Chapter 9: Drencher

Of course, nobody elseeven noticed my grand noble decision to save all their lives, as I started with the only thing I could think of, which was in fact just not going through the gym doors until everyone else had made it out. But that wasn’t noticeable, because given this week’s ridiculous course, that was the only sensible thing to do. The course usually doesn’t change throughout the week, but we thought possibly this one time there would be additional attacks during our second and third runs, because it was so aggressively useless otherwise, but no. For that whole week, for everyone who ran it, that’s all the course was: a good sprint with one not-actually-surprise attack at the end.

Even if I had been full of ironclad determination to abandon everyone behind me and run through the graduation gates at the first chance, it would still have been stupid to let my teammates get picked off in the gym during practices.

So no one batted an eye when I stopped at the doors on Wednesday and Friday and turned round to disintegrate the entire forest of vines even as they came whipping out. We didn’t even discuss strategy or anything; there wasn’t any strategy to discuss, except to agree after the Wednesday run that Nkoyo and Khamis should just take Friday off and build mana while they healed up. That wasn’t even a nice break for them; it was making the best of a bad situation. None of us wanted a break. What we wanted was more of the practice that we desperately needed to get out alive. Personally, I wanted it even more than I had before.

I tried going round the school hunting with Orion to make up for it, but that was even more useless. Nothing whatsoever attacked us, and if there was ever a faint scritching noise somewhere, he’d instantly abandon me and take off at top speed to go and get it. At best I’d catch up and there he’d be satisfied with himself standing over some dead thing. At worst, I’d have to spend half an hour wandering around the seminar-room labyrinth trying to find him again. Wait, no, sorry. At worst, I spent half an hour wandering around trying to find him, slipped in a giant puddle of goo that was the solitary remnant of whatever thing he’d killed, and then gave up and found him in the cafeteria eating lunch, still satisfied with himself. He didn’t say outright that I’d asked to be covered in goo, but his expression was perfectly explicit. At that point I realized the only thing I was going to kill was him, so I gave it up.

Then the next week rolled round, the course changed again, and the school made clear it was more than ready to make up for the slow week. We couldn’t cover ten meters of ground before yet another thing came at our heads. To fully convey the experience, on Friday the previous course had taken us a grand total of three minutes start-to-finish, including the time it took for me to wither all the vines into dust. Even on a more typical course, the average run only takes ten minutes. When a real graduation run takes more than fifteen minutes, it normally means you aren’t getting out at all.

On Monday, I didn’t come out until the twenty-seven-minute mark, into a crowd: we’d taken so long that there were about eight other alliances already downstairs and waiting outside the doors for their turn. None of them looked very enthusiastic. Usually you avoid finding out what’s in the obstacle course so you can have a blind first run, but this time the waiting teams were all busily interrogating everyone in our group who’d come out, and going into huddled negotiations with other alliances to run it together.

I don’t think my appearance was reassuring. I emerged trailing clouds of dark-green smoke flickering phosphorescent with crackles of lightning, the dwindling remnants of the hurricane I’d whipped up to dissolve the shambling army of frozen-mud-things. There was also the large ring of glowing orange-purple balefire spheres orbiting round my waist. The workings all fizzled out as I came through the doors, but they hung in the air just long enough to make a fashion statement of the behold your dark goddess variety, and anyway I’d been standing there just short of the threshold for five minutes, siccing spheres and thunderbolts on strategic targets to clear a way to the doors. Everyone else on our three teams was staggering. Nkoyo even sat down in the corridor right there and shut her eyes and leaned her head on Khamis’s shoulder when he sat down next to her. The worst of the gouged marks around her throat were barely healed and some of the scabs had cracked and bled again.

