, effortlessly. Since La Main de la Mort kills you instead of your target if you get it even the slightest bit wrong, very few people feel blithe about giving it a go, unless for instance they’re inside a maw-mouth where death would be a reasonably good outcome. Also you’ve got to be able to channel a truly outrageous amount of mana without displaying the slightest effort, which is tricky for most people who aren’t designed to be dark queens of sorcery et cetera.

“Look it up yourself if you want to know,” I said, taking refuge in more rudeness, and walked away from them as fast as I could towards the stairs, but even Ravi was gawking at me.

At that point it wasn’t exactly transmutation of matter to work out that I had something substantial and disturbing under the hood. When I came in at lunchtime, I saw Liesel stopping to talk to Magnus at the New York table, and he was waving a couple of his hangers-on over to open a spot for her to sit down next to him. “Well, I’m fucked,” I told Aadhya and Liu, succinctly, as soon as I reached our table and sat down with them. And how right I was.