Chapter 7: Alliance

Orion didn’t even havethe bare decency to avoid me the rest of the day. In fact, he spent all of lunchtime casting pathetic looks of desperation and longing in my direction, exactly as though I’d been the one who’d fired him up only to cruelly leave him hanging. Nobody made a peep about it in my direction, but I could tell they all assumed that I had done just that. When I complained to Aadhya about it that afternoon, she told me—with a total lack of sympathy—that no one was spending that much time thinking about my love life, but what did she know?

“You should just be grateful he saved you from yourself, anyway!” she added.

I glared at her. “And who was just asking me for all the salacious details?”

“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have thrown a bucket of cold water on your head if I’d been in range. What were you thinking? Do you even know when your last period was?”

I really couldn’t argue with her especially since no, I had no idea when my last period was or when the next one was due. Thankfully, that’s one thing magic is good for; whenever the first signs show up, you brew yourself a cup of nice go-the-fuck-away tea—an easy alchemical recipe every wizard girl can brew in her sleep—and that’s the end of it. Some of us do have to keep a sharp eye on the timing, because theirs starts with blood spotting, and you don’t want mals to get a whiff of that. But my first symptom is a nice sharp whanging cramp in the midsection, completely unmistakable, and it arrives with a good five hours’ warning.

Unfortunately, one thing magic is not good for is avoiding pregnancy. The problem is, if you deliberately do something that you are conscious and deeply terrified might cause pregnancy, the magical intent gets confused. Protective spells are about as reliable as the withdrawal method. Science is much more reliable, but then you have to either invest some of your very limited induction weight allowance to bring in condoms or pills and then use them properly, or get an implant or an IUD before you get inducted and cross your fingers that nothing goes wrong with it over the four years you’re hopefully going to be in here before you next get to see a gynecologist. I didn’t see the point. Or rather, I hadn’t seen the point four years ago, when I’d been reasonably sure no one was going to talk to me, much less date me.

“It’s just—” I stopped squabbling and sat down on the floor of her room in a thump and said, “It was just so nice,” and maybe that sounds stupid but I couldn’t help my voice wobbling. Nice was what we didn’t have in here. You could manage desperate victories and even dazzling wonders sometimes, but not anything nice.

Aadhya sighed out a long deep breath. “Well, forget it. I’m not getting eaten by a maw-mouth because you got yourself knocked up.” I sat up with my mouth open in low-blow outrage, but Aadhya just looked at me hard-faced and serious, and she was right; of course she was right. I’d already been screwing around excessively without making it literal, and if I kept on, I’d very likely end up with something even less helpful than a pewter medal.

We didn’t know what we were going to find when we got down to the graduation hall, and in some ways that was worse than knowing it was going to be the same terrible horde of mals that seniors had faced every year for a hundred years and more. We couldn’t even guess based on the early accounts of the days when the cleansings had been running, because the school had been brand-new then, and the only mals had been the first squirming pioneers to find their way through the wards. Now there were century-old infestations and colonies buried deep in dark corners, ancient maleficaria rooted into the foundations, generations who’d never lived outside the machinery. Maybe there had been enough survivors of the cleansings to start a sudden population explosion in the available space, like the oncoming wave of amphisbaena, and we’d be dumped into a ravening horde of recently hatched and starving mals, so many of them and so small that most of our strategies wouldn’t apply, just like that horrible mass we’d accidentally lured with Liu’s honeypot spell only ten thousand times worse.

Or maybe they’d all be dead. Maybe they’d eaten each other all the way down the food chain, and there would be no maleficaria left except Patience and Fortitude themselves, guardians on either side of the gates, and they’d have nothing left on the menu except us.

If that’s what we found down there—I had no idea what I’d do. There was an obvious and sensible thing to do, which was to pass the word to our entire graduating class in advance that if it was us against the maw-mouths, they’d all make one enormous circle and feed me mana, and I’d try to take them out. But just because that was obvious and sensible didn’t mean I was going to do it. I had killed a maw-mouth the only way you could, from the inside out, and if I tried to think even in a very vague distant way about doing it again, a faint incoherent screaming started up inside me that took up all the room there was in my brain, like standing next to a fire truck with siren wailing while someone tried to talk to you, their mouth moving with no sound at all coming through because the whole world was full of noise.