“Righty-o, who wants a rundown?” I said, waving away the last trailers of smoke in as prosaic a way as I could manage. Which wasn’t very, but desperation still drove people to talk to me, or at least to creep close enough to overhear what I said to the braver ones. I stayed there in the corridor for the next ten minutes, answering questions to help everyone work out their strategy for running the course. Then the four alliances who’d been lined up to go after us gave it a go, together. They made it about ten meters from the door and then gave up and ran back out. At that point, everyone else just left. The new course was useless in the opposite way: it was too hard for anyone to get through. Except for me.

On Wednesday morning, we came out of our run after only fourteen minutes; we’d thought up loads of better ways for me to take out everything in our path. There was nobody outside waiting at all. We had to patch ourselves up, which went slowly; everyone in our group was exhausted. Except for me. I felt energized and extremely ready for lunch.

During which, it occurred to me that if no one else was trying, the course was wide open. Normally the school goes after you if you try to run the course more than three times a week, to keep people from hogging it, but you’re allowed to take an extra run if there’s literally nobody else queued. “I’ll be up to the library in a bit,” I said abruptly to everyone as we got up to clear our trays. “Come on, Lake.”

Orion whinged all the way down the stairs—all the real mals had abandoned the gym, since nobody was down there trying to run the course, so as far as he was concerned there wasn’t any point—but he gave in and came with me. We ran it together.

It was an even worse idea than hunting with him, in a completely different way. Blazing through endless hordes of fake mals, Orion killing them left and right in a sulky bored way and keeping me clear, with no one at my back I had to worry about, utterly free, utterly fearless. I made him do it three times in a row, and when he balked at a fourth run, I jumped him right there in front of the gym doors. We were kissing and everything was going really well in my opinion, and then he put a hand on the side of my breast mostly by accident and panicked and jerked back from me and babbled, “I’ve got, it’s, uh, I didn’t, you have, we,” incoherently, and nearly walked himself backwards right onto the corpse of the very real drencher he’d killed in our first run, which was still sopping wet and perfectly capable of dissolving the flesh off his feet and legs if he touched it on his own. I had to jump after him and drag him to one side, and he didn’t even notice why, he just pulled free of me and fled, leaving me standing alone in front of the doors.

But this time, not even that humiliation could bring me down. I went upstairs breathing deep and full of my own power, helplessly happy, even though it had obviously been stupid in every respect. I’d already known that I could get out if I didn’t bother worrying about anyone else. I didn’t need to shove my own face in how lovely and easy it would be, and especially I didn’t need to contemplate how much fun I could have with Orion in the process.

If I had needed help recognizing the stupidity of it all, Precious was waiting eagerly to provide it, perched on a shelf just inside the library doors. We weren’t taking the mice with us on the obstacle course; they weren’t the kind of familiars that help in combat situations, so instead we were practicing with small stuffed balls tucked into safe places in our gear. But I didn’t need to be bitten on the ear by the time I got up there; I’d had several long flights of stairs on which to contemplate the folly of my ways. “Yeah,” I told her shortly as I reached up to take her down, and she just nosed at the knuckle of my thumb and scampered back into her bandolier cup.

In the reading room, I stopped by one of the teams Aadhya had made our cleanup deal with, and told them if they did come down on Friday, I’d do another run with them after ours. They all stared at me like a herd of wildebeest being offered safe passage across the Nile by a very large crocodile. “Or don’t,” I said crossly. “I can use the practice if you want it, that’s all.”

They couldn’t decide that they did, but evidently they shared the offer around to get opinions, because on Friday, the other two teams were waiting when we came out. They didn’t actually ask me outright to go with them, like I was a person or anything; they just looked at me sidelong. I swallowed it and told Aadhya shortly, “I’ll see you upstairs,” and after my team had gone off down the hall, I said, “Let’s go,” and marched myself back in.

The other team weren’t as good as mine—or at least they weren’t as good as we’d become after six weeks of running the course together—but I got them all out again still alive. I did have to turn one of them to stone at one point to save her from being bitten in half, but I turned her back afterwards, so I don’t see what the problem was.

