Ordinarily the reserved gym is a useful and highly valued privilege. No one was very enthusiastic about it this year, but there wasn’t any other option for practice. The fundamental goal of graduation is to get from the nearest stairwell to the gates as fast as possible without getting stopped along the way. It’s roughly a distance of 150 meters, about the same distance as from one end of the gym and back, and aside from throwing spells left and right, you also have to run.
“Mornings?” I said, in protest, because Aadhya had us meeting three times a week at eight, which meant hauling ourselves out of bed at the first quiet chiming to get breakfast and make it downstairs; we’d be first through all the corridors, not to mention—very important to mention—first into the obstacle course every week, without any warning how bad it was going to be.
“I talked to Ibrahim and Nkoyo today, during the cleansing,” Aadhya said. “We made a deal. They’ll go right behind us with their teams, on either side. We take the heat up front, and they keep us from getting flanked. We’ll practice together each morning.”
That kind of arrangement is normally a supremely terrible strategy for the lead group, to the point that you’re explicitly warned against it in the pre-graduation handbook we’ll all be getting in about three months—much too late to be of real use; we’re all using copies we bought in our sophomore years off that year’s seniors, who’d bought their own copies two years before, et cetera. The advice changes a little from year to year, but one of the most consistent points is that taking the lead is absolutely not worth whatever advantage you might get from the groups covering you. As soon as you’re in any danger of being overwhelmed, they’ll hop to one side and let whatever they’re holding off come at you, meaning that you won’t even have a chance to recover, while they take the opening created by the pile-on and go sailing onwards with a substantial improvement to their odds, taken out of yours.
It’s not great to be the one taking the lead even within an alliance, but at least in an alliance, you’ve been practicing together and integrating your skills tightly, so it’s not actually a good idea for your allies to cut and run. Unless you’re close enough to the doors, at which point loads of alliances do fall apart. And that, boys and girls, is why enclavers never take the lead.
Aadhya wasn’t making a mistake, though. There’s one situation where having someone covering you does in fact make excellent sense: if it’s never going to be a good idea for them to ditch you. For instance, if all they’ve got is knives and your team’s got a flamethrowing machine gun. So she was confirming that yes, our entire strategy was going to rest on my keeping my big-girl pants on. “Right,” I said, grimly, because what else was I going to say? No, don’t rely on me? No, I won’t do my best to get you to the gates, the way you’ve done for me? Of course she was going to build the strategy around me. And of course I had to let her.
“El,” Aadhya said, “you know we’d take Orion,” and you might think that was a hilariously absurd thing to say—yes, out of the generous goodness of our hearts we’d take the invincible hero along with us—but I knew what she really meant. She was saying Orion’s not on our team, and if I was, that meant I couldn’t ditch them to go help him, even if, for instance, I looked over and saw him being dragged into the guts of a maw-mouth, screaming the way that Dad’s been screaming in Mum’s head since the day she crawled out through the gates with me in her belly. If that was the monstrous fate Mum had been trying to warn me away from, she’d know, she’d know the way no one else in the world would know just how horrible it would be to live with someone you love screaming in your head forever.
“I’ll ask him,” I said without lifting my head, pretending I could still see anything when actually I had my eyes shut to keep from dripping on Aadhya’s carefully written timetable. She put her hand on my shoulder, warm, and then she half put her arm around me, and I leaned into her a moment and then shook my head wildly and sucked in a big gulping breath, because I didn’t want to get started. What was the point? I couldn’t do anything about that, either.
I did ask him that night as we walked up to dinner, because I had to, just in case. He had the nerve to say, “El, you’re going to be fine,” in reassuring tones. “There’s plenty of mana in the pool, I’ll get more in now that there are more mals around, you’ve got Chloe and—”