Maybe I’d get over it if I saw the maw-mouths coming and there wasn’t any other choice. Maybe. I wasn’t at all confident, for all I was about to have six months of honing my reflexes to razor sharpness. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t remotely the same. Having to choose to go inside again—I don’t know if it’s a choice anyone could make more than once. There certainly haven’t been many people who’ve had the chance to consider it. If I do make it out of here, I should look up the Dominus of Shanghai. He’s the only other living person who’s ever done it. We could compare notes. Or we could look each other in the face and just start screaming together, which feels more appropriate to me.

Of course, it was extremely likely that it wouldn’t work anyway. The maw-mouth I’d killed had been a small one, maybe budded off one of the big ones or however they spawn—no one’s spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths as far as I know. It had managed to squeeze through the wards and make it upstairs. I don’t know how many people had been inside it, how many lives; I’d been far beyond keeping count of the deaths I’d dealt out. But I did know that it hadn’t been anywhere near as big as Fortitude, much less Patience, who’s been lording it over the killing grounds almost since the hall first opened. I don’t think even I can do that much killing. The only way they’re going is if the whole school goes.

The point being that we still needed a better strategy for graduation than Wait and see if El can keep her big-girl pants on, and here I was whinging on about how nice it would be for me to do something unbelievably stupid instead, like Orion. Aadhya had every right to cram my face in it.

“Sorry,” I muttered. She just nodded, which was kinder than I deserved, really, and then said, businesslike, “So I think I’ve figured out a good gym schedule,” and rolled out a timetable for me to look at.

After New Year’s, half of the gym gets cordoned off exclusively for the seniors, and every week, it lays out a fresh new obstacle course for us, so we can get as much practice as possible running flat-out through forests of sharp things trying to kill us. It’s excellently realistic, full of artificial constructs pretending to be mals, and also the many real mals who show up helpfully to populate it. It’s a testament to our top-quality educational experience how few of us die. Please envision me saying this with my hand held piously over my heart. But really, we were all hitting our stride by now. There isn’t anything much more dangerous in the world than a fully grown wizard. That’s why the mals have to hunt us when we’re young. We’re the real apex predators, not the maw-mouths that after all just sit by the doors mumbling to themselves and occasionally groping around for some supper. Once through the gates, we’ll be carving our dreams into the world like gleeful vandals scratching graffiti on the pyramids, and we won’t look behind us. But only once we’re out.

Ordinarily the reserved gym is a useful and highly valued privilege. No one was very enthusiastic about it this year, but there wasn’t any other option for practice. The fundamental goal of graduation is to get from the nearest stairwell to the gates as fast as possible without getting stopped along the way. It’s roughly a distance of 150 meters, about the same distance as from one end of the gym and back, and aside from throwing spells left and right, you also have to run.

“Mornings?” I said, in protest, because Aadhya had us meeting three times a week at eight, which meant hauling ourselves out of bed at the first quiet chiming to get breakfast and make it downstairs; we’d be first through all the corridors, not to mention—very important to mention—first into the obstacle course every week, without any warning how bad it was going to be.

“I talked to Ibrahim and Nkoyo today, during the cleansing,” Aadhya said. “We made a deal. They’ll go right behind us with their teams, on either side. We take the heat up front, and they keep us from getting flanked. We’ll practice together each morning.”

That kind of arrangement is normally a supremely terrible strategy for the lead group, to the point that you’re explicitly warned against it in the pre-graduation handbook we’ll all be getting in about three months—much too late to be of real use; we’re all using copies we bought in our sophomore years off that year’s seniors, who’d bought their own copies two years before, et cetera. The advice changes a little from year to year, but one of the most consistent points is that taking the lead is absolutely not worth whatever advantage you might get from the groups covering you. As soon as you’re in any danger of being overwhelmed, they’ll hop to one side and let whatever they’re holding off come at you, meaning that you won’t even have a chance to recover, while they take the opening created by the pile-on and go sailing onwards with a substantial improvement to their odds, taken out of yours.

