It wasn’t a situation you’d call conducive to fellow-feeling among the enclavers. Personally, I didn’t mind not knowing. I wasn’t going to be joining an enclave myself. I’d made that decision last year—resentfully—and I wasn’t going to be getting involved, if there was a war. Even if it was just some hideous maleficer going around taking out enclaves, it wasn’t anything to me, except possibly my future competition, according to the unpleasant prophecy that would have made my life loads easier if it would just hurry up and come true.
What I did mind was that Sudarat couldn’t help out with what was clearly about to be my fifth seminar, in freshman rescue. Their enclave’s mana store had been fairly new and small to begin with, and now the Bangkok seniors had taken full control and were desperately trading on it to other enclavers to try and get themselves graduation alliances. They weren’t even sharing with the juniors and sophomores. All of them had just become ordinary losers like the rest of us, scrabbling for allies and resources and survival. Their one big bargaining chip for alliance-building had been the chance of a spot in their fast-growing enclave, which they didn’t have anymore, and they were operating under an aura of creepy uncertainty because no one knew what had happened. The other freshmen hadn’t been avoiding Sudarat because they hadn’t known she was from Bangkok; they’d been avoiding her because they had. She hadn’t even been given a share of the gear that last year’s seniors had left behind. That bag she’d brought in was all the resources she had.
I suppose I should’ve felt sorry for her, but I’d rather be sorry for someone who never had luck at all than for someone whose extreme luck ran out unexpectedly. Mum would tell me I could be sorry for both of them, to which I’d say she could be sorry for both of them, but I had a more limited supply of sympathy and had to ration it. Anyway, I’d already saved Sudarat’s life twice before the second week of classes, despite my lack of sympathy, so she hadn’t any right to complain.
And neither did I, since I was apparently determined to keep doing it.
Aadhya and Liu and I had made plans to take showers together that night. As we headed downstairs, I said to Liu bitterly, “Have you got any time after? I need to get down some basic phrases in Chinese.” You might expect that to mean things like where’s the loo and good morning, but in here, the first things you learn in any language are get down and behind you and run. Which I was going to need to stop the freshmen getting in the way of my saving them. Entirely at my own expense.
Liu bent her head and said softly, “I was going to ask you to help me.” She reached into her school satchel and pulled up her clear plastic pencil bag to show me a pair of scissors inside: a left-handed pair with the remnants of ragged patches of green vinyl still clinging on stickily around the finger holes, one blade notched and the other a bit rusty. Promising signs: they were bad enough that they almost certainly weren’t cursed or animated. She’d been asking round for someone who had a pair to loan for the last couple of weeks.
Her hair was down to below her waist, a glossy midnight black except at the very roots where it was coming in a color that anyone would also have called black, except by contrast to the slightly eerie darker shade of the long mass. Years and years of growing it out, and three of those years had been in here, having to negotiate terms and conditions for every shower we got. But I didn’t ask are you sure. I knew she was, even if only on a purely practical note. Aadhya was going to use it to string the sirenspider lute that she was making for our graduation run, and anyway, she’d only been able to get away with growing her hair that long because she’d been using malia.
But then she’d had an unexpected and very thorough spirit cleanse, and she’d decided she wasn’t going back down the obsidian brick road. So now she had to pay back three years of unreasonably good hair days all at once. We’d been taking it in turn each evening to help her comb out the truly horrific snarls that developed every day no matter how carefully she braided it.
After we were done in the showers, the three of us went back to Aadhya’s room. She sharpened the scissors with her tools, then got the box she’d prepared for the hair. I started the cutting carefully, just taking off a bare centimeter from one very skinny lock of hair held as far from Liu’s head as I could—you always want to start slow when it comes to an unfamiliar pair of scissors. Nothing terrible happened, and slowly I worked halfway up the strand, and then I took a deep breath and went in fast and cut, right at the visible demarcation line between the old hair and the new, and handed the one long section to Aadhya.