Everyone but me was waiting with enormous anticipation for that course to be swapped out, but on Monday, the next one was just as bad. All three of our cleanup-crew teams were waiting by the open doors when we came out, with their faces blankly appalled. I turned right round and did another run with them, and when we got out, there was a new team waiting—Liesel’s team. After New Year’s, she’d apparently crossed Magnus off and had instead settled for allying with Alfie, from London. I didn’t know what she had against the Munich enclave, which had three strapping senior boys to choose from if that was really one of her primary criteria, but there was presumably something, since these days Munich was a better choice than London for a German girl who was apparently viciously determined to get a seat on a top-tier enclave council before she was thirty. Unless there was something especially right with Alfie, but I hadn’t seen any notable signs of that in the last three years and change.

“El, how are you?” he said, exactly as if we hadn’t seen each other for ages and he was delightfully surprised to find me here.

I ignored him and said to Liesel, “Right, let’s go.” She nodded back coldly and we went. A woman after my own heart.

Also, she was really good. She wasn’t Orion, but she was miles better than anyone else I’d run with, even though I tried not to notice out of loyalty. Her whole team was better, actually. Even Alfie wasn’t remotely a weak link: he’d taken the middle, obviously, but he wasn’t sitting there cowering; he was using the position to throw complicated defensive spells to all sides to cover everyone else, and he was really good at it. He had fast reflexes and what must have been an encyclopedic defensive collection that he knew backwards and forward: he kept steadily pitching exactly the right spell at exactly the right time to exactly the right place, so the rest of us could just trust him and go totally on the offensive. We made it through in eleven minutes; it had taken me twenty-two on the first run with my team.

Of course, twenty-two was better than never, which is what it would’ve been for Liesel and company if they hadn’t had me along. They all flinched when we got to the homestretch and the icy ground we’d been running over abruptly folded itself up round us into towering slabs toothed with jagged spikes the size of tyrannosaur femurs, and seething with ectoplasmic vapors that suggested they had psychic form and not just physical. Alfie threw up what was the very best group shield I’d ever seen, which might have held for one or two hits, but there literally wasn’t anywhere to go.

Until I spoke the seventh spell of binding from The Fruitful Vine, which was the very first Marathi-language spellbook ever written. It was put together by a group of poet-incanters from the Pune area who wanted more spells in their own vernacular—the better you know a language and understand its nuances, the better your spellcasting is going to be—so they gathered for a writing and spell-trading session. It went so well that they formed a long-term circle and kept going, their spells went on getting more and more powerful, and eventually the collection was so valuable they were able to trade just the one book to Jaipur for enclave-building spells.

Immediately after which, their group imploded into a massive internecine fight. Most of them died and a few went to Jaipur and a couple of others renounced magic and purged all their mana and went to live in the wilderness as ascetics, and that’s why there’s no enclave in Pune. But before that, they wrote some real corkers, including this series of increasingly complex binding spells, the hardest of which really only ever gets hunted up by the sort of maleficer who wants to bind one of the more nasty mals in the manifestation category as a personal servant. Well, or by a circle of decent wizards trying to get rid of one of those mals, but you can guess why the school gave me a copy. The soles had started to come off my trainers halfway through my freshman year, and I thought I was being adequately specific when I asked the void for a spell to securely bind them back up, but no. You’d be amazed at how little call I’ve had in the last four years for a pet benibel that would need to be fed on a steady diet of human corpses, although I suppose you could accuse me of a lack of imagination.

But it was just the spell you wanted when facing a possessed entity the size of a glacier. This was my third time through this course, and I’d got the hang of doing it, so it was fairly painless as an experience; I just banged out the spell, commanded the gnashing ice peaks to lie flat, and off to the doors we went. But that didn’t make it less maddening for Liesel and her crew. The problem was, no one other than myself, no matter how brilliant or hardworking, could have done much of anything in the situation. Even if you’d got hold of the binding spell, it normally calls for a circle of twelve wizards chanting for an hour. Her face was rigid with fury when we got out the doors. I didn’t even blame her for stalking off without so much as a thank-you. Alfie was better programmed, so he did say, “Thanks, El, fair play,” before going after her, but even for him it was mechanical.