It’s not great to be the one taking the lead even within an alliance, but at least in an alliance, you’ve been practicing together and integrating your skills tightly, so it’s not actually a good idea for your allies to cut and run. Unless you’re close enough to the doors, at which point loads of alliances do fall apart. And that, boys and girls, is why enclavers never take the lead.

Aadhya wasn’t making a mistake, though. There’s one situation where having someone covering you does in fact make excellent sense: if it’s never going to be a good idea for them to ditch you. For instance, if all they’ve got is knives and your team’s got a flamethrowing machine gun. So she was confirming that yes, our entire strategy was going to rest on my keeping my big-girl pants on. “Right,” I said, grimly, because what else was I going to say? No, don’t rely on me? No, I won’t do my best to get you to the gates, the way you’ve done for me? Of course she was going to build the strategy around me. And of course I had to let her.

“El,” Aadhya said, “you know we’d take Orion,” and you might think that was a hilariously absurd thing to say—yes, out of the generous goodness of our hearts we’d take the invincible hero along with us—but I knew what she really meant. She was saying Orion’s not on our team, and if I was, that meant I couldn’t ditch them to go help him, even if, for instance, I looked over and saw him being dragged into the guts of a maw-mouth, screaming the way that Dad’s been screaming in Mum’s head since the day she crawled out through the gates with me in her belly. If that was the monstrous fate Mum had been trying to warn me away from, she’d know, she’d know the way no one else in the world would know just how horrible it would be to live with someone you love screaming in your head forever.

“I’ll ask him,” I said without lifting my head, pretending I could still see anything when actually I had my eyes shut to keep from dripping on Aadhya’s carefully written timetable. She put her hand on my shoulder, warm, and then she half put her arm around me, and I leaned into her a moment and then shook my head wildly and sucked in a big gulping breath, because I didn’t want to get started. What was the point? I couldn’t do anything about that, either.

I did ask him that night as we walked up to dinner, because I had to, just in case. He had the nerve to say, “El, you’re going to be fine,” in reassuring tones. “There’s plenty of mana in the pool, I’ll get more in now that there are more mals around, you’ve got Chloe and—”

“Shut up, you cartwheeling donkey,” I snarled at him, and he recoiled and wobbled between baffled and offended for a moment, then said, sounding confused, “Wait, are you worried about—?” and just stopped to gawk at me as though the shadow of the idea that any living being might at any point entertain a fraction of concern for his health and well-being had never crept across the windowsill of his molluscular brain, and I ran up the rest of the flight of stairs away from him because it was that or punch him in his beaky nose, which I’d caught myself idly thinking just that morning across the table at breakfast had a hint of young Marlon Brando, which might convey to you the depths to which I was sinking if your mum thinks, like mine does, that the height of appropriate children’s entertainment is antique movie musicals.

Aadhya and Liu and Chloe had gone on ahead, but I caught up to them before they actually went into the food line. “Thanks for holding a spot,” I said, grabbing a tray, without saying how it’d gone, and Chloe bit her lip and Liu looked sorry and thank goodness Aadhya just said, “What do you guys think of asking Jowani?” and got us discussing the merits.

I could list them out for you. He had a really top-notch perimeter-warning spell, the kind you cast once and then it lingers for half an hour; his was notable because it worked off intent rather than physical presence, which meant it would warn you about incorporeal mals. He’d give us a solid personal connection across our little trio of alliances, because Cora had teamed up with Ibrahim and Nadia and Yaakov. And boys are undeniably useful for heavy lifting; I was the closest thing to brawn on our team at the moment. The discrepancy hadn’t seemed as significant at the start of the year, but lately it felt like all the senior boys were expanding up and out when we weren’t looking, and they were suddenly doing things like toting an entire crate full of iron all the way across the shop under one arm.

You might think those all sound like minor advantages, and they were, relatively speaking. Everyone in the school could make themselves somewhat useful—that’s what all of us have been doing all four years of this, finding ways to make ourselves useful. And now that everyone knew I was very useful, we could have cherrypicked ourselves one of the top kids. In fact, I suspected that at least two of the near-miss valedictorian candidates had made overtures of their own to Aadhya: I’d seen them stopping by her room.

