That was the scale of things for which he could express desire: friendship, love, humanity. But he didn’t care where in the cafeteria he sat, he didn’t care what shirt he wore, he didn’t care what classes he was in or what books he read. He did his work more or less dutifully, was polite, and preferred to avoid hero-worshippers while feeling guilty about it, and if I said, “Let’s go stand on our heads on the cafeteria mezzanine stairs,” he’d probably shrug and say, “If you want to.” He certainly hadn’t come up with the sudden desire to go on a road trip away from his enclave. He’d been fed the idea, and the idea was very clearly to get me into the New York crowd. Before they’d been worrying about someone else using me to get Orion; now they were trying to use Orion to get me.
“Lake,” I said in measured tones, “why don’t you tell Magnus actually you’d like to go backpacking in Europe with me instead. See what he thinks of that. We could do the Grand Tour! Start in Edinburgh, visit Manchester and London, go on to Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Pisa—” I was rattling off the names of every city with an enclave I could think of, and Orion got the point, scowled at me, and sloped off.
I felt pretty pleased with myself afterwards, until that evening when I went on a snack bar run with Aadhya, and Scott and Jermaine from New York passed us on the stairs and said a cheery, “Hey, El, how’s it going? Hey, Aad,” with a friendly wave.
She waved back and said, “Hey, guys,” like a civilized human being, while I delivered the coldest possible, “Hi,” in return. As soon as they were out of sight, she looked at me and said, “What now?”
I hadn’t ranted about the charming road-trip scheme to her because I couldn’t without breaking the horrible taboo myself, and being tactless into the bargain. Aadhya’s family lived in New Jersey, and while she hadn’t said outright that she’d have liked a New York enclave spot herself, it was what virtually every wizard for three hundred miles around the city aspired to, since they were all more or less working for the place anyway. “They’d like to make plans for my future,” I said, shortly.
She sighed, but once we were back in her room and eating our makeshift parfaits—strawberry yogurt out of slightly aged tubes, topped with fruit-and-nut mix and whipped cream out of a can; we’d regretfully discarded the tin of vienna sausages, which had been not merely dented but slightly punctured, with a bit of greenish ooze round the edges of the hole—she said, “El, they’re not that bad.”
I knew she wasn’t talking about the parfaits, which were fairly ambrosial by our standards. “They are, though,” I said, revolted.
“I’m not saying they’re sterling examples of grace and nobility,” Aadhya said. “They’re all kind of dickish, but they’re the same kind of dickish that anyone is when you put them in an enclave. Magnus, okay, that boy is trying way too hard to be big man on campus. But Jermaine’s a nice guy! Scott is a nice guy! Chloe is practically too nice. And you actually like Orion, who is kind of creepy—”
“He’s not!”
“Excuse you, he totally is,” Aadhya said. “Half the time he can’t recognize me unless I’m with you. He pretends to when I say hi to him in shop, but every time his brain goes into this panicky loop like who is she oh no I’m supposed to know her oh no I’m failing at human. And it’s not just me, he does it to everyone. He could probably tell you every last mal he’s killed in the entire time he’s been at school, but us human beings all get filed under the generic category of future potential rescue. I don’t know why he can see you, I think it’s because you’re some crazy super-maleficer in waiting. Creepy.”
I glared at her indignantly, but she just huffed and added, “And you have a hard time accepting that anyone has a right to exist if they won’t jump three lab tables to save the life of a total stranger, so you guys are totally perfect for each other. But sorry to break it to you, you both still need to eat and sleep somewhere and, even worse, occasionally interact with other humans. Why are you setting every available bridge on fire?”
I put down my empty yogurt cup and pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms round them. “I’m going to start thinking Magnus put you up to this.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, he tried. I told him that I wasn’t a crazy person and I’d take a place in New York in a hot second if he offered it to me, but he wasn’t going to get any closer to bagging you. My point is—look, El, what are you even going to do?”