During which, it occurred to me that if no one else was trying, the course was wide open. Normally the school goes after you if you try to run the course more than three times a week, to keep people from hogging it, but you’re allowed to take an extra run if there’s literally nobody else queued. “I’ll be up to the library in a bit,” I said abruptly to everyone as we got up to clear our trays. “Come on, Lake.”
Orion whinged all the way down the stairs—all the real mals had abandoned the gym, since nobody was down there trying to run the course, so as far as he was concerned there wasn’t any point—but he gave in and came with me. We ran it together.
It was an even worse idea than hunting with him, in a completely different way. Blazing through endless hordes of fake mals, Orion killing them left and right in a sulky bored way and keeping me clear, with no one at my back I had to worry about, utterly free, utterly fearless. I made him do it three times in a row, and when he balked at a fourth run, I jumped him right there in front of the gym doors. We were kissing and everything was going really well in my opinion, and then he put a hand on the side of my breast mostly by accident and panicked and jerked back from me and babbled, “I’ve got, it’s, uh, I didn’t, you have, we,” incoherently, and nearly walked himself backwards right onto the corpse of the very real drencher he’d killed in our first run, which was still sopping wet and perfectly capable of dissolving the flesh off his feet and legs if he touched it on his own. I had to jump after him and drag him to one side, and he didn’t even notice why, he just pulled free of me and fled, leaving me standing alone in front of the doors.
But this time, not even that humiliation could bring me down. I went upstairs breathing deep and full of my own power, helplessly happy, even though it had obviously been stupid in every respect. I’d already known that I could get out if I didn’t bother worrying about anyone else. I didn’t need to shove my own face in how lovely and easy it would be, and especially I didn’t need to contemplate how much fun I could have with Orion in the process.
If I had needed help recognizing the stupidity of it all, Precious was waiting eagerly to provide it, perched on a shelf just inside the library doors. We weren’t taking the mice with us on the obstacle course; they weren’t the kind of familiars that help in combat situations, so instead we were practicing with small stuffed balls tucked into safe places in our gear. But I didn’t need to be bitten on the ear by the time I got up there; I’d had several long flights of stairs on which to contemplate the folly of my ways. “Yeah,” I told her shortly as I reached up to take her down, and she just nosed at the knuckle of my thumb and scampered back into her bandolier cup.
In the reading room, I stopped by one of the teams Aadhya had made our cleanup deal with, and told them if they did come down on Friday, I’d do another run with them after ours. They all stared at me like a herd of wildebeest being offered safe passage across the Nile by a very large crocodile. “Or don’t,” I said crossly. “I can use the practice if you want it, that’s all.”
They couldn’t decide that they did, but evidently they shared the offer around to get opinions, because on Friday, the other two teams were waiting when we came out. They didn’t actually ask me outright to go with them, like I was a person or anything; they just looked at me sidelong. I swallowed it and told Aadhya shortly, “I’ll see you upstairs,” and after my team had gone off down the hall, I said, “Let’s go,” and marched myself back in.
The other team weren’t as good as mine—or at least they weren’t as good as we’d become after six weeks of running the course together—but I got them all out again still alive. I did have to turn one of them to stone at one point to save her from being bitten in half, but I turned her back afterwards, so I don’t see what the problem was.
Everyone but me was waiting with enormous anticipation for that course to be swapped out, but on Monday, the next one was just as bad. All three of our cleanup-crew teams were waiting by the open doors when we came out, with their faces blankly appalled. I turned right round and did another run with them, and when we got out, there was a new team waiting—Liesel’s team. After New Year’s, she’d apparently crossed Magnus off and had instead settled for allying with Alfie, from London. I didn’t know what she had against the Munich enclave, which had three strapping senior boys to choose from if that was really one of her primary criteria, but there was presumably something, since these days Munich was a better choice than London for a German girl who was apparently viciously determined to get a seat on a top-tier enclave council before she was thirty. Unless there was something especially right with Alfie, but I hadn’t seen any notable signs of that in the last three years and change.