None of us raised those objections. We all agreed that Jowani would be helpful and a good strategic addition to round out our team. But we didn’t talk about why. We didn’t say that we didn’t want him to get left behind. Ever since Cora’s arm, we’d all been eating together as a group almost every day, and each day at the start of breakfast, he would bring out a tiny book full of incredibly thin pages—one for each day of four years, I realized after the first few times—and he’d softly recite out loud a short poem or an excerpt of one that his dad had copied out by hand into the book, in one of a dozen languages, each one a piece full of love and hope: have courage. His voice reading them smoothed out even my most snarling mornings.

Before then, I’d never heard him emit more than a monosyllable. I’d always assumed that was dislike on his part, but actually it hadn’t anything to do with me in the slightest. He had a stammer, which didn’t trip him up when he recited poetry, and luckily also not when he was casting spells, but made it almost impossible for him to get out a word in conversation unless he really knew you. And that was why he’d held on to Nkoyo’s social coattails past when that had stopped being a good idea, and why he was now having a lousy time of finding himself an alliance. And if he didn’t get an alliance, he wasn’t going to make it out.

We didn’t say any of that to one another. You didn’t, ever. Ibrahim and Yaakov and Nadia hadn’t taken Cora because they remembered making the circle around her, mana flowing through us all like a river to heal her arm, a gift that hadn’t cost anything but caring to give. They’d taken her because she and Nadia both knew how to dance spells—there’s quite a lot of spells that get more powerful if you dance them along with the incantation—and were now working out a magical sword-dancing routine using blades that Yaakov was making; Ibrahim had scored a major matter-phasing spell to put on them from one of his other enclaver friends, who’d traded it to him on the cheap after putting together his own alliance, as apology for not asking him. That was a good solid fighting team, and they’d got offers from at least two or three enclavers to join up. That was why. You couldn’t choose people because you liked them, or because you wanted them to live.

But we did scrape together good enough reasons to say yes to Jowani, and when we got to our table, Aadhya pulled him aside and asked him, and after that all three of our alliances were firmed up, and everyone agreed we’d go for the first run the very next morning. Even Orion. He was clearly not even bothering to think up any kind of plan for getting to the doors beyond Kill things until there aren’t any more, but he overheard us discussing the merits or lack thereof for going first thing, and how we’d have to keep a sharp eye out for any real maleficaria that had crept into the gym overnight and hidden in the course. At which he perked up and said, “Oh hey, do you mind if I come down with you?” It will shock you to hear that nobody minded.

So we all trooped down after breakfast the next morning. I hadn’t been back to the gym myself since Field Day. I was braced, but not enough. The place had got even worse. Some birdwitted freshmen—it could only have been freshmen—had replanted the big planters along the walls with seeds out of the alchemy supplies, and the spell machinery had worked them in, currently as hedges, so now you couldn’t even tell where the walls met the floor, and it was an even more perfect illusion of being outdoors. The big trees in the distance had let their leaves fall, and there was a feathery dusting of snow on their wet dark branches, broken by the occasional red huddle of a tiny bird, and every delicate blade of the grass underfoot was crisp with frost. Our breath fogged.

“What,” Jowani said, and stopped there, which actually did pretty well to encapsulate all our feelings, I think.

Well, not all our feelings. “It’s so nice, El,” Orion said to me, almost dreamily, arms outstretched and his face turned up to the artful flurry that the sky allowed to fall to greet us. “I can’t even tell we’re not outside.” I think he meant to be complimentary.

You could pick out the boundaries of the obstacle course with a good squint: there was a low wooden fence running down the halfway mark dividing the obstacle-course area off from the rest of the gym. But apart from that, the illusion artifice had integrated the obstacles fully into the environment: bristling thornbushes, trees with grabby-looking limbs, a steep hill covered with snow; a thin grey fog lying over a wide black slick of icy river ready to break into jagged shards and an ominous handful of ways to cross: a thin rickety board, a scattering of slippery rocks poking up above the ice, a healthier-looking narrow stone bridge that was undoubtedly the most dangerous option. If you looked up at the inside of the gym doors, they seemed to be two enormous iron gates set in the wall of a mysterious and alluring stone tower.

