My hand instinctively went up to wrap around the bandolier cup on my chest, where she was curled up sleeping. “There’s something wrong with her?”
Liu shook her head. “Not wrong. But it took so much longer for her to start manifesting, and now she’s already a lot stranger than the others. I saw her try to bite Orion once in the library when he was about to put his arm around your shoulders. That means she’s exercising judgment that’s independent of yours. That’s not really a thing that happens with mice.”
I was about to claim that my judgment was perfectly aligned with Precious on the subject of Orion putting his arm around my shoulders or on any other part of me, but Liu gave me a pointed look and I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth.
“Anyway, I also realized, you almost never use normal spells,” she went on. “You’ll even sweep the floor with a broom before you’ll use a spell.”
“My spells are more likely to sweep every living person in the room into the nearest rubbish bin,” I said.
Liu nodded. “Yes. And those are the spells you’re good at, the ones that come easily. So you don’t ever use magic when you can use something else.”
“But how did Zixuan guess all that?” I asked, after a moment. I was having some difficulty digesting the idea. I never do get ordinary spells, and the ones I get are almost always unnecessarily complicated—like those Old English cleaning spells I’d got last term, which turned out to be worthless for trade even beyond being in Old English, because they took twice as much mana to use as the modern cleaning charms everyone else had, and needed more focus besides. I’d assumed that was the school—or, well, the universe—being out to get me, not because there weren’t ordinary cheap spells, for me. I wasn’t sure whether that ought to make me feel better or worse, actually.
“He said it’s the same way a reviser works,” Liu said. “It abstracts away detail and allows you to operate on a higher scale, control more power. But you can’t use a reviser to do detail work. So—you’re like a living reviser. That’s why you have trouble with little spells, and not really big ones. He guessed because you could channel the power from his reviser so easily.”
“I wouldn’t have called it easy, myself,” I muttered, but that was just grousing. I would’ve quite liked a chat with him myself, actually; it sounded as though he might know more about how my magic worked than I did. “But in that case, they know I’m not lying—they know I really can get them through the course. Why wouldn’t they come?”
“They don’t believe you could really have hidden your power from everyone,” Liu said. “They think New York knew all along, and you’ve been in with them from the start, and just hiding it so none of the other enclaves would know about you before graduation.”
I groaned and thumped my forehead down against my knees. The problem was, I couldn’t see any way to disprove it. It made all the sense in the world from their perspective, which was limited by the language barrier that runs through the middle of the school. Over my four years in here, I’ve shared a class with at least half the kids in the English-language track, and almost none with Chinese-track kids. I know the ones like Yuyan who are doing enough languages that we’ve overlapped once or twice, and the bilingual Chinese-track kids who take their general classes in English to count for their language requirement. But that’s it. Most kids don’t cross over very much to begin with—most group conversations in this school happen either in English or in Chinese, so you hang out with the kids who prefer the same one you do. Liu deliberately chose to spend more time with the English-speaking crowd because she’s working on spell translation, which requires as much fluency as writing complicated metered poetry with lots of long obscure words in a foreign language.
But I crossed over not at all, because I wasn’t in any conversations, period. I went to my classes and spoke to almost no one, ate alone, studied alone, worked out alone, tucked away in my own cramped little cell, exactly as I would have if I’d been deliberately hiding a very bright light under a bushel. The actual explanation, which was that I hadn’t had any alternatives because no one liked me, only invited the question of why I hadn’t made any of them like me by giving them a good look at the aforementioned bright light, thereby getting myself courted by all instead of dangerously isolated.
That was such a good question that I’d literally spent three years aggressively telling myself I was going to join up to an enclave as soon as I got the chance, and then carefully avoiding any possibility of a chance while pretending to myself I was playing some sort of extremely long game. If I’d ever acknowledged to myself that possibly my mum had been right and I didn’t want to join an enclave after all, I’d probably just have lain down and died in hopelessness at the prospect of—the rest of my life. I’d only been able to admit it to myself after Orion, Orion and Aadhya and Liu; after I wasn’t completely friendless anymore.