“What’s the right way?” I said warily.
* * *
The right way was, Chloe whispered around to everyone in New York, that Orion’s girlfriend was keeping him from hunting mals because I didn’t want him getting hurt, and now I was getting suspicious about why the mana was suddenly running low.
The New York enclavers were all as eager for me to learn the truth about the source of their mana as Chloe had been, so they did start quietly contributing after all—which it turned out they could do by the bucketload without even getting anywhere close to their mana-building capacity. That of course didn’t keep them from being grumpy about the work they were doing. I confess I enjoyed catching a glimpse of Magnus stalking into the boy’s bathroom at the head of his entourage, soaked in sweat and red-faced from what I assume was a hearty session of building mana with annoying physical exercise.
But after a month of what I suppose they found unbearable suffering, they all began to interrogate each other in accusatory ways about mana use, and meanwhile the honeypot project ran into a serious snag. Aadhya had made up a special incense burner, a set of nested cylinders of different kinds of metal, with holes punched carefully in each one to control the path that smoke took through them. Chloe had mixed a dozen small batches of mana-infused incense and left them out around a drain in one of the alchemy labs during dinner. We came down afterwards—warily—and picked the one that showed the most signs of having been poked at with various appendages, including a snuffler’s face, which had left a distressing imprint roughly like a lotus seedpod.
“Great, let’s go,” Orion said promptly; he would have grabbed the cylinder off the table and headed straight for the door, but Aadhya put out a hand against his chest and stopped him.
“How about we don’t try it out for the first time next to a big junction going straight down to the graduation hall,” she said. The rest of us all agreed heartily. The diameter of the school’s plumbing is open to a determined interpretation, and if we were deliberately luring mals, our intent would actually be helping them squeeze themselves through.
Orion sat on a stool in visible impatience, tossing the burner from one hand to the other, while the rest of us discussed the best place for a trial run. We finally settled on the lab itself, on the grounds that the incense had been out here for a bit already, and we didn’t want to carry it through the corridors to somewhere else, possibly accumulating a trailing horde in the process.
Aadhya put the incense into the burner, fussed with the positioning of the cylinders a bit longer, and finally said, “All right, let’s give it a shot,” handing it to Orion.
We all backed well off towards the door while he did the honors. He lit the small blob of incense—“Ow,” he said, burning his fingers with the match, which he was more worried about than the possibly impending mals—and dropped it into the middle of the cylinders. Then he put the burner on the lab stool and set it right near the drain.
The first threads of smoke came out and visibly wafted over the drain before dispersing. Orion hovered over it eagerly, but nothing came out. We waited another few minutes. The smoke began to pick up, making a thin stream that circled the drain and went down into it. Still nothing.
There had been a couple of small agglos in the lab, stealing the floor leavings—we’d ignored them as they’re quite handy when fully grown, and completely harmless otherwise—which had started slowly humping their way towards the drain to escape when we’d come into the room. While we were still waiting, they reached the drain and kept going, straight through the thickest smoke, showing no interest in it whatsoever.
Orion looked over at us. “Shouldn’t it work on them? They’re still mals.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Chloe said, a bit nasally. The burner was certainly doing something; even all the way back at the door, the air was taking on the same distinct aroma that regularly wafted out of the boys’ loo.
Aadhya frowned and took a few cautious steps towards the burner. “Maybe we should,” she started, and that was when Pinky stuck his head out of his carrying cup and gave a loud excited squeak. Aadhya had made each of us a bandolier-style strap with a cup attached, for the mice to ride around in during the day, since Liu wanted us to keep them with us more often. Before she could stop him, Pinky leapt directly out of the cup on her chest all the way down to the floor, raced over to the stool, scampered up the leg like a tiny streak of white lightning, and did a full-body flying lunge for the cylinder and knocked it onto the floor. While we were still yelping, Mistoffeles and Xiao Xing emerged from their cups and made their own mad dashes to join him.