We’d already started wrong. The best way to use the obstacle course is to just throw yourself at it instantly, the first time you see it, without taking time to look it over. After you come out bruised and limping—assuming you do come out—that’s when you go over all the things you did wrong, and try new things the rest of the week, and then the new course comes out on Monday and you do it all over again. And if you’re lucky, every week you get better at doing it the first time, with no planning. You don’t get any planning time at graduation. But in our defense: What.

“Let’s get going before the next teams show up,” I said. Then I realized that everyone else was waiting for me, which was both obvious and terrifying. I stared out at the perfectly lovely expanse of winter-touched wilderness. Any mals out there were in hiding, except for the faint dancing lights visible on the other side of the river, glowing in colors through the fog, exactly as if will-o’-wisps had moved in to take up residence, only those are largely decorative constructs and not much use for the purposes of practice. They might have been some variety of soul-eater, but real soul-eaters that close to one another would have merged into one very hungry soul-eater, so a pack of them wasn’t much use for practice, either. But that would be useless in a more dangerous and unpleasant direction, and therefore more likely. The fake mals the course produces are very much like the ones that get put on display in Maleficaria Studies—just because they’re not real doesn’t mean they can’t kill you, and sometimes the real ones sneak in and pretend to be fake just long enough to get hold of you. But we weren’t doing ourselves any favors by waiting to find out which these were. I took a deep breath, nodded to Liu, who started playing the lute, and I sang out the mana-amplification spell in a slightly squeaky voice and ran straight in.

The snow burst open all around us before we were more than a stride away from the doors, jagged scything blades curving out with the tips lunging for our guts, and after that I couldn’t tell you what order any of it came in. We had to cross the river both ways, both going and coming, but I don’t remember whether I turned it to lava on the way out or the way back. We didn’t actually make contact with the wall, since the gym illusion was trying very hard to convince us there wasn’t one: when we got close, a sudden blizzard came howling into our faces with quavery ghost voices, telling us to turn back.

Actually the lava was definitely on the way in, because on our way back out, the obstacle course was still trying to reset around the lava spell, so instead the river fired geysers of superheated steam at us through cracks in the ice. One of them caught Yaakov’s leg. He fervently yelled out what I’m absolutely sure were wild curses with every step the rest of the way back to the doors: he was usually such a nice, proper boy, carefully polite; it would’ve been funny under any other circumstances. But not here: it meant he was in the kind of desperate pain where all you can do is drop where you are and howl, and he couldn’t do that, because he’d die. The instant he got out into the corridor, he did drop, and started trying to pull out a bandage to wrap around the blistering skin, still gasping curses under his breath with tears gathering in his eyes. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t unroll it.

“You can’t keep yelling!” Ibrahim snapped, even as he dropped to a knee next to him. He dragged his arm across his forehead—not very effective; each one smudged some streaks of blood on the other—and took the bandage out of Yaakov’s hands to put it on for him.

“No,” Liu said, panting; she was on her knees on the floor mostly draped around the long neck of the sirenspider lute. “No, it was all right. It went into the music. We should all yell, I think, or sing.” She was better off than most of us; she’d been playing the whole way from inside the sheltered place at the center of our alliance.

Chloe was shivering with her eyes wide enough to be on the edge of shock, and she was fumbling out some bandages of her own; Jowani was helping her. Her whole right side—the exposed side—had been perforated with one too-close swipe from one of those clawing tree branches, blood and skin showing through open gaps in her clothes from her shoulder down to her thigh, the frayed edges stained dark. Aadhya had been bringing up the rear; she was standing with her arms wrapped around herself, her hands still clenched tight on the fighting-sticks she’d made for the run. I didn’t see any wounds, but she looked pretty sick. I was just about to go to her when she pulled in a deep breath and then went to Liu to look at the lute and make sure it had stayed in tune.

Nkoyo’s team had been hit by a spray of razor-blade-sized slivers of sharpened ice and were all even bloodier than the rest of us, except for their resident enclaver, a boy named Khamis from Zanzibar, who’d been very firmly ensconced in the most protected spot in their team, at the center. He was an alchemist and armed only with a bandolier of spray bottles, one of which he was wielding right now on Nkoyo’s slashed arm: the wound underneath was disappearing along with the blood as she wiped tears from her face.