By lunchtime word had got round, and everyone started to panic. Aside from the very real danger of dying for basic lack of practice, the new course made no sense in a particularly alarming way. There are some mals as big as mountains out there in the world, but you might as well say there are blue whales in the world. If a blue whale happened to appear smack in the middle of the graduation hall, it would certainly present a challenge to us all, but it wouldn’t have got there on its own initiative. So why was something like that suddenly showing up in the obstacle course? Either the school was just throwing it at us out of nastiness, on the justification that at least one student could get past it, even if that made the course totally useless to everyone who didn’t have me along—which would be bad enough—or there was something on that scale down below.

No one else could think of any other reason why it was happening; as far as they knew, nothing had changed. I was the only one who knew what had changed. I’d changed. And the brutal courses were too obviously a response. You want to save everybody, you silly girl? Right, let’s make that harder for you: nobody gets any practice the rest of the term, so they’ll all be panicking and fumbling around down in the hall. Good luck saving them then.

I wasn’t sharing my grand plan, though, so everyone else kept laboring onward in ignorance and spreading alarm. That afternoon in the library, a couple other teams got up the desperation to ask me to do a run, and the next morning, Ibrahim did them one worse: he cornered me on my bleary way to the girls’ and sidled round the subject for nearly five minutes before I finally understood that he was trying to work out if I had any sort of opinion about him kissing Yaakov.

He hadn’t done anything wrong by Scholomance standards, not telling me. You do have to disclose any conflict of interest like that to your potential allies before you ask them to go with you and your significant other—it clearly wasn’t an accident that in his team, he was in the lead and Yaakov was bringing up the rear, the two most dangerous positions and the most separated, where they wouldn’t have a chance to ditch the others and take off together. But I wasn’t one of his allies. My name wasn’t written up on the wall with him and Yaakov, so he hadn’t owed me a thing, my opinion shouldn’t have made a difference. But here he was trying to find it out, as though it should have mattered.

It was horrible, and I couldn’t even howl at him, because it did matter, now, by the standard operating procedure of Scholomance losers. Aadhya had made a tactical deal for us with their alliance, but it’s always understood in those deals that either side has the right to jettison the other and trade up if the opportunity permits. And the opportunity did permit, now that I had become an extremely scarce and valuable resource. If we took the chance to, oh, upgrade to running with Liesel and Alfie, Ibrahim and his team would suddenly be just as stuck as everyone else who didn’t have me to run with.

And it wasn’t an accident that he and Yaakov hadn’t let on that they weren’t just friends, all those nights we were sitting together studying in Chloe’s room. We’re all fairly nose-to-grindstone in here, but one of the most reliable topics of conversation was nevertheless gossip about who was dating who or wanted to. It was second only to gossip about who was getting allied with who.

There wasn’t actually very much of the gossip to be had, because oddly enough constantly being on the verge of malnourishment, exhaustion, and mortal terror isn’t really conducive to romance, but we extracted all the entertainment we could from the couples that managed to have the energy—most of which involved at least one enclaver, unsurprisingly. We knew when Jamaal started coordinating his snack runs at the same time as a girl from Cairo—her with a group of girls, him with a group of boys, all very by the book. We knew that Jermaine from New York had spent the last year in a competitive love triangle with a boy from Atlanta over one of the top alchemists, and we all knew when in a perfect storm of gossipy delight it turned into a trio and an alliance, halfway through the first month of term. Everyone else also had the fun of pestering me about Orion while they were at it. Ibrahim and Yaakov had decided not to share the information. They’d decided it was a risk they couldn’t afford to take.

Lots of enclavers, especially from the most powerful Western enclaves, like to go on about how enlightened wizard society is, relative to the masses of the mundanes. From their rarefied perspective, I suppose it’s true. Spend decades recruiting the most brilliant wizards from all round the world, because they’re the ones who can best save your kids’ lives and make your enclave even richer and more powerful, then you can look round your diverse and tolerant international enclave and pat yourself on the back in a congratulatory way. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any bigots among us. It only means that we’ve got this one additional dividing line of our own that stops right at the enclave doors, and it’s sharp enough to cut your throat.

