“But not…more than that,” Liu said softly, looking across the room at her cousins, who were at their own table now, along with Aaron and Pamyla, the girl who’d brought in Aadhya’s letter, and a good, solid crowd of other freshmen kids clustered around them: the kind of group that mostly only enclave kids got. Which surprised me, until I realized they’d picked up some glow-by-association from getting that close to Orion, hero of the hour. And then it occurred to me, possibly even a bit of glow might have come from me, since to all of the freshmen I was now a lofty senior who’d also been on the run down to the hall, and not the creepy outcast of my year.
And—I wasn’t the creepy outcast by anyone’s standards anymore. I had a graduation alliance with Aadhya and Liu, one of the first formed in our year. I’d been invited to sit at one of the safest tables in the cafeteria, by someone who had other choices. I had friends. Which felt even more unreal than surviving long enough to become a senior, and I owed that, I owed every last bit of it, to Orion Lake, and I didn’t care, actually, what the price tag was going to be. There’d be one, no question. Mum hadn’t warned me for no reason. But I didn’t care. I’d pay it back, whatever it was.
As soon as I put it in those terms inside my head, I stopped worrying over my note. I didn’t even have to wish anymore that Mum hadn’t sent it. Mum had to send it, because she loved me and she didn’t know Orion from a cold welshcake; she couldn’t help but warn me off if she knew I was on a bad road for his sake. And I could hold her love close to me and feel it, and still decide I was ready to pay. I put my fingers into my pocket to touch the last scrap I’d saved, the piece that said courage, and I ate it that night before I went to sleep, lying in my narrow bed on the lowest floor of the Scholomance, and I dreamed of being small again, running in a wide-open field of overgrown grass and tall purple-belled flowers around me, knowing Mum was nearby and watching me and glad that I was happy.
* * *
The lovely warm feeling lasted five seconds into the next morning, which is how long it took me to finish waking up. In most schools, you get holidays after term-end. Here, it’s graduation in the morning, induction in the evening, you congratulate yourself and your surviving friends that you’ve all lived that long, and the next day it’s the start of the new term. The Scholomance isn’t really conducive to holiday-making, to be fair.
On the first day of term, we have to go to our new homeroom and get our schedules lined up before breakfast. I was still feeling like moldy bread: it tends to slightly aggravate a half-healed gut wound when you get yourself bungeed around by yanker spells et cetera. I’d deliberately set an alarm to wake me five minutes before the end of morning curfew, because I was absolutely sure that wherever I was assigned for homeroom, it was going to take forever getting there. And sure enough, when the slip of paper with my assignment slid under my door at 5:59 a.m., it was for room 5013. I glared at it. Seniors hardly ever get any classroom assignments above the third floor, so you might think I should have been pleased, except it was only homeroom, and I was sure I’d never get a real class assigned that high. As far as I knew, there weren’t any classrooms on that floor—fifth floor is the library. Probably I was being sent to some filing closet deep in the stacks with a handful of other luckless strangers.
I didn’t even clean my teeth. I just swished my mouth out with water from my jug and started off on the slog while the first other seniors up were still shambling off to the loo. I didn’t bother asking round to see if anyone else was going the same way: I was sure nobody I knew well enough to speak to would be. I just waved to Aadhya in passing as she came out of her room with her bathroom bag, and she nodded back in immediate understanding and gave me a thumbs-up for encouragement as she continued on to collect up Liu: we’re all sadly familiar with the hazard of a long slog to a classroom, and our year now had the longest slogs of all.
There was no more down for us: yesterday, just as the seniors’ res hall went rotating down to the graduation hall, ours had followed to take their place, at the lowest level of the school. I had to trot round to the stairway landing, then make my extremely cautious way through the workshop level—yes, it was the day after the cleansing, but it’s never a good thing to be first onto a classroom floor in the morning—and then begin on the five steep double flights of stairs straight up.
They all felt at least twice as long as usual. Distances in the Scholomance are extremely flexible. They can be long, agonizingly long, or approaching the infinite, depending largely on how much you’d like them to be otherwise. It also didn’t help that I was so early. I didn’t even see another kid until I was panting my way up past the sophomore res hall, where the early risers had started trickling onto the stairs in small groups, mostly alchemy and artifice students hoping to nab better seats in the workshop and the labs. By the time I reached the freshman floor, the regular morning exodus was in full swing, but since they were all freshmen on their first day with no real idea where they were going, that didn’t speed the stairs up at all.