All of us were freaked out and shaking, from a dozen near-death experiences crammed into the span of five minutes and also from the even worse knowledge that this was nothing, absolutely nothing. It was the first obstacle course on the first day after New Year’s, it was warm-up material, and there was nowhere to go from here but a long steep road uphill all the way. Most of us were used to being jumped by mals, but there’s a substantial difference between one attack and an unending stream of them. About half of us were crying, and the other half wanted to cry.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

“Hey, that looked pretty good,” Orion said encouragingly, coming to join us with a bounce in his step and the mangled corpse of something spiky dangling from his hand: he’d somehow managed to sniff out the one real mal hiding amidst the fakes. Normally every word out of his mouth automatically produces a burst of adulation, but everyone in our group had spent enough time sitting at meals with him for the shine to wear off a bit, and under the circumstances, they all glared at him with pure hatred. I’m fairly certain I saved him from bodily harm when I interrupted his attempt to dig himself a deeper grave—“I mean, you all made it okay”—and said, “Lake, what is that dead thing and why are you carrying it around?”

“Oh, it’s—I don’t know, actually,” he said, lifting it up: it had a vaguely Doberman-sized body with dachshund legs and was covered with narrow cone-like spikes that had tiny holes at the tips. I had no idea what it was myself. Mals are always mutating, or being mutated, or new ones get made, et cetera. “The spikes put out some kind of gas. I didn’t want to leave it out there; it was covered with snow and the gas blended into the fog. I thought somebody might step on it.” Very thoughtful of him.

Other seniors were beginning to cautiously trickle down from breakfast by then. As we dragged ourselves off to lick our wounds both metaphorical and literal, I overheard someone asking Aadhya, “Hey, you’re taking first run?” and she shrugged and said, “We’re thinking about it,” meaning that we were open to offers: at least one or two teams would be glad to bribe us to be the very first ones through the doors, so they could come down bright and early themselves and still know that someone else had already cleared the way. If we were going to do it anyway, we might as well get paid for it.

She negotiated the arrangement at lunchtime, with three alliances who wanted to share the time slot after us, and got us a promise of cleanup help from them, meaning we wouldn’t have to waste our own healing and mending supplies. That was a good deal for us: helping us right after we slogged out meant they had to wait instead of starting their own runs before anyone else showed. They agreed because they had to wait anyway: the obstacle course took a good long while to finish resetting itself after we’d gone through.

Normally that process takes place in the time it takes for the doors to close on your heels and open up again. The runs aren’t actually real. A thousand wizards all hurling their most powerful spells around three times a week would wreck the place almost instantly, and also if we were actually casting our most powerful spells, we wouldn’t have enough mana for graduation, our works of artifice would get worn out, our potions would get used up, et cetera. So instead the obstacle-course magic fades everything out: when you cast spells inside, it feels the same, but you’re only casting half of one percent of a spell, and the course fakes the reaction so it’s as if you’ve cast the full thing. You think you’re taking a big swallow of potion, but it’s being diluted down; you think you’re using a piece of artifice, but it’s wrapped in a traveling-protection spell. And when you come out, swish, everything goes back to normal—except for any injuries you’ve picked up, those are entirely persistent, the better to encourage rapid improvement—and the next round of eager seniors gets to go in.

And all of that works because we voluntarily enter the course: consent is the only way for someone else’s magic to get at your mana and your brain on that level. Well, except for violence. There’s always violence.

However, apparently there was still substantial effort required to clean up even one half of one percent of a giant river full of lava. The particular spell I’d used on the river this morning had come from an overambitious maleficer from the Avanti kingdom who decided his evil fortress would be much more impressive if only it was surrounded by a moat of lava. How right he’d been. The teams behind us had been forced to twiddle their thumbs on the threshold for ten minutes until the doors opened up again on the charming wintry landscape of murder.

