I can’t actually coherently describe the level of indignation I experienced. It was one thing for the school to be out to get me, which I think all of us secretly feel is the case from the moment we arrive, and another for the school to be out to get only me, to the exclusion of literally everyone else, including even Orion, even though the school’s hunger was really his fault in the first place. Although I suppose it was getting him by keeping mals away from him. “What do you have Wednesdays after work period?” I demanded, when I could get words out past the incoherent rage.
“My senior alchemy seminar,” he said: four levels down from the library. So he couldn’t come up and give me a hand even if he wanted to, as he apparently very much did.
“What are your first periods?”
“Chinese and maths.” As far away from the workshop level as a senior class could get.
“I hate everything,” I said passionately.
* * *
“The rest of New York is going to say something if this keeps going,” Chloe said unhappily, perched on Liu’s bed cross-legged with her own mouse cupped in her hands. She’d named him Mistoffeles because he had a single black spot at his throat like a bow tie, which had started looking much more like a bow tie just in the week she’d been holding him. He was also already doing things for her: just yesterday he’d hopped out of her hands and run scampering off into the drain and then come back a few minutes later and offered her a little scrap of only slightly gnawed-on ambergris he’d somehow found down there.
It irritated me: I’d been working on Precious for more than a month and a half now, giving her mana treats and trying to give her instructions, and she still wasn’t doing much but accepting the treats as her due and sitting there on my hand graciously permitting me to pet her. “Shouldn’t you at least be able to turn invisible or something by now?” I’d told her in a grumble under my breath before tipping her back into Liu’s cage. She just ignored me. Even Aadhya had been able to take her mouse Pinky permanently back to her room by now, where she’d built him a massive and elaborate enclosure full of wheels and tunnels that kept getting expanded up the wall. “It just takes time sometimes,” Liu told me, very tactfully, but even she was getting a faintly doubtful expression as the weeks crept on.
Of course, I still wouldn’t have given up a single minute of getting to cuddle Precious even if I could have had them all back a hundredfold in study time. She was so alive and real, her soft fur and her moving lungs and the tiny beat of her heart; she didn’t belong to the Scholomance. She was a part of the world outside, the world I sometimes found myself thinking maybe only existed in the dreams I had of it once in a while. We’d been in the Scholomance for three years, one month, two weeks, and five days.
And in that last one month, two weeks, and five days, nobody but me or the me-adjacent had been attacked by a single mal, as far as we could double-check without making people suspicious. People hadn’t realized yet only because some of the attacks had spilled over into the workshop, which was on the other side of my independent study room, and also it was still early enough in the year that everyone separately thought they were just getting lucky.
“But the other New York kids are going to notice the mana pool getting low,” Chloe said. “Magnus was already asking me the other day if I’d been doing any major workings. I’ve got a right to share power with my allies, but not to let them take it all.”
“We’re all putting as much as we can back,” Aadhya said. “And there’re seven seniors from New York. You have to be putting in loads yourselves. How low is the pool going to get?”
“Well,” Chloe said, in an odd, awkward way, darting a look at me, and then she said haltingly, “We don’t really—I mean—”
“You don’t build mana at all,” I said flatly, from the corner, as I instantly realized what she wasn’t saying. “None of you ever put any mana in the enclave pool, because Orion was putting in enough for all of you.”
Chloe bit her lip and avoided our eyes; Aadhya and Liu were both staring at her, shocked. Everyone’s got to build mana in here. Even enclave kids. Their big advantage is more time, better conditions, people watching their backs and doing homework for them and giving them little presents of mana and all the other things that the rest of us have to spend mana to get. They all have their own efficient mana stores and power-sharers. So by the time they get to senior year, they’re all way ahead. But never having to build mana at all—never having to do sit-ups or struggle through making some horrible doily, because all of them were just coasting on Orion’s back—