After that it was awkward silence all round. I shoved aside enough of Orion’s dirty laundry to clear a rectangle of floor and did push-ups for mana, spiced up by the faint throbbing still going in my head. I was tired and sore and hungry enough that the exercise was highly productive as long as I could do it, but I ran out of steam sooner than I ran out of time and then I just flopped myself back onto Orion’s bed and lay there even more tired and sore and hungry and now sweaty, too. Liesel was sitting at Orion’s desk working on something, which I only realized was his work when he did and said, “Hey, you don’t have to…” in the most halfhearted way those words had been spoken ever.
“I have nothing else to do now,” Liesel said. “Later you can pay me back.”
“He’s guarding the room, isn’t he?” I said.
Liesel shrugged. “He’s here, too. It doesn’t count.” I rather thought it did, since he didn’t want to be in here and would have gone like a shot if we hadn’t been here, but I was the only one arguing his case. She added to him, “I will need amphisbaena scales.”
“Oh, sure, no problem,” Orion said, very enthusiastically. I scowled at him across the room, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on even metaphorically; that was a completely reasonable trade for someone doing your homework, and even if you thought it was in some way his duty to go hunt down amphisbaena for nothing, which I didn’t, that still wouldn’t mean he wasn’t entitled to get something back for taking the trouble to collect the scales.
Anyway he probably wouldn’t hunt amphisbaena for nothing; they’re only slightly more dangerous to us than the agglos, which they eat. Their worst quality is every decade or so enough of their predators get wiped out in a cleansing, and then the amphisbaena lay a bumper crop of tiny rubbery eggs in nice warm damp spots like for instance around the hot-water pipes, and when they hatch shortly after New Year’s, the babies pour out of the taps and the showerheads in droves, both heads hissing and biting. Which you’d justifiably say is in fact nightmarishly bad, but the poison isn’t strong enough to do more than sting at that stage, and it doesn’t get stronger until they’re big enough that they don’t fit through anymore. You just hear them stuck in there and hissing as you wash and hope very hard that the showerhead doesn’t break off today.
There almost certainly would be an infestation this year, now I thought about it. I’d have to pass the word, and also spend some of my crochet time making mesh bags to put on the showerheads. Liesel must have seen it coming a while ago and worked up a strategy using what was about to become an abundant resource; clever of her. Even more clever to take advantage of a golden opportunity to have Orion do the harvesting, in exchange for her doing the remedial homework she would probably knock off in the next two hours.
I sulked on the bed in completely unjustified resentment while she motored through the entire stack of worksheets with about as much effort as it was taking me to lie there. The only thing that slowed her down even a little were the places where Orion had dripped food and/or maleficaria innards on some of the questions, and she had to get him to help her reconstruct what the unspattered words had been. Actually I overestimated vastly: it took her thirty-eight minutes, and that includes the time she spent sorting it neatly into deadline order and putting it into a pair of folders for him and also tidying up absolutely everywhere.
I veered from being annoyed at her to being annoyed at Orion when he received the folders and just perfunctorily put them on the side of his desk and said, “Great, thanks. How many scales do you need?” It wasn’t effusive enough for me, much less by American standards.
“What Lake means is, he’s pathetically grateful that he doesn’t have to spend the last six months of term dodging vats of strong acid because he couldn’t be arsed to do his own homework,” I said peevishly.
Liesel just shrugged with all the weariness of a veteran of the wars—I suppose she’d worked her way through the entire time doing homework for enclavers—and said to Orion, “Can you get thirty hides? I need them at least two weeks old.”
“Sure,” Orion said blithely, and I didn’t literally gnash my teeth because no one does, do they, but I felt as if I were gnashing my teeth. With no justification in the slightest. Liesel had made a good deal for her, and so had Orion, and for that matter it was good for me, too, because I wouldn’t have to keep saving his thick plank self all the time. I didn’t even need to be worried that he was neglecting something important that would come back to bite him the way neglected assignments usually did. He didn’t need to practice his alchemy, either to graduate or for any other reason; he didn’t have any special affinity for it as far as I’d ever seen. I didn’t even know why he’d done alchemy track in the first place. New York surely had all its lab space packed with geniuses; he wasn’t going to graduate and go be a modestly competent alchemist the rest of his life.