We spent the rest of the day the way we’d be spending all our days from now on: gathered around a table in the library, going over every move we’d made and trying to decide what we’d done wrong. As noted, I had almost no idea what moves I’d made, and no one else did, either, which made our first postmortem difficult. Everyone did very clearly remember the river boiling up into lava, points to me, so we frittered away quite a lot of time discussing whether we should make that the centerpiece of our strategy: just have me bang a molten river of magma down the middle of the graduation hall, throw a cooling spell on our feet, and all run along it to the doors. It did sound good, nice and simple, but there are plenty of mals who are just fine with even boiling-lava amounts of heat, and anyway every single kid would get on the highway to heaven right behind us, which would concentrate mal attention too much. Mals would force each other into the lava by sheer pressure of numbers, and the second wave would climb over the charred bodies to get at us. Also, not only would the maw-mouths not mind the heat, they’d just flop parts of themselves over onto the path and make it their serving tray as soon as we started running towards them. It’s not like we could just stop. There aren’t a lot of cooling spells that will last long if you keep standing on lava for any length of time.

“What if you throw it across the room the other way, right behind us?” Khamis said. “You could keep the mals off our backs.”

I said levelly, “I’d also block any other kids behind us.”

He clearly considered that their lookout and not ours, but he was a smart guy; he didn’t say so to my face. I’m fairly sure he did say so to Nkoyo’s face, though, in the vein of Can’t you reason with your silly friend? I saw him pull her back to talk to her as we went downstairs for dinner, and she was all controlled resignation when she got to the queue, her usual sparkle dimmed.

There was a man who came to the commune once with his girlfriend and patronized everyone, asking overly polite questions with a sneer in the smile that he always tacked on, and you all really believe in this sort of thing? It was a familiar sneer: the exact one that filled my own heart every time someone tried to tell me earnestly about how I would really clear my chakras if only I would wear this set of beads or that magnetic copper bracelet. They’d always get wound up when I told them that putting on a thing churned out of a machine from ore that had been strip-mined by underpaid laborers wasn’t likely to improve my mana balance any. But I still hated this wanker the instant he turned up. He’d only come, as far as I could tell, to make his girlfriend feel bad about having a nice weekend doing yoga in the woods with people kind enough to ask her how she was feeling, even if they did it with a bunch of blather about her chakras.

The tired way she had looked, that was how Nkoyo looked, and it made me just as cross to see, cross enough that back at the commune I’d actually gone up to the guy and told him that he should get out and stay away. He laughed and smiled at me and I just stood there looking at him, because that usually did the trick even though I was only eleven years old at the time, and fifteen minutes later he did indeed leave. But he made his girlfriend go with him.

So I didn’t go tell Khamis to get out. I just made sure to bus my tray with Nkoyo and told her, “Feel free to tell that prick that I kicked off at you when you even tried to suggest the idea,” and she glanced at me and her mouth quirked, a little of the sparkle coming back. I should have felt proud of myself; I’m sure Mum would have told me I’d grown. I’m afraid all I felt was an even more passionate desire to drop Khamis down a maintenance shaft.

When we ran the course again two days later—we each get to go every other day; anyone who tries to hog the course more than that starts to have unpleasant experiences, like for example their spells not working at all at a critical juncture—I didn’t turn the whole river to lava. Instead I summoned just enough lava at the bottom of it to boil the whole thing up while simultaneously cooling the lava down. The variety of traps and simulated mals lurking in the river almost all got encased in the new stone, or at least became completely visible, and we could just walk across at any point we liked.

“El, that was the right thing to do,” Liu said to me afterwards, intently. We’d made it to the far end and back without any serious bloodletting that time, which made that seem obvious, but she meant it more generally. “It was the right thing to do because it gave us choices. Having a choice is the most important thing.”

I’d heard that before. It’s a bullet-point line in the graduation handbook: As a general rule, regardless of the specific situation in which you find yourself, at every step you must take care to preserve or widen the number of your options. It hadn’t quite sunk in properly, but now it did. Having a choice meant being able to choose something that worked for you and whatever you were carrying and whatever you’d prepared. Having a choice meant you got to choose getting out.

Liu looked back at the doors. “Six months left.” I nodded. We went upstairs to get back to work.