Khamis was leaning far back by then, with the iridescent green sheen of the light reflecting off his cheekbones and in the dark rings of his wide eyes, but he was stuck, after all. Maybe if he had been a coward, he’d have shut up just to get me to back away, but he wasn’t, worse luck for both of us, and I had to be lying, because that couldn’t be the truth in here. He took a gasp of cold air and said thinly, “That’s crazy. What are you going to do? Save everyone? You can’t save everyone. Not even you and Lake.”
“Watch me,” I said, furious and desperate, but even while I was snarling at him, I knew that the wheels were coming off and the wreck was coming. I’d just barely made it through the obstacle course with fifty kids—not quite fifty kids—and there were more than a thousand of us: the largest senior class in the history of the entire Scholomance. The senior class that Orion Lake had made by saving us and saving us. A thousand timers running out, all at the same time.
Khamis had been in the gym for the run himself, so after I said those stupid words, he wasn’t angry at me in the same way anymore, because he’d worked out that I wasn’t lying to him. It was the difference between someone threatening to shoot you and someone running around in circles screaming wildly while emptying a gun into the air. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “Get everybody out? You are crazy!” He spread his arms to the whole table. “What happens to us while you’re busy saving all these people you don’t like? You’re going to get us all killed while you pretend to be a hero. You think you can take our mana, take our help, and do whatever you want, is that what you think?”
“Khamis,” Nkoyo said, low and urgent; she’d got up too, and she was reaching out to put a hand on his arm. “It’s been a hard morning.” He stared at her incredulous, his whole expression twisted up with indignation, and then he looked round the table at everybody else—everybody else who wasn’t saying anything to me, in exactly the same way no one had ever said anything to him, all these years—while he took their mana and their help and did whatever he wanted, because there was no point saying anything when the answer was yes. It was just rubbing your own face in it, and the only reason he didn’t already know that was he’d never been a loser before, lucky enclave boy.
But he was now. He was a loser, and so was Magnus, so was Chloe, so was every last enclaver in the place, because they weren’t getting through the obstacle course without me. It was entirely possible that they weren’t getting through the graduation hall without me. So if I offered any of them a place at my side, in exchange for everything they could possibly scrape together, mana and hard work and even friendship, and if I took everything they gave me and used it to pretend to be a hero—even though of course they didn’t want me to, because that was, actually, very likely to get them killed—still they’d take it and say thanks, if they knew what was good for them. Thank you, El. Thank you very much.
The silence got longer. Khamis didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t look at me. He wasn’t stupid any more than he was a coward, and he’d got it now that he had rubbed his own face in it. And mine, of course, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. From this side, it was only embarrassment, really. How unfortunate that someone had made such a scene, such an unnecessary fuss. If only I’d been an enclaver myself, I expect I’d have been trained up to handle moments like this with grace. By now, Alfie would have said, a little rueful, Do you know, I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea, and he’d have reached into his ample purse of mana and turned our jug of water into a big steaming teapot, with milk and sugar on the table—just the soothing comfort his own lightly chafed spirit needed. And everyone else would have taken it, not because it helped the gaping wound on their side, but because when you had nothing, you took what you could get.
But I wasn’t an enclaver, so I didn’t handle it gracefully, and they didn’t even get a cup of tea for their pains. I just turned and ran away into the stacks.
Aadhya found me a while later. I don’t know what time it was. There isn’t any daylight in here and the surroundings never change and I was alone in the little library room where you couldn’t hear the bells, the room where no one else had ever had a class, where the Scholomance had tried and tried all this year—not to kill me, but to make me turn my back and let other people die, kids I didn’t know. As though the school had known what it needed to worry about, long before I’d worked it out for myself. The way it had known that I could kill a maw-mouth, and had tried to bribe me into going the other way.