Liu shook her head. “The course is in the gym.”
I groaned and lay myself out flat on the ground, staring at the ceiling. The gym, which I’d completely overhauled this past Field Day, in a bizarre and utterly nonsensical use of power which would suddenly make fantastic sense if what I’d been doing was, for instance, arranging some kind of mysterious sabotage of the obstacle course that would force people to put themselves in my power. Ideally in some way that would allow me to maintain power over them even after they left school and went home to their enclaves. That’s the whole idea behind the obstacle course to begin with—giving your consent is necessary to make it work. If some maleficer—some maleficer—managed to wriggle their way into it, that would be an excellent mechanism to use to force people to become their mindless zombie servants et cetera.
“I’m sorry,” Liu said softly. “I did already try asking a few indie kids to come, but…they don’t really trust me.” She put her hand up to run it back and forth over the short spiky fuzz of her head, an unconscious gesture she’d picked up ever since it had been cut. She hadn’t made that many more friends than I had, in her first three years in the Scholomance. Her family hadn’t needed her to network. They’d needed her to stay alive, and keep her kid cousins alive through their freshman year, and she’d been meant to do it with malia. And when you’re just a low-level maleficer, people pick up on that sort of thing and get nervous. “And they do trust the Shanghai kids. Most of them wouldn’t have spots in here at all if Shanghai hadn’t fought for them.”
I’d have debated the purity of the enclavers’ motives, but I’ll grant you that I didn’t have very good ground to stand on, me with my for-granted spot that Mum asked me if I wanted to take. “Do you suppose it would help things if we told them that I’ve actually got a mind control spell that works on masses of people at once?” I said aloud.
“No,” Liu said, positively. Then she said, “…do you?”
I grimaced, enough of an answer. She was right, of course; that’s not very confidence-inspiring.
But if we couldn’t find a way to change their minds—if Zixuan and Yuyan and the other kids from Shanghai didn’t come, if they all stayed away from our obstacle course runs, because they were afraid that it was a massive setup meant to take control of their brains and turn them all into trojan horses—and then graduation came, and they all died, in droves, because they hadn’t had any practice, while everyone who’d followed New York’s lead came sailing out home to their families—then it would in fact turn out to be a massive setup, in result if not intention, and I didn’t think their parents would be particularly interested in what my intentions had been.
* * *
As if to emphasize the problem, next morning there were more than a hundred kids for the English run. That many kids all in one place was so much temptation that a squad of extremely real, extremely hungry mals jumped us during the run, bursting out of snowdrifts and from behind jagged towers of ice. It wasn’t very wise of them; we could all tell they were the real thing, because they hadn’t been in the run earlier that week, so Orion made a beeline for each one. He took them all down without a worry, except for the massive manta-ray-sized digester that peeled itself off one face of the glaciers during their attack and tried to just flop itself completely over him. That one I just disintegrated whole.
I had the attention to spare, because everyone else had already got better. Thanks to Liesel, I was grudgingly forced to admit; she had been waiting right in front of the doors while everyone gathered, and as I got there, she preemptively announced in projecting tones, “We must approach the run differently. Stop thinking how you can help the people nearest to you. Think about what help you can give best, and look for the nearest person who needs that help.”
That was completely unintuitive, and very few people were willing to let go of their alliances quite that thoroughly yet. But by halfway through the run, it was so obviously the better approach that everyone was at least trying to do it. By the end I almost felt as if Orion and I were running it on our own—the same exhilaration except even better, though the run was still a thousand times harder—because the plan was working. Everyone was helping everyone else, saving everyone else, and all I had to do was jump in when anyone’s luck went a bit sour.
There were a lot more kids at the Hindi run in the afternoon, too: Ravi and three other enclavers from Jaipur showed up with their teams, so evidently Liesel’s cooing had paid dividends after all. Still nobody from Mumbai, though; not from anywhere in Maharashtra. That wasn’t really a surprise. Back at the start of freshman year, when all of us who weren’t enclavers ourselves were in the first frantic rush of trying to make friends, the other kids started going to lengths to avoid me by the second time meeting me. But the kids from Mumbai would literally pick up and move away from me without another word as soon as they heard my name.