“What’s the matter, Mwinyi?” I snapped back. “Picked up a splinter today?”
“What’s the matter?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter! Six times today—six times—Fareeda went down.” He jerked a thumb at poor Fareeda, who was just sitting down herself, three chairs away from him. She was an artificer friend of Nkoyo’s I didn’t know very well, and she very clearly did not think she could safely have a go at me. She darted her eyes between us and slid the rest of the way into her chair while doing her best to convey that her entire being was on another plane of existence and it was just a mistake on our parts if we thought she was there. “On Monday, she only went down once. What do you say about that?”
There’s a lovely spell I know that makes your victim’s organs all desiccate while still inside them. The original was developed ages ago for perfectly respectable mummification purposes and fell out of fashion roughly along with that practice, but the version I’ve got is the really nasty nineteenth-century English one that everyone’s favorite Victorian maleficer, Ptolomey Ponsonby, worked up in translation out of his father’s collection of Egyptian artifacts. At the moment, I felt roughly as though someone were casting it on me.
“She didn’t stay down, did she?” I squeezed out of my shriveling entrails. Khamis wasn’t wrong to be concerned if Fareeda was going down a lot: she was in their team’s lead position. She’d spent all the fall semester building a massive forward shield, which would have been a bad strategy on an individual level except it had bought her a place in an enclaver’s alliance, even if it was an extremely dangerous place.
“Nkoyo pulled her up three times, James pulled her up twice. I got her up once myself,” Khamis said. “What were you doing? I’ll tell you. You were taking out a razorwing coming at Magnus Tebow. I don’t see Magnus at this table. Do you think we’re putting ourselves out to cover you so you can help all your New York friends?”
Chloe was on Aadhya’s other side, or on the astral plane along with Fareeda—almost everyone at the table was halfway to joining her, or trying to transmute themselves into unmanned ventriloquist dummies—but at that she let out a small strangled squawk, and then covered her mouth and looked away when everyone glanced at her.
“Tebow had a really good go at killing me about seven months ago, right in that corner over there,” I said, stupidly grateful for Khamis to have given me ground I thought I could stand on. “I wouldn’t lift a finger to put him at the gates ahead of one single person in this school.”
“Ah, so he’s not your friend,” Khamis said, loading on the sarcasm. “You don’t like him, you don’t want New York to take you.”
“El’s already got a guaranteed spot,” Chloe said, obviously deciding that she had to come in after all if this was going to be some kind of challenge to New York.
Everyone round the table twitched instinctively; it’s the kind of gossip we all pay attention to because you can usually trade it for something, but no one really looked surprised. “Which I’m not taking,” I said through my teeth. “I don’t like Magnus, and he’s not my friend, and I’m not going to New York.”
Everyone did look surprised then, and Chloe flinched. But Khamis just stared at me incredulously, and then got angry, really angry, like he thought I was telling him a lie so stupidly obvious that it was insulting I expected him to swallow it. He leaned forward and said through his teeth, “Then I have to ask you again. What was that? Why are you helping Magnus Tebow, who you don’t like, who isn’t your friend, whose enclave you don’t want to join, when you’re supposed to be helping us?”
But getting mad at me isn’t safe, because it gives me permission to get mad, too. I put my hands on the table and half came up, leaning forward, and I didn’t do it on purpose, but I don’t have to do this kind of thing on purpose: the lights in the room started to dim and stutter, except right around me, and the air got cold, and the words came out on a thin stream of fog when I hissed, “I helped Magnus because he needed it. The way I blocked the stone storm from crushing your skull when you needed it, and if Fareeda had gone down and stayed down, I’d have helped her, too. And if it’s too much to ask you to help her cover your massive front so I can save someone else’s life in the meantime, then you can try going it without me at all, you selfish toerag.”