“Why are we getting so wiped out?” I said. “Do you think the school’s draining our mana somehow?”
But I looked back and Aadhya and Liu were both giving me the same kind of level, murderous looks I’d seen aimed at Orion in the past. “We’re all being attacked much more in every run than ever before,” Liu said. “It’s not just the extreme maleficaria. At this time last year, the obstacle course only had ten attack stations, all separate. The general melee runs aren’t supposed to start until June.”
“Oh, right,” I said awkwardly, as if I’d just needed to be reminded.
We went through the line and loaded up our trays with bowls of spaghetti—we had to pick out the red mana leeches hiding among them, but we were all used to that—and big helpings of sliced peaches in hallucinogenic yellow syrup that Chloe would probably be able to neutralize for us when we got it back to the table she was arranging. Annoyingly, the last helping of sponge cake they were meant to accompany went just in front of us, to a boy from Venice who had a tidy fishing tool he used to snag it from among the surrounding spikegrubs. Even more annoyingly, once he’d got it, he paused and turned and offered it to me, exactly the way people sucked up to enclaver kids all the time. And Aadhya gave me a jab with an elbow before I could erupt in the boy’s face like I wanted to, so instead I just had to say in as ungracious a tone as I could manage, “No. Thanks.”
“We need to think about it, though,” Aadhya said at the table, a while later. I was sullenly eating the peaches without even being able to enjoy them, and it wasn’t just because the neutralizer gave them a faintly metallic taste. “What if the school is making it harder on purpose? What if it’s trying to wipe you out so bad that it can hit you in a gym run, take you or Orion out?”
“Well,” I said, trying to think how to word it so I wouldn’t get more death glares from the entire table. I was tired, but to be perfectly honest, I’d mostly been whinging. You’re supposed to be tired during graduation training. If you aren’t, you aren’t working hard enough. I was working-a-full-day tired, not falling-into-my-soup tired.
Orion was, and I’d saved his bowl twice so far this meal, but that’s because he was sneaking out to go hunting real mals after curfew. I’d tried to persuade Precious to keep watch on him, but she wouldn’t; the only thing she’d do is insist on coming along anytime I went over to his room to force him to actually get into bed and shut his eyes and turn out the lights before the curfew bell rang. If he did, he instantly fell asleep and stayed down until morning; otherwise he’d be in the cafeteria at dawn, eating from a giant heaped tray before anyone else got there. In case you’re wondering, staying out past curfew is normally a death sentence and probably still was for any other student even in this strange year, but at this point mals were all fleeing Orion very energetically. Mostly he only ever got to kill them in the runs, when one of them got too distracted trying to eat another student and blew its cover.
“Or maybe it wants to kill some of us now in practice, in case most of us do get out,” Liu put in, a perfectly reasonable concern which helpfully relieved me of having to make a bright and cheery point of explaining that it wasn’t that bad really, at least for me.
“What should we do?” Ibrahim said, anxiously.
“Why don’t we just take a break?” Chloe said, which I suppose was the obvious solution if you were someone who had ever had the luxury of being able to take a break. “We could take the rest of the day, skip tomorrow, and Wednesday morning. Nobody would miss more than one run. That’s not much.”
Almost everyone endorsed the idea as soon as it percolated outwards. Even Orion perked up dramatically as soon as he woke up enough to hear it. I assumed he was planning an all-day hunting extravaganza. I personally slept in to the glorious hour of eight, just early enough to still make it upstairs for breakfast dregs if I rushed, and was up and stuffing my hair into a short ponytail when someone knocked. I’d got much more cautious about that sort of thing since my delightful encounter with Jack last year, but with a vat of mana available, that now just meant I kept a nice murder spell on the tip of my tongue and opened the door at arm’s length.
Orion was standing there looking a bit nervous, carrying a large mug of tea and an alchemy lab supply box heaped with three buns, a small glass full of apricot jam and butter pats that were starting to permanently intermingle, a bowl full of congee with a whole egg on it, and a half-green clementine. I stared at him and he blurted, “Would—would you—have breakfast with me?” and then realized as the words left his mouth that he hadn’t made the situation horrible enough and added, “On a date?” in a squawky warble.