Which is hardly a unique approach. Roughly half of the indie kids are at least partly on the minion track: some of them offer up labor or muscle; the more desperate ones offer themselves up more or less explicitly as human shields. They take the worst seats at the cafeteria tables and in the classrooms; they fetch supplies and drop off homework; they walk the enclaver kids to their dorm rooms at night and keep watch for them in the showers without even asking for turnabout. Because almost all enclavers except the very richest ones will end up with a few filler positions in their alliances, open to average kids who can do four or five decent castings in ten minutes and have built a modest sum of mana on top of their schoolwork, and have been lucky enough to stay able-bodied and in solid physical condition through years in the Scholomance.
That was the kind of opening Ibrahim was aiming for, his whole time here. He didn’t have other options. He was perfectly competent, but that didn’t make him anything special, not by the standards of the graduation hall. And if you’re on the minion track, you can’t afford to prioritize anything as unimportant as your most passionately held beliefs or your deepest emotional needs. You don’t even get to prioritize your own bloody life when you’re going down the stairs first with your heart in your throat, just so if there is something waiting, it’ll get you instead of the enclaver seven steps behind you, who you’re both pretending really hard is being such a good friend for letting you have the chance.
That was why he’d kept it quiet. He wanted to keep the option to glom on to an enclaver who was the kind of rusty hinge who cared about other people’s business, and now he was asking me if I was one of those—because his life depended on it.
I wanted to yell at him in a fury and stomp away, but I couldn’t. He looked ready to cry, the way you would if you had to desperately beg some girl you’d been rude to on the regular for your life and the life of someone you loved. He’d have been a complete nutter not to lie to me in any way I wanted him to, if that got me to keep running with his alliance. For that matter, if he were really clever, he’d know I didn’t care and have the conversation anyway, as an excuse to exhibit his commitment to servility.
But I knew Ibrahim wasn’t that kind of clever. He was so good at sucking up because he was sincere about it. I think he really liked people to begin with—a foreign concept to me—and he was earnestly starry-eyed. He’d kept on sucking up to Orion long after it’d become clear that Orion wasn’t in the market for minions. For that matter, Ibrahim had been stupid enough to fall in love inside school; and it really had to be love, because hooking up with Yaakov for an alliance was an obviously bad idea that had put them both in those more dangerous spots.
So instead I muttered, “I’m not a wanker, Haddad. Have your own fun. See you tomorrow morning,” ungraciously, and then stomped away.
That same day at lunchtime, Magnus had the bald-faced cheek to ask Chloe to pass along an invitation to join his team if I still wanted more practice, which I suppose in his mind was the equivalent of Ibrahim’s desperate begging. I gritted my teeth and did a run with them that afternoon. They were just as good as Liesel’s team, and they would have been just as dead without me.
When I went down with my own team again on Wednesday morning, there were roughly thirty people downstairs waiting even before we got there, and they were all angry—furiously angry. They still didn’t know I meant to help them. What they did know was, if they wanted any practice, they had to go to me hat-in-hand for help that they weren’t going to have on graduation day, because of course I wasn’t going to help them then, and when they saw thirty other kids lined up to ask, they knew that today was the day I’d start charging for my help, and I’d want things they couldn’t afford to give away.
I don’t know if I could have fixed the situation by telling them I was going to save them all. I don’t think they’d have believed me. But I can’t say for certain, because I didn’t even try. They were looking at my friends; they were looking at Aadhya and Liu and all the people who’d taken a chance on me; and they were losers looking at enclavers, except fifteen minutes ago they’d been the enclavers, the ones who were going to live. Alfie with Liesel and the brilliant team she’d built, Magnus and his wolf pack; they hadn’t spent four years being slowly taught over and over that another kid had the right to live and they hadn’t.
And I could see in their faces that if they could have taken me, if I’d been a piece of artifice they could wrestle away or steal, they would have: they’d have used every unfair advantage they had and gone after my friends, and at this very moment probably most of them were trying to think of some way to do it, just like Magnus with his Field Day stunt.