The Shanghai kids had all backed a mile off, and for that matter so had the New York kids. During the previous month, people had briefly started doing things like asking me to trade books or passing me a jar in lab or loaning me a hammer in the shop. I’d been irritated at the time, since I’d understood very well it was because they’d decided I was an important person worth courting. But now they didn’t ask me for anything, and if I did say, “Can I have the psyllium husks,” four kids would jump at the same time to shove whatever thing I needed at me, more often than not knocking it over and spilling it all over the floor, at which point they would collectively go into a frantic routine of apologies and babbling while cleaning it up.
I did try saying things like, “I won’t bite,” only I said it while seething, so the message that actually got conveyed was that biting would be mild by comparison with whatever I would do instead. And of course they believed me. I’d already done something horrible beyond imagining: I’d made the Scholomance worse. Top marks for inflicting mass trauma. It was even getting the freshmen, too: three of them had died in the gym during the last couple of weeks. I made clear to mine that none of them were to go near the place, but other, less-well-advised ones, kept making excuses to go down there to play fun games of keep-away-from-the-surprise-mal or get-eaten-in-the-doorway. The death toll would’ve been higher except Orion had begun patrolling the place on a routine basis to hunt for the mals that were using it as a hunting ground. I wasn’t clear on whether it counted as him using the freshmen as bait if they were the ones staking themselves out.
We’re all wary of one another in here as a general rule. Budding maleficers are at the top of everyone’s list of potential threats, followed by enclavers, older kids, the better students, the more popular ones. Any other kid could become a mortal enemy without so much as a moment’s notice if the right conditions—usually a mal planning to eat at least one of us—came along. But we knew how to be afraid of one another; what we might do to one another had sensible limits. No one would ever in ten thousand years have imagined that if someone tried to kill me in the gym, I’d respond by rebuilding the gym fantasia and creating a fresh torment for everyone in the school, including myself. I certainly wouldn’t have imagined it.
So now I wasn’t just a dangerously powerful fellow student, to be flattered and watched and strategized over. I was an unpredictable and terrible force of nature that might do anything at all, and they were all shut up in here with me. Like I’d become part of the school myself.
As if to confirm it, the mals all suddenly stopped coming after me. I didn’t know why. I spent a few weeks panicking until Aadhya worked it out. “Right, here’s what’s going on,” she said, sketching it out on paper for us to understand, on a stick-figure diagram of the school’s screw-top shape. “It takes mana to run all the wards. Early in the year, when there’s not a lot of mals, the school does this neat trick: it opens a few of the wards, aimed right at you, and uses that mana to reinforce the other wards. The mals take the path of least resistance, and voilà, you’re target number one. But by now there’s too many of them and they’re squeezing through on their own as usual.”
“And no maleficaria are going to come at you if they have any other choice,” Liu finished, as if that were obvious.
“Yeah, aces,” I said. “Even the mals agree I’m poison. Ow! Get off me, you little—！” Precious had just bit my earlobe. I swatted at her but she scampered handily across my hunched shoulder blades and grabbed the rim of my other ear meaningfully, a fairly potent threat given the stabbing pain in my first one. “No treats for you,” I told her coldly, after I took her off—carefully—and put her back into the carrying cup. But I did say, “Sorry,” to Aad and Liu in a mutter. It really wasn’t on for me to be whining about being unpalatable. I still remembered exactly how I’d felt about Orion telling me that mals never came after him.
Of course, even if the mals had gone, my hair trigger hadn’t. I was still jumping at every noise and nearly obliterating the occasional solitary fool who came bumbling across my path at unexpected moments. They were always the kind of pathetic friendless loser no one else would warn off from going into the library corridor where I was lurking or taking a seat too close to me. Just like I’d been. I’d almost have appreciated the distraction of actually being attacked.