They were certainly interested in the incense. Together they spent the next half hour rolling the cylinder around the lab in mad glee, sending it under cabinets and tables and squirming out of our grip every time we tried to grab it or them. It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good at not being caught. There was a lot of swearing and yelling and banged elbows and barked shins before we finally managed to get the cylinder away from them and put the smoke out, at which point they collapsed in exhausted furry lumps with their paws curled and glazed expressions that somehow conveyed dreamy pleasure on their faces.
Chloe drew several thick lines through the incense recipe in her notebook, and Aadhya disgustedly dumped the set of cylinders into the scrap bin. When a first experiment goes that far awry from your expectations, it’s usually not worth the risk to keep going. It means you’re missing something quite important, and in this case, we had no idea what the something we were missing was. So if we tried again with just minor tweaks, we’d expect it to go wrong, and at that point, not only would it go wrong, it would almost certainly go wrong in a much more dramatic and possibly painful fashion.
The only positive outcome was my getting the first sign that Precious was actually becoming a familiar. She hadn’t joined the frenzy; instead, as soon as Pinky went for the burner, she’d run up my shoulder and jumped onto a high shelf of the lab, where she tipped a large beaker over herself and sat there disapprovingly watching the other mice having fun with her tiny forepaws held over her nose. After we put out the incense, she climbed back into my bandolier cup and pulled the lid firmly on top of herself and made clear that she was coming home with me instead of going back to the group cage in Liu’s room with the other stupefied mice.
So that was tidy, but the honeypot project was back to square one.
Meanwhile the New York enclavers weren’t my only problem anymore. Everyone else was starting to look into the pattern of mal attacks, or lack thereof. We all spend a great deal of time thinking about mals and what they’re going to do. Almost half our freshman and sophomore courses are devoted to the study of maleficaria, their classification, their behavior, and most important, how to kill them. When mals start behaving unexpectedly, that’s bad. Even if the unexpected behavior is that they’re not leaping out to kill you anymore. That usually just means they’re waiting to leap out and kill you at a much more opportune moment.
The next Wednesday, at the end of our cheery library death seminar, Sudarat waited until the kid on my other side got up and then said softly to me as we packed up to leave, “A girl from Shanghai asked me if our class had been attacked again.”
We were getting into striking range of midterms by then, and a grand total of twenty-three people had been killed so far the whole year. More than half of them had been freshmen blowing themselves up in shop or poisoning themselves in alchemy lab, which was barely like dying at all by our normal standards. The others—bar one—had all been cafeteria mistakes. Even that was radically below the usual rates, since almost everyone could afford to cast sniffer spells and brew antidotes, since they weren’t getting jumped by maleficaria.
Death number twenty-three was the only upperclassman, a junior-year charmer named Prasong who’d been another former Bangkok enclaver. He had been very unhappy to discover he wasn’t an enclaver anymore, and he’d made himself obnoxious enough in the years he’d been one that he found sympathy and friends in very short supply. As he couldn’t see any other way to continue in the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed—or to reliably continue living, for that matter—he made the decision to go maleficer. And obviously the best and safest way for him to get a big helping of malia stored up, enough to see him through graduation, would be draining it out of a group of unsuspecting wide-eyed freshmen.
If that sounds unimaginably evil to you, I should mention that it wasn’t to us. Most years there are somewhere between four and eight kids who go for the maleficer track, and since most of them haven’t planned it out carefully in advance and brought in a supply of small mammals, targeting younger students is their standard order of business. We’re all warned about it quite prosaically in the freshman handbook, and told to be wary of older or more successful kids showing too much interest in our activities. I owed my own charming gut scar to one of them, the late unlamented Jack Westing, who’d also done for Orion’s neighbor Luisa back in our sophomore year.
Sudarat was the only freshman that Prasong could talk to without arousing suspicions. He didn’t even have to go out of his way—she was going as far out of hers as she could to maintain her connections to the older Bangkok ex-enclavers. Even if all that got her was a chance to sit with them in the cafeteria once in a while, or the last hand-me-downs they couldn’t sell as seniors, that would still be better than nothing. So all Prasong needed to do was agree to let her fill an empty seat at his table for a single meal. She must have told him enough about her weird library seminar to convince him it was the perfect meal: eight freshmen in an isolated room with no witnesses around. I assume she didn’t mention me.