No one else could think of any other reason why it was happening; as far as they knew, nothing had changed. I was the only one who knew what had changed. I’d changed. And the brutal courses were too obviously a response. You want to save everybody, you silly girl? Right, let’s make that harder for you: nobody gets any practice the rest of the term, so they’ll all be panicking and fumbling around down in the hall. Good luck saving them then.
I wasn’t sharing my grand plan, though, so everyone else kept laboring onward in ignorance and spreading alarm. That afternoon in the library, a couple other teams got up the desperation to ask me to do a run, and the next morning, Ibrahim did them one worse: he cornered me on my bleary way to the girls’ and sidled round the subject for nearly five minutes before I finally understood that he was trying to work out if I had any sort of opinion about him kissing Yaakov.
He hadn’t done anything wrong by Scholomance standards, not telling me. You do have to disclose any conflict of interest like that to your potential allies before you ask them to go with you and your significant other—it clearly wasn’t an accident that in his team, he was in the lead and Yaakov was bringing up the rear, the two most dangerous positions and the most separated, where they wouldn’t have a chance to ditch the others and take off together. But I wasn’t one of his allies. My name wasn’t written up on the wall with him and Yaakov, so he hadn’t owed me a thing, my opinion shouldn’t have made a difference. But here he was trying to find it out, as though it should have mattered.
It was horrible, and I couldn’t even howl at him, because it did matter, now, by the standard operating procedure of Scholomance losers. Aadhya had made a tactical deal for us with their alliance, but it’s always understood in those deals that either side has the right to jettison the other and trade up if the opportunity permits. And the opportunity did permit, now that I had become an extremely scarce and valuable resource. If we took the chance to, oh, upgrade to running with Liesel and Alfie, Ibrahim and his team would suddenly be just as stuck as everyone else who didn’t have me to run with.
And it wasn’t an accident that he and Yaakov hadn’t let on that they weren’t just friends, all those nights we were sitting together studying in Chloe’s room. We’re all fairly nose-to-grindstone in here, but one of the most reliable topics of conversation was nevertheless gossip about who was dating who or wanted to. It was second only to gossip about who was getting allied with who.
There wasn’t actually very much of the gossip to be had, because oddly enough constantly being on the verge of malnourishment, exhaustion, and mortal terror isn’t really conducive to romance, but we extracted all the entertainment we could from the couples that managed to have the energy—most of which involved at least one enclaver, unsurprisingly. We knew when Jamaal started coordinating his snack runs at the same time as a girl from Cairo—her with a group of girls, him with a group of boys, all very by the book. We knew that Jermaine from New York had spent the last year in a competitive love triangle with a boy from Atlanta over one of the top alchemists, and we all knew when in a perfect storm of gossipy delight it turned into a trio and an alliance, halfway through the first month of term. Everyone else also had the fun of pestering me about Orion while they were at it. Ibrahim and Yaakov had decided not to share the information. They’d decided it was a risk they couldn’t afford to take.
Lots of enclavers, especially from the most powerful Western enclaves, like to go on about how enlightened wizard society is, relative to the masses of the mundanes. From their rarefied perspective, I suppose it’s true. Spend decades recruiting the most brilliant wizards from all round the world, because they’re the ones who can best save your kids’ lives and make your enclave even richer and more powerful, then you can look round your diverse and tolerant international enclave and pat yourself on the back in a congratulatory way. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any bigots among us. It only means that we’ve got this one additional dividing line of our own that stops right at the enclave doors, and it’s sharp enough to cut your throat.
And Ibrahim wasn’t on the safe side of that line. He’s not an enclaver; he’s not one of the top students, who could count on getting an alliance with one. His primary gift, the one talent that he’d marshaled to get himself all the way through school and into his alliance with Jamaal—the boy from Dubai who was going with his team—was that he was a really determined and enthusiastic suck-up. If you liked a tidy bit of flattery and someone who’d cheer you on and comfort you when you were down, pat you on the back and tell you that you were brilliant and in the right even if you were really quite blatantly in the wrong, help you talk your way through any inconvenient fits of guilt or conscience, then he was your lad, and loads of enclavers did indeed like that.