I’d jumped on a chair to get clear of the various gushing fluids, and the last wafting clouds of phosphorescent smoke were winding around me. My mana crystal was glowing with the power I’d had to pull, but I wasn’t casting a shadow, which meant I was probably glowing myself. “Oh my God?” Chloe said, a little faintly, sort of like a question, frozen in place.
“Hey, can you get off?” Orion said, sounding a bit squashed.
“Just so you know, I was going to say yes anyway,” Chloe said miserably, like she didn’t think I’d ever believe her, as she handed me the power-sharer. “Really, El.”
“I know you were,” I said grimly, taking it, but her expression didn’t change; probably my tone didn’t sound very encouraging. So I added, “If you were going to say no, it wouldn’t have jumped us,” a little pointedly, because she should have figured that much out by then. A mal smart enough to have been quietly lurking in her floor pillows—floor pillows she’d probably inherited from a previous New York enclaver—for years and years, conserving its energy and slurping up anyone other than her who was unlucky enough to be left alone in her room—which is the kind of thing enclavers do, invite friends over for a study group after dinner with the understanding that one of them is going to arrive first and make sure the room is all right—hadn’t just leapt at us because it suddenly lost all self-control. It had done it because Chloe was about to get on board with me, meaning that especially delicious me was about to become a much harder target.
Chloe frowned, but she’s not dim, and she’d just had her face shoved in it very firmly, so once she got over the hump of her basic programming, she worked through the implications fast enough that the associated emotions traveled over her face in quick succession. It meant I hadn’t been making everything up. The school really was out to get me, and the mals were, too; I really was as powerful as that implied—her eyes darted over to the still-standing array of grotesque ingredients as that hit—and anyone hanging round me was almost certainly asking to be in the line of fire.
When she got there, I said, “I have a bunch of storage crystals. I’ll just fill them up and then give this back to you.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment; she was still looking at the ingredients on the floor, and then she said, slowly, “You’re strict mana. Is that—because—” She didn’t go on, but that was because she didn’t have to. Like I said, she’s not dim. Then she looked at me and raised her chin a bit and said in a high voice, like she was declaring it to the world and not just me, “Keep it. You might need more.” I was already fighting down the violent urge to scowl at her like a monster of ingratitude when she added tentatively, “Would you—do Aadhya and Liu need them?”
Which made it a request to join our alliance.
I couldn’t even just blurt out a flat unthinking no, because I couldn’t give her an answer to that question without talking to Aadhya and Liu. That meant that I’d have too much time to recognize that the obvious and sensible and even fair answer was yes.
I didn’t want to be allied with Chloe Rasmussen. I didn’t want to be one of the lucky ones whose alliance gets scooped up with enormous condescension by some enclaver with mana and friends and a chestful of useful things to spare, which is of course the goal that most people are actively aiming for when they put together a team without an enclaver already in it. Even if that wasn’t what Chloe meant or what we meant, that’s what everyone would think it was. And after all, they’d be right; we’d get Chloe out, and Chloe’s mana would get us out, and we’d be leaving other people behind who didn’t stand a chance.
But she had a right to ask, when I was here asking for her help to start with, and she’d had the guts to ask, when instead she could just have got clear after paying me back for saving her from the attack that only happened because she’d been willing to help me in return for nothing at all. She was offering more than fair value, even if it wasn’t fair that she had it to offer, and if I still wanted to say no to her despite all of that, Aadhya and Liu had the right to tell me I was being a colossal twat.
“I’ll talk to them,” I muttered ungraciously, and as you would expect, the end result was that three days later I had to add Chloe’s name on the wall near the girls’ bathroom, where we had written up our alliances. Liu also put her name on the Chinese translation next to me, the power-sharer on her wrist gleaming and shiny, and then we all went to breakfast together and I had to hear at least twenty bazillion people congratulating us, where by “us” I mean me, Aadhya, and Liu, for having scored Chloe. We hadn’t got nearly as many congratulations when we’d written ourselves up near the end of last term, even though we’d been one of the first alliances to go on the wall.