And Ibrahim wasn’t on the safe side of that line. He’s not an enclaver; he’s not one of the top students, who could count on getting an alliance with one. His primary gift, the one talent that he’d marshaled to get himself all the way through school and into his alliance with Jamaal—the boy from Dubai who was going with his team—was that he was a really determined and enthusiastic suck-up. If you liked a tidy bit of flattery and someone who’d cheer you on and comfort you when you were down, pat you on the back and tell you that you were brilliant and in the right even if you were really quite blatantly in the wrong, help you talk your way through any inconvenient fits of guilt or conscience, then he was your lad, and loads of enclavers did indeed like that.

Which is hardly a unique approach. Roughly half of the indie kids are at least partly on the minion track: some of them offer up labor or muscle; the more desperate ones offer themselves up more or less explicitly as human shields. They take the worst seats at the cafeteria tables and in the classrooms; they fetch supplies and drop off homework; they walk the enclaver kids to their dorm rooms at night and keep watch for them in the showers without even asking for turnabout. Because almost all enclavers except the very richest ones will end up with a few filler positions in their alliances, open to average kids who can do four or five decent castings in ten minutes and have built a modest sum of mana on top of their schoolwork, and have been lucky enough to stay able-bodied and in solid physical condition through years in the Scholomance.

That was the kind of opening Ibrahim was aiming for, his whole time here. He didn’t have other options. He was perfectly competent, but that didn’t make him anything special, not by the standards of the graduation hall. And if you’re on the minion track, you can’t afford to prioritize anything as unimportant as your most passionately held beliefs or your deepest emotional needs. You don’t even get to prioritize your own bloody life when you’re going down the stairs first with your heart in your throat, just so if there is something waiting, it’ll get you instead of the enclaver seven steps behind you, who you’re both pretending really hard is being such a good friend for letting you have the chance.

That was why he’d kept it quiet. He wanted to keep the option to glom on to an enclaver who was the kind of rusty hinge who cared about other people’s business, and now he was asking me if I was one of those—because his life depended on it.

I wanted to yell at him in a fury and stomp away, but I couldn’t. He looked ready to cry, the way you would if you had to desperately beg some girl you’d been rude to on the regular for your life and the life of someone you loved. He’d have been a complete nutter not to lie to me in any way I wanted him to, if that got me to keep running with his alliance. For that matter, if he were really clever, he’d know I didn’t care and have the conversation anyway, as an excuse to exhibit his commitment to servility.

But I knew Ibrahim wasn’t that kind of clever. He was so good at sucking up because he was sincere about it. I think he really liked people to begin with—a foreign concept to me—and he was earnestly starry-eyed. He’d kept on sucking up to Orion long after it’d become clear that Orion wasn’t in the market for minions. For that matter, Ibrahim had been stupid enough to fall in love inside school; and it really had to be love, because hooking up with Yaakov for an alliance was an obviously bad idea that had put them both in those more dangerous spots.

So instead I muttered, “I’m not a wanker, Haddad. Have your own fun. See you tomorrow morning,” ungraciously, and then stomped away.

That same day at lunchtime, Magnus had the bald-faced cheek to ask Chloe to pass along an invitation to join his team if I still wanted more practice, which I suppose in his mind was the equivalent of Ibrahim’s desperate begging. I gritted my teeth and did a run with them that afternoon. They were just as good as Liesel’s team, and they would have been just as dead without me.

When I went down with my own team again on Wednesday morning, there were roughly thirty people downstairs waiting even before we got there, and they were all angry—furiously angry. They still didn’t know I meant to help them. What they did know was, if they wanted any practice, they had to go to me hat-in-hand for help that they weren’t going to have on graduation day, because of course I wasn’t going to help them then, and when they saw thirty other kids lined up to ask, they knew that today was the day I’d start charging for my help, and I’d want things they couldn’t afford to give away.

