“I don’t suppose they let you talk them out of it?” I asked, without any real hope. It looked stupid in retrospect even to me, so I didn’t think Yuyan and Zixuan were going to believe it. Maybe someone who’d been among the kids who’d deliberately avoided me, but the Shanghai kids hadn’t any clue that loser-kid me even existed until suddenly I erupted into prominence. And then Chloe and the New York kids suddenly embracing me en masse, offering me an alliance and a guaranteed spot, just because Orion had been hanging around me for a few weeks? I’d thought they were completely mad. It would make loads more sense if actually I’d secretly been part of their crew all along, or at least for a year or more.
Liu shook her head. “They were polite, but I’m pretty sure the other reason they wanted to talk to me was to get an idea if you had tricked me, or if I was trying to establish a relationship with New York.”
I blew out a breath. That was Liu trying to be polite to me, but I knew what she meant was, the Shanghai kids wanted to get an idea if she—and by extension her family—were getting ready to undercut the established Chinese enclaves and make an alliance with New York to get their own enclave. “Which did they pick?”
Liu held up her hands in a shrug. “I told them that I couldn’t prove anything. But you were my friend, and you really wanted to get everyone out, and you aren’t going to New York. So…they think you tricked me.” She gave a small sigh.
It wasn’t even especially paranoid of them. The Asian enclaves have been in a slow and increasingly vicious decades-long wrestling match with New York and London to force them to hand over more Scholomance seats. The Chinese-language track of general classes literally only started in here in the late eighties. Before then, it was English or nothing, even after a good quarter of the school was coming in with some dialect of Chinese as their first language, and it only finally changed when the ten major Asian enclaves, Shanghai in the lead, publicly announced an exploratory committee to build a new school under their control.
Of course, the enclaves didn’t really want to follow through on that threat. The wizard population has been growing steadily since the Scholomance opened, but as of right now, adding a second school and splitting the enclaver population across them would mean they’d have to compete with the Scholomance for indie kids. Both schools would have to sweeten the odds for us—at the cost of their own kids. And that’s apart from the massive cost of building the school itself.
What they really wanted was what they got: more Scholomance seats for their enclaves to hand out, and classes in an easier language for their kids. Not much to ask, but they’d had to make the threat to get it, and the allocation is still a far cry from fair. I’m in here myself thanks to a spot London really shouldn’t still have had to give out, and meanwhile indie kids all over Asia are still doing those grueling exams for the chance to be among the one in two kids who get a place.
But that can’t be fixed any more without starting to take places away from the very top international enclaves in the US and Europe, none of whom want to give up a single one. The next reallocation is coming soon—and there’s a real fight brewing over it. New York and Shanghai and their allies on both sides have been doing increasingly nasty things to one another for the last few years, jockeying for position. It would be a bit of a shocker to find out that a New York ally had gone after Bangkok and literally taken the enclave down, but we can all imagine it. Everyone knows it’s entirely possible that there’s a full-on enclave war happening right now.
Everyone including me, but the truth is, I’ve only known it in a vague background-noise way. All these years I’ve been a loser struggling in the soup; the geothaumaturgipolitical dancing among the top enclaves of the world didn’t matter to me anymore than pariah-loser me mattered to the top kids from Shanghai enclave. But it mattered now, and the more I thought about it, the more of a desperate mess it looked. Of course Yuyan and Zixuan wouldn’t trust me. They thought I was planning to graduate and head straight to New York, where presumably I’d be trying to help kill them and their families. Why wouldn’t I just do for them in here if I had the chance?
“But what’s their alternative?” I said in frustration, having gnawed it over in my head without finding a way through. “No matter what, they still can’t get through the obstacle course without me, and if they don’t get any practice in, they’ll die anyway. I’ll grant you it’s a bad chance, but it’s the only chance they’ve got. Why not give it a go? Or—why not at least send a few minions to give it a go, and make sure?”