“Catch up already, girl,” she said, unrepentantly.
* * *
It’s not that I’d rather have had Aadhya and Liu ditch me to face the rest of my school career alone and desperate instead of asking Chloe Rasmussen for help, but I had definitely managed not to see asking her as an option. I wasn’t actually sure what she’d say. I’d turned down her offer of a guaranteed place in New York, after all. I was still sullen about having to do it. I’d spent the better part of my life carefully planning out my campaign for an enclave spot. It had been a really comforting plan that ended in the fantasy of me having a nice happy long life in a safe and luxurious enclave with endless mana at my fingertips like all the other enclave kids, and by making sure the campaign was long and involved and never quite completed successfully, I’d neatly avoided having to think about how I didn’t really want to be an enclaver at all.
Even Chloe—she’s a decent sort, and better than that if I’m being fair. When the enclave kids started courting me last term—because of Orion—they all behaved as though they were doing me a generous favor by so much as talking to me. All it got them was my violent and unstrategic rudeness in their faces, so they stopped talking to me at all. But Chloe stuck it out. She’s already asked to sit with us ten times this year, and she hasn’t brought any tagalongs with her. I don’t know that I’d have bent my neck the way she did, apologizing to me and even asking to be friends after I bit her head off. I’m not sorry for doing the biting, I had more than enough cause, but I still don’t know that I’d have had the grace.
Oh, who am I lying to? My supply of grace wouldn’t overflow an acorn cap.
But Chloe’s still an enclaver. And not like Orion. All the New York kids have a power-sharer on their wrists that lets them exchange mana and pull from their shared storage, but Orion’s is one-way, going in. Because otherwise, he’ll just pull as much mana as he needs to kill the nearest mal and save other kids. It’s so much of an instinct for him that he can’t actually stop himself. So the son of the future Domina of New York doesn’t get access to the shared mana pool, although he sure gets to contribute, not to mention come running if any of them get into danger.
Chloe’s one of the kids who gets the benefit of all that power he puts in. She doesn’t need to budget her spells. She throws up a shield anytime she feels anxious. If a mal jumps her, maybe she has to keep her head and figure out what spell to use on it, but she doesn’t have to worry that she can’t afford to cast it. When she came in as a freshman, on top of bringing in a bag of the most useful magical items that wizardry can devise, she inherited a massive chest crammed full by more than a century’s worth of other kids from New York, each of them bringing in a new set of useful items and making others in here—items they can afford to leave behind, because when they get out, they’re going home to one of the richest enclaves in the world. And they do get out, because they’re the worst targets in the room when we get dumped into the graduation hall, and there’s lots of tasty losers available to be the cannon fodder.
I can’t forget that whenever I’m with her. Or more honestly, I do forget it after a bit, and I don’t want to. I find myself wishing she’d just gone on being awful, so I could go on being awful back. It feels unfair for her to get to have real friends, the kind of friends who don’t care about how rich you are and how much mana you have, and also have all the mana and the money and the eager hovering sycophants on top of it. But whenever I really get into that mean sour squirrely thought, I immediately get the sensation of Mum looking at me with all this love and sympathy, and I feel like an earthworm. So hanging about with Chloe is a constant roller coaster from guarded to relaxed to resentful to earthworm and back again.
And now I had to ask her to let me in on the mana pool, because if I didn’t, I’d be laying out Aadhya and Liu and all the freshmen in the library, and possibly everyone else in the school if I ever do screw up one fine morning when a rhysolite tries to dissolve my bones or a magma slug squirms up the furnace vent and launches itself at my head. I’d have even less excuse for being resentful of her than I’ve already got. I half wanted her to say no.
“Wait—do you mean you’ll take the spot?” she said instead, sounding hopeful about it, as if I was meant to think that it was on perpetual offer, and I could claim myself a place in New York anytime I liked.
“No,” I said, warily. I’d come to her room—I didn’t want eavesdroppers for this conversation—and the whole place made me feel twitchy. She had one of the rooms above the bathrooms, where the opening to the void is overhead instead of out one wall. On the bright side, you never need to worry about falling out. On the downside, you’ve got an endless void over your head. She’d dealt with that by putting up a canopy of opaque cloth with just one spot open over the desk. Anything at all could have been hiding above it or in the folds.