I don’t know if I could have fixed the situation by telling them I was going to save them all. I don’t think they’d have believed me. But I can’t say for certain, because I didn’t even try. They were looking at my friends; they were looking at Aadhya and Liu and all the people who’d taken a chance on me; and they were losers looking at enclavers, except fifteen minutes ago they’d been the enclavers, the ones who were going to live. Alfie with Liesel and the brilliant team she’d built, Magnus and his wolf pack; they hadn’t spent four years being slowly taught over and over that another kid had the right to live and they hadn’t.

And I could see in their faces that if they could have taken me, if I’d been a piece of artifice they could wrestle away or steal, they would have: they’d have used every unfair advantage they had and gone after my friends, and at this very moment probably most of them were trying to think of some way to do it, just like Magnus with his Field Day stunt.

“Lots of us up for first run today,” Alfie said, in the bright sort of way that someone might say, Well, looks like rain, doesn’t it! when it’s sheeting down and you’ve taken shelter under an awning with five people who’ve all got knives drawn, and you’re quietly reaching into your pocket for a handgun.

So I didn’t say anything reassuring like, You can stop fretting already, Orion and I are going to get all of you useless gits out. I didn’t even say anything sensible about going with everyone in turn. Chloe glanced at me and I could see her getting ready to say something sensible for me, play peacemaker with the enclave boys, and before she could, I said, “No sense waiting for any more to show,” and I marched for the doors, flung them open, and sailed in. There was a confused scramble behind me, and then everyone reached the same conclusion at the same time: if they wanted to be sure of getting in a run with me, they had to go now. They all poured in after me together.

Doing the course with fifty people at once isn’t normally a good idea, because you make it through all right, but you don’t get enough practice. That wasn’t a problem when we were being deluged from all sides. I realized afterwards that actually it had been terrific practice for me, the closest I could get to the real thing, all of us being dumped into a sea of maleficaria at once. But right then in the moment, I didn’t have time to think about anything but fighting, casting desperately in every direction to take out attacks that were about to overwhelm someone’s defenses. It was like one of those horrible twitchy games where there are seventeen things to do on separate timers and you frantically dash from one to the next and you’re always on the verge of missing one. It was just like that, except I had forty-seven timers running, and if I missed even one of them, somebody was going to die. It was a massive relief when we got to the final attack and I could just cast the one nice relaxing hideously powerful spell and let everyone else run for the gates while I held the eldritch glacier down.

We limped out with skins more or less intact but utterly exhausted. Even I felt drained, my whole rib cage aching; my heart was banging around inside like it’d had an argument with my lungs and now it was in the kitchen putting pots and pans away angrily while they tried to find a way out through my breastbone. Which I suppose was good really, as it meant I’d got some proper exercise in, but I wasn’t for taking the long view at the moment. Some other teams had come down and were waiting, but after I staggered out, they took off without even trying to bribe me for a run, so I gather I looked the way I felt.

There wasn’t any conversation afterwards. Aadhya said, “I want a shower,” and I said, “Yeah,” and basically all twenty-seven girls of our group trudged off to the showers together. It was almost time for Orion to harvest the amphisbaena for Liesel; the juveniles had stopped coming through with the water a week ago or so and now were just hissing and banging impotently at us from inside the showerheads like the steam pipes had gone mad. There was one moment when the wall cracked around one of the showerheads and the amphisbaena inside started to thrash around wildly to try and finish breaking out, but it was just an amphisbaena, so the girl using the shower didn’t even stop rinsing her hair, she just grabbed a long enchanted stiletto-knife out of her bathroom bag and stabbed it into the opening. The showerhead stopped moving around. It would be unpleasant if the dead amphisbaena started rotting in there, but probably the others would eat it before that happened.

