That might not sound like much, but for comparison’s sake, in freshman year an enclave kid from Sydney glanced down at the really good French–English dictionary I’d found that week in the library and said, “Let’s have that, there’s a good girl,” not even asking. And because I told him exactly where he could hop off, at the end of class he had two of his minion-friends trip me going out of the room while another grabbed my entire bag and ran down the corridor shaking all my things out, yelling, “Free supplies!” while everyone laughed and grabbed.
I got up in the doorway with my lip bleeding and my forehead bruised. He was standing right there with two more of his pals to enjoy the show, all of them grinning, and then I turned and looked him in the face and thought in a red haze of all the things I could have done to him, so he stopped grinning and they fled the other way. Ever since, he’s firmly ignored my existence. Ah, the advantages of being a monstrous dark sorceress in embryonic form.
But he wouldn’t have stopped on his own. That’s what enclavers are like, most of them. Like Magnus, who was the reason we were exposed and also the reason the Shanghai kids were putting themselves on the line to take me out. Because they could imagine what someone like that would do with the kind of power I had.
And probably, maybe, at least half of those enclaver kids closing in round us were like Magnus themselves, but Yuyan wasn’t. I knew that much about her, and I also knew what she was casting, because I’d overheard people talking about this fantastic spell she’d got in her languages seminar that allowed you to get behind someone else’s spell and push, meaning that whatever spotty mustache boy was about to throw at us, she’d double it. That meant that when I flung it back, she’d get hit with the reflection, too. And maybe she deserved it, but I didn’t want to give it to her, to any of those kids getting ready to kill us for no reason other than being absolutely terrified of me and what I might do. It felt like making them right to have come after me.
But I even less wanted to let them kill me and Chloe, so I was just steeling my gut to go ahead and reflect the spell back anyway, when Chloe pulled a tiny plastic spray bottle filled with blue sparkling stuff from her pocket and spritzed it in the air all round us. On the other side of the glimmering, the whole room slowed down like everyone but the two of us was moving through mud—which meant of course she’d sped the two of us up; much easier.
“Do you have enough for us to run for it?” I asked her, but she shook her head, holding it up for me to see: the reservoir was the size of an underfed caterpillar, and there was barely any of the blue stuff left in the bottom.
“I just couldn’t think of anything else to do that would be quick enough,” she said. “I’ve got a blinding spray on me, but if I use it on those two incanters, Hu Zixuan in the back is going to hit us, and I’m almost sure that thing he has is a reviser. We’ve heard rumors about him working on one since he got here, and he’ll have it powered up by the time they go down—”
She was pointing at a kid all the way in the back of the group on the other side. I hadn’t paid much attention to him, because he was so shrimpy he looked like a sophomore at best; I’d assumed he was just helping to provide mana. But as soon as Chloe pointed him out, I realized it was the other way round: the five people fanned out in front of him were screening him and feeding mana back to him. Zixuan had a small pale-green rod almost completely hidden in his hand, which was connected by a thin gold wire to what had to be the rest of the artifact in his pocket: I could see slowed-down light gleaming along the line.
“Right,” I said grimly. “Go ahead and blind the incanters. Is it permanent?”
“You really want me to explain how it works now?” Chloe said. “It’s a migraine inducer, and maybe they’ll keep having them for the rest of their lives, and they’re about to fry us!”
“Yes, all right!” I said hastily. I was in fact perfectly all right with giving someone migraines in exchange for attempted murder. “Go after the boy with the mustache: Yuyan’s just doing an amplification; if you get him, her casting won’t do anything.”
“But what about the reviser?” Chloe said.
“That I can handle,” I said, and I really hoped I wasn’t lying, but anyway we were out of time. Chloe threw me one last desperate look that also hoped I wasn’t lying as she got out the blinding spray, and then the blue haze was settling down and my throat was hurting as if I’d been shrieking at the top of my lungs. The people on either side of us in the line were cringing away, so probably that’s about what our conversation had sounded like. Chloe was already lunging with a last bit of unnatural quickness across the empty space towards mustache boy, whose eyes went wide in alarm but stayed resolute. He’d known he was going to pull the first attack, brave bastard, although he screamed and crumpled when the spray hit him in the face just the same.