“Yeah,” Chloe said. “But my grandma’s an alchemist. She started by teaching me to cook, when I was about ten. She was really happy that I wanted to learn; my mom and my uncle never did. She got in for working on the cafeteria overhaul,” she added.
For all that the food in here is mostly awful and regularly contaminated, we’re lucky to have it. Originally the Scholomance cafeteria dispensed a nutritious slurry three times a day—thin and watery enough to pass through the very narrow warded pipes—and if you wanted it to be something else, you had to transmute it yourself, which no one could afford to do.
Actually making a particular food out of something else with magic is almost impossible, because you aren’t just interested in how you experience it in your mouth: you want the food to work as nutrition for your body once you send it down into your stomach and forget about it. If you turn a box of nails into a sandwich, you might think you’ve eaten afterwards, but you’ll be wrong. And for that matter, if you turn gruel into bread, you’ll generally be wrong then, too, because gruel and bread aren’t actually that similar as far as your digestive enzymes are concerned. It has been done, but only in alchemy labs funded by enclaves, by the kind of wizard who will finish their Scholomance training and then go off to spend ten years in a mundane university getting advanced degrees in chemistry and food science.
You can start with something that technically qualifies as nourishment and then just put a sensory illusion on it, but the illusion will break down as soon as you start chewing. The result is generally more unpleasant than just choking down whatever you started with. The only practical solution is to selectively transmute whatever parts come into significant contact with your senses: you lose the nutrients out of the bits that were transmuted, but that sends the rest successfully down.
However, that’s loads more complicated and expensive mana-wise than just waving a hand and turning, say, a stick into a pen, where you don’t care in the slightest what’s happening on the molecular level as long as you can write with it. Not even enclavers could afford to do it on a regular basis. Most kids came out more or less malnourished, and everyone spent most of their weight allowance bringing in food. It was enough of a factor in deaths that after ten years or so, the decision was made to open up a hole in the wards for transporting in small amounts of actual food, enough to give everyone our thrice-weekly snack bar visit.
But shortly after World War II, New York and a consortium of the US enclaves swooped in and very cheerfully took over the school—London wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight—and they hired a batch of those chemist-wizards who went into their labs and developed a food-transmutation process to run on the slurry that was an order of magnitude cheaper than the best solutions before then.
Evidently Chloe’s granny had been one of the alchemists who had made it possible—good enough to get a place in New York enclave for the work. I already knew her dad had been allies with her uncle, during graduation, and he’d got in by marrying her mum. So her dad and her granny had been indie wizards who’d made it in by clawing and scratching and working themselves to the bone; her family weren’t high up in the council or anything, they were relatively new. No wonder she was so anxious about not losing the Domina’s son.
But I couldn’t say anything to reassure her. I wasn’t coming to New York. I wasn’t making her grandmother’s bargain, not even the better version of it that I could have struck. So if Orion wanted me more than he wanted New York, I suppose I was going to take him away, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it, either. Not after the way they’d treated him, raised him to be their hero instead of just another kid. I’d spent most of my childhood yelling at Mum for not taking me into an enclave. It hadn’t occurred to me what any enclave would do with someone like me, what they’d want of me, what they’d tell a kid too young to resist them, just to get what they wanted.
I wasn’t going to give in to them. I wasn’t going to give in to anyone: not Magnus, not Khamis, not Chloe, not even Orion, if he asked me himself. I wasn’t going to give in to New York, to any of the enclaves, and most of all, I wasn’t going to give in to the Scholomance.
After I left Chloe in her room, I walked alone to the gym. The doors were closed today: there were no runs on Sunday. On the other side, the low grinding and clanking noises were going steadily as the obstacle course went on rearranging itself to try to kill us, all in the name of making us stronger. I stood in front of them listening for a long time. I could; nothing tried to jump me. “That’s right,” I said, aloud, defiantly. “Don’t even try. You’re not going to win. We’re going to get everyone out. I’m going to get everyone out.”