None of us talked. We took our turns washing in almost complete silence broken only by the occasional “has anyone got shampoo to trade for toothpaste” and the like. We got our clothes back on and straggled up to the library for our respective postmortems, and still no one said anything to me or to each other until I sat down at our group’s table. But the boys were there waiting for us—and stinking, which was a lot more noticeable since we’d got ourselves clean—and before I’d even quite got my arse in the chair, Khamis demanded peremptorily, “What was that?” like he’d been holding the words back on a tight leash until I got in range and he could let them loose.

I gawked at him. Yes, I’m perpetually complaining about everyone cringing away from me, but of all the people to think they could safely have a go at me without getting knocked back—and then I had a moment of even greater indignation as I realized he’d been biting his tongue for a month the same way I had, waiting until enough of the term was gone and we’d locked things down and I couldn’t shove him off anymore without crossing the line of what passes for common decency in here.

“What’s the matter, Mwinyi?” I snapped back. “Picked up a splinter today?”

“What’s the matter?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter! Six times today—six times—Fareeda went down.” He jerked a thumb at poor Fareeda, who was just sitting down herself, three chairs away from him. She was an artificer friend of Nkoyo’s I didn’t know very well, and she very clearly did not think she could safely have a go at me. She darted her eyes between us and slid the rest of the way into her chair while doing her best to convey that her entire being was on another plane of existence and it was just a mistake on our parts if we thought she was there. “On Monday, she only went down once. What do you say about that?”

There’s a lovely spell I know that makes your victim’s organs all desiccate while still inside them. The original was developed ages ago for perfectly respectable mummification purposes and fell out of fashion roughly along with that practice, but the version I’ve got is the really nasty nineteenth-century English one that everyone’s favorite Victorian maleficer, Ptolomey Ponsonby, worked up in translation out of his father’s collection of Egyptian artifacts. At the moment, I felt roughly as though someone were casting it on me.

“She didn’t stay down, did she?” I squeezed out of my shriveling entrails. Khamis wasn’t wrong to be concerned if Fareeda was going down a lot: she was in their team’s lead position. She’d spent all the fall semester building a massive forward shield, which would have been a bad strategy on an individual level except it had bought her a place in an enclaver’s alliance, even if it was an extremely dangerous place.

“Nkoyo pulled her up three times, James pulled her up twice. I got her up once myself,” Khamis said. “What were you doing? I’ll tell you. You were taking out a razorwing coming at Magnus Tebow. I don’t see Magnus at this table. Do you think we’re putting ourselves out to cover you so you can help all your New York friends?”

Chloe was on Aadhya’s other side, or on the astral plane along with Fareeda—almost everyone at the table was halfway to joining her, or trying to transmute themselves into unmanned ventriloquist dummies—but at that she let out a small strangled squawk, and then covered her mouth and looked away when everyone glanced at her.

“Tebow had a really good go at killing me about seven months ago, right in that corner over there,” I said, stupidly grateful for Khamis to have given me ground I thought I could stand on. “I wouldn’t lift a finger to put him at the gates ahead of one single person in this school.”

“Ah, so he’s not your friend,” Khamis said, loading on the sarcasm. “You don’t like him, you don’t want New York to take you.”

“El’s already got a guaranteed spot,” Chloe said, obviously deciding that she had to come in after all if this was going to be some kind of challenge to New York.

Everyone round the table twitched instinctively; it’s the kind of gossip we all pay attention to because you can usually trade it for something, but no one really looked surprised. “Which I’m not taking,” I said through my teeth. “I don’t like Magnus, and he’s not my friend, and I’m not going to New York.”

Everyone did look surprised then, and Chloe flinched. But Khamis just stared at me incredulously, and then got angry, really angry, like he thought I was telling him a lie so stupidly obvious that it was insulting I expected him to swallow it. He leaned forward and said through his teeth, “Then I have to ask you again. What was that? Why are you helping Magnus Tebow, who you don’t like, who isn’t your friend, whose enclave you don’t want to join, when you’re supposed to be helping us?”

