But I could do it. It was the opposite of everything that was unbearably horrible about the gym. The other side of the doors was undoubtedly deep underground in some unpleasant and probably dangerously spiky place to discourage both mals and mundanes from coming near; the smell coming through had the thick mucky stink of a stagnant sewer—an entirely likely location—and absolutely none of that mattered because it would be real, it would be outside, and I wanted to go so badly that I turned round and ran back to the maintenance shaft without letting myself look round even one more time.
The climb up was not abbreviated. It felt more as if I were paying back the speed from the earlier climb. But Precious was along with me, a warm lump on my shoulder, or scampering up a few rungs ahead of me, her white fur bright even in the dim light I’d cast on my hands. I finally crawled out of the shaft and lay flat on the floor in the seminar room with my arms and legs starfished out round me, too tired to groan more than faintly. She sat on my chest washing her whiskers fastidiously and keeping an eye out, if that was even necessary. The school was obviously looking out for me really hard. It had only sent just the right level of mals to make me swallow the indigestible lump of my pride and take mana from Chloe. If it hadn’t gone after me, Aadhya and Liu and I would’ve spent this year working so hard to build a decent pot of mana that I certainly wouldn’t have had the time and energy—much less the mana—to imagine saving anyone else. And no one else would’ve listened to me even if I had.
I stared up at the stained ceiling overhead as that thought sank in, and with an effort lifted my still-leaden arm with the power-sharer up in front of my eyes. I’d got so used to it by now I didn’t think about it anymore. But I had been pulling oceans of mana with every run, even at the discounted gym levels. Magnus and the other New York kids had probably gone round to the other enclaves at some point and demanded that they share the burden—implying that I’d kick them out of the runs if they didn’t.
No one would have listened to me if I’d gone to them with a crazy plan to get us all out together. The school had made them listen, had made them all come to me, by laying out one unsurvivable run after another. It had forced everyone to give me those oceans of mana, to put their lives into my hands. None of them had wanted to do that. So the moment I told everyone that there was nothing down there at all, that we could sail right out—
“Mu-uum,” I groaned faintly, as if she were there for me to argue with violently, but she was only inside my head, looking at me with all the desperate worry in the world furrowing her face. Keep away from Orion Lake. Was this what she’d seen? Had she caught some glimpse of what it would mean to stack me and Orion up together in a single year, and what I’d have to do in order to pay it off? Because of course I wouldn’t be able to do a thing if everyone took back their mana. But if I took their mana with a lie—it wouldn’t be freely given, after all.
Which wouldn’t hurt me in any obvious way, not the way outright maleficers get hurt. If Prasong’s little freshman-flaying scheme had worked, his anima would’ve been scarred so badly he’d probably never have been able to build mana of his own again even if he’d spent the rest of his life trying to atone and purify himself. That wouldn’t happen to me; I wouldn’t even get black nails and a faint cloud of disquiet, like Liu had, punishment for sacrificing a couple of defenseless mice to survive on. Maleficers got that kind of damage because they were yanking mana out of something that was actively fighting them, resisting them. That’s what turned it into malia. But when you got someone to hand you their mana—it didn’t hurt. You could trick someone, pressure them, lie to them, all you wanted. It wasn’t going to damage you in any way that anyone else would ever see.
Which is why that’s what enclavers did. And then they pretended it wasn’t malia, but it was. There’s a long distance between cheating someone out of a scrap of mana they didn’t urgently need, and turning into a slavering murderous vampire who couldn’t do anything decent ever again, but it’s all on the same road. Mum taught me that, spent her whole life teaching me that, and it had taken a while, but the lesson had stuck.
I knew what she’d say to the idea of doing it for someone’s own good, much less for the sake of future generations. I was only alive because she would never make that bargain. She’d been told flat-out that I was going to be a monstrous killing scourge by people who hadn’t been lying to her, and she hadn’t refused to hand me over because she didn’t believe them. She hadn’t even refused because she loved me: if that had been the only reason, she’d have taken me to live in an enclave when I was nine years old and mals started to come for me, almost five years ahead of schedule. She hadn’t done that either. She’d only refused because she wouldn’t take the first wrong step.