But that afternoon as I was leaving lunch I saw her slumped in the freshman queue, standing alone, and on an impulse, I stopped by Sudarat, who was alone in the queue just a little further back. “Come on,” I said. “You’ve got someone holding a place for you.”
She trailed after me uncertainly, and I took her over to the other girl: she was an American, but just an indie, and I vaguely thought she was from Kansas, or one of those other states you never hear about on the BBC news, far from any enclaves. The point being, she didn’t have a smidge of a reason to care about what had or hadn’t happened to Bangkok. “Right, what’s your name?” I demanded, and the girl said warily, “Leigh?” as if she wasn’t quite willing to commit.
“Right, this is Sudarat, she was from Bangkok before it went pear-shaped; you’re Leigh, and you’re so miserable in this place that you’d rather trade for the odds outside; that’s introductions sorted,” I said, getting the worst bits out in front, for the both of them. “See if you can bear to sit together; it’s best to have company for meals.”
I sailed away and left them to it as quickly as I could, so none of us including me could think too hard about what the bloody hell I was doing. I don’t think I could have done it, even a week before. I wouldn’t have imagined doing it, I wouldn’t have imagined either one of them letting me do it: a senior putting two underclassmen together, why? I’d need to have an angle, and if I hadn’t an obvious one, they would have made one up for me, and more likely than not actively avoided each other afterwards.
Maybe they still would: Sudarat had more reason than most to be wary, and I didn’t know a thing about the Kansas girl beyond her being as miserable as I’d once been, which might mean anything. Maybe she, too, was secretly a proto-maleficer of unimaginable dark power, or maybe she was such a reflexively nasty person that everyone avoided her for good reason—I immediately thought of dear old Philippa Wax, back in the commune, who almost certainly hadn’t got any nicer just because I wasn’t there, although she’d often implied she would—or maybe Leigh from Kansas was just a loser kid who was shy and bad at making friends, and who had nothing going for her, so no one had bothered to make a friend of her. She wasn’t an actual maleficer, because a maleficer wouldn’t have been that desperate to get out.
Anyway, Sudarat could decide for herself if it was worth enduring her company. At least it was someone, someone who wasn’t going to be suspicious of her, or even just hesitant to make a friend of her because other people were suspicious of her. And I could imagine trying to help her, and help the other girl into the bargain, because that was now a thing that could happen in the Scholomance.
Assuming that they actually did sit together for at least that one meal, it was also the most successful example of help that entire week, at least that I knew of.
There were any number of charming additional proposals for maleficaria-breeding, some of which got so far as to include detailed specs. One alchemy-track kid actually had the gall to suggest to Liu that he could do it with our mice: enchant them and leave them all living forever in the pipes of the Scholomance to breed and eat agglo larvae. Liu didn’t get angry very easily, but she did get angry then, to the point that Precious woke me up out of a nap and sent me racing to her room just in time to collide with Mr. Animal Cruelty, who beat an even more enthusiastic retreat when he saw me outside the door with Precious poking a quivering-whiskered nose out of the bandolier cup on my chest.
People also generated some less obviously bad ideas, like plans for installing some kind of major weaponry in the dead space under the workshop floor, which would be used to blast the graduation hall mals more directly. The problem was that anything you installed outside the graduation hall would require openings in the extremely powerful wards that keep the mals in the graduation hall and out of the classroom levels.
We were a fairly glum group as we gathered in the reading room the next Saturday. The obstacle course had reversed itself full-bore: instead of being impossible to survive, it had suddenly got so easy that even freshmen could manage it, so now they were doing runs instead of us. The school had in fact started randomly locking seniors out of the cafeteria, and the only way to get in was to give something useful to one of the younger kids. Small things like individual spare socks or pencils were working this week, but you could see the writing on the wall perfectly well. And grotesquely, of course most seniors were giving the things to enclave kids, in exchange for nothing more than the promise of putting a good word in with the enclave council when they graduated.