There was a man who came to the commune once with his girlfriend and patronized everyone, asking overly polite questions with a sneer in the smile that he always tacked on, and you all really believe in this sort of thing? It was a familiar sneer: the exact one that filled my own heart every time someone tried to tell me earnestly about how I would really clear my chakras if only I would wear this set of beads or that magnetic copper bracelet. They’d always get wound up when I told them that putting on a thing churned out of a machine from ore that had been strip-mined by underpaid laborers wasn’t likely to improve my mana balance any. But I still hated this wanker the instant he turned up. He’d only come, as far as I could tell, to make his girlfriend feel bad about having a nice weekend doing yoga in the woods with people kind enough to ask her how she was feeling, even if they did it with a bunch of blather about her chakras.
The tired way she had looked, that was how Nkoyo looked, and it made me just as cross to see, cross enough that back at the commune I’d actually gone up to the guy and told him that he should get out and stay away. He laughed and smiled at me and I just stood there looking at him, because that usually did the trick even though I was only eleven years old at the time, and fifteen minutes later he did indeed leave. But he made his girlfriend go with him.
So I didn’t go tell Khamis to get out. I just made sure to bus my tray with Nkoyo and told her, “Feel free to tell that prick that I kicked off at you when you even tried to suggest the idea,” and she glanced at me and her mouth quirked, a little of the sparkle coming back. I should have felt proud of myself; I’m sure Mum would have told me I’d grown. I’m afraid all I felt was an even more passionate desire to drop Khamis down a maintenance shaft.
When we ran the course again two days later—we each get to go every other day; anyone who tries to hog the course more than that starts to have unpleasant experiences, like for example their spells not working at all at a critical juncture—I didn’t turn the whole river to lava. Instead I summoned just enough lava at the bottom of it to boil the whole thing up while simultaneously cooling the lava down. The variety of traps and simulated mals lurking in the river almost all got encased in the new stone, or at least became completely visible, and we could just walk across at any point we liked.
“El, that was the right thing to do,” Liu said to me afterwards, intently. We’d made it to the far end and back without any serious bloodletting that time, which made that seem obvious, but she meant it more generally. “It was the right thing to do because it gave us choices. Having a choice is the most important thing.”
I’d heard that before. It’s a bullet-point line in the graduation handbook: As a general rule, regardless of the specific situation in which you find yourself, at every step you must take care to preserve or widen the number of your options. It hadn’t quite sunk in properly, but now it did. Having a choice meant being able to choose something that worked for you and whatever you were carrying and whatever you’d prepared. Having a choice meant you got to choose getting out.
Liu looked back at the doors. “Six months left.” I nodded. We went upstairs to get back to work.
I’d like to say Khamis improved on acquaintance, but he didn’t. The second week of the obstacle course, we did it properly: I sang the mana-amplification spell before the doors even fully opened and charged in without stopping to let myself look. I went straight into a knee-high snowdrift in a glacial mountain landscape, empty except for massive tall stone boulders jutting out of the ground like pillars, intermittent blasts of snowy wind coming into our faces almost as hard as the boundary blizzard from last time. It was still beautiful, but it was the kind of beautiful that normally you only get to see in person if you spend a week hauling yourself up a mountain with a backpack longer than your torso.
I floundered a few steps in, and then my foot just went out from under me and I headed over backwards. If it hadn’t been for Aadhya’s shield holder—after I’d told her about my little run-in with Liesel, she’d tweaked them to handle accidental falls along with deliberate impact—I’d probably have concussed myself properly that time. As it was, I went down hard, and the snowdrifts on either side of me fell in on top of my head and started actively trying to smother me. Jowani hauled me out of it and put me back on my feet—oh I was glad to have him along—just as the boulders all unfolded themselves into troll shapes like Transformers made out of rock and started flinging chunks at our heads.