That day I had filled about thirty tiny pages with tight handwritten notes. The bell was about to ring and I was still going when the whole folder did a sort of angry jerk and went flying sideways off my desk, scattering paper everywhere; I gave a yowl of protest and grabbed for it, too late, and then had to pack up in a hurry, expecting something to jump me at any moment. I only realized that it had been my mark being delivered when I finally had all my notes collected again. I opened the folder to stuff them back in, and the little slip of green paper was tucked in the pocket, with Adv. Readings in Sansk poking out above the top. I pulled it out and glared at the A+ with a footnote asterisk going to Special Commendation at the bottom, which was just rubbing it in: Look at all your misspent time. I could practically hear the Scholomance sniggering at me from the ventilation system. But that was just pettiness, and overall I heaved a sigh of relief; it could’ve been loads worse.
It was loads worse for other people. At lunch that day, Cora came to our table with her face tight with pain and her arm wrapped up in her beautiful yellow head tie with the embroidered protection charm, blood soaking through it in spreading dark patches. “Failed shop,” she said, her voice ragged. She had her tray held tight against her waist with her other arm, and the contents were pretty scanty. But she didn’t ask for help. She probably couldn’t afford it. She hadn’t nailed down an alliance of her own yet.
She and Nkoyo and Jowani were friends, and they’d been great help for one another for tables and walking to class, but the same reason they’d been great for that was why they weren’t a viable graduation team: all three of them were incantations-track, and doing all the same languages. And Nkoyo was going to get decent alliance offers. In fact, she probably had one already, since just that morning she’d carefully mentioned that she might sit with someone else tomorrow for breakfast. A lot of alliances happened after midterm marks cleared. But Jowani and Cora were going to be stuck until after the end of the semester, when the enclavers had got their alliances set and the leftovers sorted themselves out.
It’s not that they were loads worse as students, even. As far as I knew, they were all three somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as classwork went. But Nkoyo was a star, and they weren’t. She’d always been the one who made the friends and connections, and when you thought of the three of them, you always thought of her in the lead. They’d leaned on her social skills the whole time, and that had been good for them—right until now, when everyone thought Nkoyo, and not one of them.
Most years, that meant their odds were going to be somewhere in the 10 percent range. The rule is that 50 percent of the graduating class makes it out, but that doesn’t mean it’s even odds. The kids in enclaver alliances almost all get out, with maybe one or two members picked off each team—rarely the enclave kids themselves—and that’s roughly 40 percent of the class. So the ones who die almost all come out of the 60 percent who don’t have an enclaver on their side. Of course, even that leaves you with better odds than you get on the outside of the Scholomance, which is why kids keep coming.
If the cleansing machinery down in the graduation hall really had got fixed, if it stayed fixed this year, they might make it out after all. But it wouldn’t improve Cora’s odds any to be going into the second half of the semester with a bad arm that she’d got because she’d screwed up and misjudged the amount of effort to put into her shop assignment. No enclaver was going to look at that arm and ask her to join their team. She sat down carefully, doing her best not to jostle the wound, but once she was down she still had to shut her eyes for a few long minutes, taking deep breaths before she tried to fumble at her milk one-handed and shaky.
Nkoyo silently reached over and got it and opened it. Cora took it and drank without looking at her. Nkoyo hadn’t taken unfair advantage. She’d helped them make it this far; it wasn’t on her if she couldn’t take them the whole way, if they weren’t good enough and she had to jettison them to make it herself, like boosters of rocket fuel falling away spent while the orbital module went flying on past gravity. There wasn’t anything she could do to save them, and they’d made their own choices, getting here. But Cora still didn’t look her in the face, and Nkoyo still didn’t say anything to her, and all of us at the table pretended we weren’t looking at Cora’s bloodstained arm when of course we were.
I didn’t know I was going to say anything until I did. “I can patch the arm if everyone at the table will help,” I said, and everyone paused eating and stared at me, either sidelong or just straight-out gawking. I hadn’t thought it through, just blurting it out, but the only thing to do in the face of the stares was push onward. “It’s a circle working. No one has to put in any extra mana, it’ll work if we all just hold the circle, but everyone already here has to do it.”