“Is that meant to be funny?” I said, with a surge of rage—her sitting there sounding exasperated about anyone else, about kids who were using the tiniest scrap of malia in desperation—
Ophelia paused. “Why do you think I did it?”
“Did what?” I snarled. “Turned maleficer? I expect you wanted to be Domina. Does that make you better than a loser kid who cheats a little so they can survive to the age of majority?” Out of the corner of my eye, Chloe involuntarily cringed back with a hand over her mouth, already distressed enough before I’d openly accused the most powerful wizard in her enclave of being a flat-out evil witch. Aadhya just looked grim. Liesel had unobtrusively urged them both round to the far side of the room closer to Balthasar, presumably on the theory that if it did come to flinging spells, better to be over there, out of Ophelia’s line of fire.
And Balthasar himself—he wasn’t surprised in the least, clearly; he was just looking at us both—mostly at me, even—with a kind of sad concern, yes, how unfortunate that I’d noticed his wife was a monster, it was too bad I found it so upsetting—
“You know, El, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you didn’t get half the mals in the world to come running with mana that every last kid in the school honestly built for themselves,” Ophelia said, with the bite of an adult who’s got tired of an unreasonable child yelling at them. “Someone in there got someone else to do their homework with a compulsion, or stole a little mana out of their best friend who fell asleep at the library table. Just because they handed it to you afterwards doesn’t make a difference to the universe. It just makes a difference to you.”
It was a sharp, accurate hit; of course that was true, and I knew it, and I didn’t have an answer for it, except the wrong answers: I hadn’t known for sure, I hadn’t done it myself, I’d been doing something good enough to justify using it, she was worse—
Ophelia gave me a mirthless smile, a thin slice of winter. “I didn’t do it for power. I’m a New Yorker. There’s mana to spare around here. Everyone I work with in the lab voluntarily lets me pull from them and gets paid back twice as much.”
I stared at her in horror, imagining it vividly, a collection of poor desperate bastards in her laboratory letting themselves be drained by a maleficer, crossing their fingers this wouldn’t be the time she went over the line and sucked them dry. “So you jettisoned your anima on purpose, then? Too inconvenient, all those twinges of conscience?”
“Anima and conscience haven’t got a thing to do with each other,” she said, a strong statement that I didn’t believe for a moment. “The kind of maleficer who deliberately starts murdering people doesn’t have one to start with. But all the psychopathic wizards in the world put together aren’t the real problem. The problem is that everyone cheats. And then we get more mals, and our kids die, and still everyone cheats, because the two things are too far apart. You can live your whole life without cheating once, like you’re trying to do, and still your kid’s just as likely to get eaten, and meanwhile someone else cheats every day and their kid sails on through. The only solution we’ve got so far for that are enclaves.”
“Enclaves you’ve built with malia,” I said, the malia I could feel even now, the uneasy subtle sloshing back and forth still going beneath my feet.
She didn’t even bother to deny it. “It’s a numbers game,” she said instead. “The malia it takes to make an enclave and keep it going might look like a lot, but it’s still less than what you’d get if the same wizards were all cheating on their own, trying to survive. Economies of scale work in magic too. And wizards mostly don’t cheat in an enclave, because they don’t have to. But enclaves…” She paused, looking at me, and her mouth quirked briefly, a curl of one corner. “Enclaves have their own unique costs. And the wizards in an enclave might not cheat, but they also don’t want to share. There’s a squabble over every new seat we add and every new person we hire, because no one wants to give up a square inch of their own space. And every year, more of us survive, and it gets worse. We need better solutions.”
“Looking for more efficient uses of malia, is that it?” I said, nauseated. I didn’t want to believe she was in earnest, but there was something hideously plausible about it all. A New Yorker really didn’t need malia. She’d got rid of her own anima on purpose, probably for some sort of horrible massive working, or maybe just so she could work with malia without the distraction of getting hurt. And she surely rationed her malia usage as carefully as Liu ever had, never taking more than precisely necessary, refusing all the side benefits on offer. It explained why she didn’t look like a maleficer, in either direction.