Of course the school was going to come after me.
And if the Wednesday mals didn’t work—it would try something else. And something else after that. The Scholomance isn’t exactly a living thing, but it isn’t exactly not, either. You can’t put this much mana and this much thinking into a place without it starting to develop a mind of its own. And theoretically it’s been built to protect us, so it won’t just start snacking on kids on its own—not to mention enrollment would drop substantially when that began happening—but of course it still wants enough mana to keep going; it’s meant to keep going. And I’ve put myself in the way, so the school is coming after me, and that means anyone round me is going to be in for it.
“The kids have got to start making mana for you,” Aadhya said.
“They’re just freshmen,” I said, dully. “All eight of them together make less mana in an hour than I can build in ten minutes.”
“They could reset your dead crystals, though,” Liu said. “You said you don’t need a lot of mana to wake those up, just a steady stream. They could each carry one around.”
Liu wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t actually going to solve the real problem. “I won’t need the dead crystals. I’m not going to have enough mana to fill my other empties, at this rate.”
“Then we can trade them,” Aadhya said. “They’re loads better than most storage. Or you know, I could try building them into the lute—”
“Do you want out?” I said, breaking in, harshly, because I really couldn’t handle sitting there while they worked through all the options I’d spent the last three weeks clawing through, trying to find a way out myself, until I’d realized there wasn’t going to be one for me. There was only the one for them.
Aadhya stopped talking. But Liu didn’t even pause; she just said, “No.”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t think you’ve thought—”
“No,” Liu said, strangely hard, and after a pause, she went on more quietly, “I used to take Zheng and Min around all day on a leading string when they were little. At school, if one of the other boys was hurting something like a frog or a stray kitten, they would stop it and bring the animal to me, even though they got teased for ‘being girls’ because of it.” She looked down at Xiao Xing in her hands, stroking her thumb over his head. “No,” she repeated, softly. “I don’t want out.”
I looked at Aadhya, my feelings in a confused knotted mess: I didn’t know what I wanted her to say. My practical friend, whose mum had told her it was a good idea to be decent to losers, and so had been decent to me, all the years while everyone else treated me like a piece of used kitchen roll no one wanted to pick up even long enough to put in the bin. I’d liked her because she was practical, and hard-nosed: she’d always driven a solid hard bargain, the kind you could believe in, without ever cheating me, even though she’d more often than not been the only person who would have traded with me. She hadn’t any reason to care about the freshmen in the library, and she had choices: she was one of the best practical artificers in our year, with a magical lute in the finishing stages that was going to be worth something outside, and not just among students. Any enclaver would’ve gladly snatched her up for a graduation alliance. That was the smart thing, the practical thing to do, and I almost wanted her to do it. She’d already taken half a dozen chances on me that anyone else would have called a bad bet. I didn’t want her to drop me, but—I couldn’t be the reason she didn’t make it out.
But she only said, “Yeah, no,” almost dismissively. “I’m not a ditcher. We just need to figure out a way to get you some more mana. Or better yet, get the school off your back. I don’t get why the Scholomance is pulling this whole complicated stunt on you. You’re not an enclaver, it’s not like you were going to have tons of mana anyway, so why is it so into making you spend the little you’ve got?”
“Unless,” Liu said, and then stopped. We looked over at her; her lips were pressed together, and she was staring at her hands in her lap, twisted up. “Unless it’s about—pushing you. The school—”
“Likes maleficers,” Aadhya finished for her.
Liu nodded a little without looking up. And she was absolutely right. That was surely why the Scholomance had given me that Wednesday session. It was trying to give me—an easier choice to make. The school wanted me to have to make the first selfish choice, to save my own mana, instead of saving a random freshman I didn’t care about. Because then it would be easier for me to make the second selfish choice after that, and the one after that.