But getting mad at me isn’t safe, because it gives me permission to get mad, too. I put my hands on the table and half came up, leaning forward, and I didn’t do it on purpose, but I don’t have to do this kind of thing on purpose: the lights in the room started to dim and stutter, except right around me, and the air got cold, and the words came out on a thin stream of fog when I hissed, “I helped Magnus because he needed it. The way I blocked the stone storm from crushing your skull when you needed it, and if Fareeda had gone down and stayed down, I’d have helped her, too. And if it’s too much to ask you to help her cover your massive front so I can save someone else’s life in the meantime, then you can try going it without me at all, you selfish toerag.”

Khamis was leaning far back by then, with the iridescent green sheen of the light reflecting off his cheekbones and in the dark rings of his wide eyes, but he was stuck, after all. Maybe if he had been a coward, he’d have shut up just to get me to back away, but he wasn’t, worse luck for both of us, and I had to be lying, because that couldn’t be the truth in here. He took a gasp of cold air and said thinly, “That’s crazy. What are you going to do? Save everyone? You can’t save everyone. Not even you and Lake.”

“Watch me,” I said, furious and desperate, but even while I was snarling at him, I knew that the wheels were coming off and the wreck was coming. I’d just barely made it through the obstacle course with fifty kids—not quite fifty kids—and there were more than a thousand of us: the largest senior class in the history of the entire Scholomance. The senior class that Orion Lake had made by saving us and saving us. A thousand timers running out, all at the same time.

Khamis had been in the gym for the run himself, so after I said those stupid words, he wasn’t angry at me in the same way anymore, because he’d worked out that I wasn’t lying to him. It was the difference between someone threatening to shoot you and someone running around in circles screaming wildly while emptying a gun into the air. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “Get everybody out? You are crazy!” He spread his arms to the whole table. “What happens to us while you’re busy saving all these people you don’t like? You’re going to get us all killed while you pretend to be a hero. You think you can take our mana, take our help, and do whatever you want, is that what you think?”

“Khamis,” Nkoyo said, low and urgent; she’d got up too, and she was reaching out to put a hand on his arm. “It’s been a hard morning.” He stared at her incredulous, his whole expression twisted up with indignation, and then he looked round the table at everybody else—everybody else who wasn’t saying anything to me, in exactly the same way no one had ever said anything to him, all these years—while he took their mana and their help and did whatever he wanted, because there was no point saying anything when the answer was yes. It was just rubbing your own face in it, and the only reason he didn’t already know that was he’d never been a loser before, lucky enclave boy.

But he was now. He was a loser, and so was Magnus, so was Chloe, so was every last enclaver in the place, because they weren’t getting through the obstacle course without me. It was entirely possible that they weren’t getting through the graduation hall without me. So if I offered any of them a place at my side, in exchange for everything they could possibly scrape together, mana and hard work and even friendship, and if I took everything they gave me and used it to pretend to be a hero—even though of course they didn’t want me to, because that was, actually, very likely to get them killed—still they’d take it and say thanks, if they knew what was good for them. Thank you, El. Thank you very much.

The silence got longer. Khamis didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t look at me. He wasn’t stupid any more than he was a coward, and he’d got it now that he had rubbed his own face in it. And mine, of course, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. From this side, it was only embarrassment, really. How unfortunate that someone had made such a scene, such an unnecessary fuss. If only I’d been an enclaver myself, I expect I’d have been trained up to handle moments like this with grace. By now, Alfie would have said, a little rueful, Do you know, I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea, and he’d have reached into his ample purse of mana and turned our jug of water into a big steaming teapot, with milk and sugar on the table—just the soothing comfort his own lightly chafed spirit needed. And everyone else would have taken it, not because it helped the gaping wound on their side, but because when you had nothing, you took what you could get.

But I wasn’t an enclaver, so I didn’t handle it gracefully, and they didn’t even get a cup of tea for their pains. I just turned and ran away into the stacks.