A Deadly Education Page 9

  Aadhya crawled out shakily from under the table and performed her own ritual thanks to Orion with complete sincerity while I wrapped the useless rubbishy mirror. If she didn’t cling to his arm as we went out of the shop, it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. To give her credit, she pulled herself together halfway up the stairs, at which point she asked me, “Can you still get credit? How bad did it warp?” I took the cover off the mirror long enough to show her the surface, and I knew what was coming even before she opened her mouth and said, admiring, “I can’t even believe it. Orion, what’d you do with the silver to get it to set that smooth?”

  I took the mirror back to my room and hung it over a particularly bad scorched spot the incarnate flame had left on the wall. The wrappings fell off as I put it up, and before I could drape it again, a ghastly fluorescing face appeared partway from the churning depths as if emerging from a pool of bubbling tar, and told me in sepulchral tones, “Hail, Galadriel, bringer of death! You shall sow wrath and reap destruction, cast down enclaves and level the sheltering walls, cast children from their homes and—”

  “Right, yeah, old news,” I said, and threw the covers back on. It muttered things from underneath all night long and occasionally burst into ghostly wailing accompanied by vividly glowing purple and neon-blue light shows. My gut was aching enough to keep me awake for it all. I glared at the tiny scuttling mals revealed up on the ceiling and felt extremely put upon. By morning I was stewing so violently that I got all the way through toothbrushing, breakfast, and my language classes of the day before I snapped at something Orion said to me in history and only then noticed he was still there. I stopped biting his head off long enough to side-eye him. There was no way that his friends hadn’t yet found an opportunity and begged him at length to dump me. What was he even doing?

  “In case it makes you feel better,” I told him irritably as we walked to lunch—he’d even stayed with me after class—“if I ever do go maleficer, I promise you’ll be the absolute first to know.”

  “If you were going to go evil, you’d have done it by now just to avoid letting me help you,” he said, with a huff, which was—spot-on, actually, and I laughed before I meant to. Chloe and Magnus were coming to the lunchroom from the opposite direction just then, and both of them eyed me with the grim and resentful expressions you’d normally reserve for a really vicious final exam.

  “Orion, I was hoping to catch you,” Chloe said. “I’m having some trouble with my focusing potion. Would you look at the recipe over lunch?”

  “Sure,” Orion said. Neatly done, and it left me the choice to tag along after Orion to their table like a trailing girlfriend, or what I actually did, which was take my tray to an empty table of my own. He’d distracted me enough I’d forgotten to pay attention, too, so I was early, and there wasn’t anyone for me to even tentatively try joining. I put my tray down in the middle of the empty table—at least it was a relatively good one—and checked the underside of the table and all the chairs, did a quick cleaning charm on the table surface—there were a few suspicious stains, probably just from some senior’s lunch, but if the cleaning charm hadn’t worked on them, they could’ve been a sign of something worse—and burned a small smudge of incense, which would probably nudge along anything lurking in the ceiling overhead. By the time I was done and sitting down, more people were starting to come off the line, all of them seeing Orion over at the New York enclave table and me alone at mine.

  I was sitting with my back to the queue. That’s the safer way to sit—if you’re friendless—since it puts you that much closer to the mass of moving students, with a better view of the doors. I resolutely started eating with my Latin book open on the table in front of me. I wasn’t going to watch for any of the people I’d waved over to sit with me and Orion, the last few days. They’d decide for themselves what they wanted to do. It was just as well he wasn’t sitting with me today: I’d find out where I stood. I was glad of it.

  I almost managed to convince myself. Almost. I didn’t want Orion’s help and I didn’t want him to sit with me and I didn’t want any fair-weather tagalongs sitting with me, I didn’t, but—I didn’t want to die, either. I didn’t want a clinger to jump me and I didn’t want anoxienta spores to erupt out of the floor beneath me and I didn’t want some slithering mess to drop on my head from the ceiling tiles, and that’s what happens to people who sit alone. For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I’ve ever done. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them. It’s so hard, it’s so hard in here all the time, and what I was really glad of was having half an hour three times a day where I could take a breath, where I could pretend that I was just like everyone else, not some queen of popularity like an enclave girl but someone who could sit down at a good table and do a decent perimeter and people would join me instead of going out of their way in the opposite direction.

  And the reason I hadn’t planned my lunch out today was because Orion had been walking with me, so I’d assumed that I would get to pretend for one meal more, and that had been stupid of me. I’d been asking for this. If I’d hung back and waited, I could’ve joined Liu or Aadhya or Nkoyo’s tables. Maybe. Or maybe they’d have done what people have always done when they see me coming towards their tables: invited the nearest loose person to sit down, to fill in any open spots before I can get there. And if they did, I’d have asked for that, too, picking a fight with the enclave kids yesterday like I thought I was as good as them. I wasn’t. We’re all in this shitty place together, but they’re going to get out. They’re loaded up with powerful artifacts and the best spells, guarding each other’s backs and pumping each other full of power; they’re going to survive unless they get unlucky. And when they get out, they’ll get to go back home to their beautiful enclaves, walled round with spells and anxious new recruits for sentries, where you can just walk into your bedroom and go to sleep, not spend an hour each night helping your mum lay wards all around your one-room yurt just so nothing comes in to rip you both to shreds.

  I was barely nine years old the first time something came at me. Mals don’t usually come after wizards in their prime, like Mum, and they don’t usually come after little ones because we don’t have enough mana yet. But Mum was ill that week; she’d got a raging fever, and after she went delirious, someone at the commune took her to hospital and left me alone. I ate our cold leftovers from the night before and huddled down in our bed, trying to sing the lullabies Mum sang me every night, to pretend she was there. When the scratching started at the wards, tiny sprays of sparks going up outside the entrance like knives on steel, I got the crystal she’d been wearing with her circle that fall. I was clutching it in my hands when the scratcher started working its way in, fingers first, long jointed things with claws like the blades of paring knives.

  I screamed when they poked through. Back then, I still had the idea somewhere in me that someone would come if I screamed. I was enough of an oblivious kid that I only considered whether I liked someone, or more often didn’t, so I hadn’t really noticed yet that people didn’t like me, and I hadn’t worked out that people not liking me meant they wouldn’t sit at even a good table in the cafeteria with me, and they’d leave me alone and hungry in a yurt without my mum, and they wouldn’t come when I screamed in the night, the way a kid would scream when something full of knives was coming at her. Nobody came even after I screamed a second time, when the scratcher’s other hand squirmed in, too, knife-fingers clawing the wards open like a mouse getting into a sack. And other people heard me, I know they heard me, because through the doorway I could see the yurts on the next rise where a group of silhouettes were still up and sitting around a fire.

  It was just as well that I could see
them not getting up, not coming, because by the time I finished the second scream and the scratcher was inside with me, I’d understood that I was alone at my table, and there was only me to save me, because no one else cared. They were stupid not to care, though they didn’t know it. It was lucky for them that I had Mum’s crystal in my hands, because otherwise I would have gone grabbing at them for power instead.

  Scratchers aren’t hard to kill, any reasonably skilled freshman could do for one with the basic blunt-force spell we all learn in the second month of Maleficaria Studies, but I was nine, and the only spell I knew was Mum’s cooking spell, which I’d picked up just because I heard it so often. It might have worked all right on a bestial-class mal, but scratchers aren’t suitable for cooking: they’re made almost completely of metal. That kind of mal is the work of some artificer that either deliberately or accidentally gave one of their creations enough of a brain to want to keep going; then it creeps off on its own, hunting for mana, building on armor and weapons as it goes. The average nine-year-old wizard in a panic throwing a cooking spell at a scratcher would have heated it through nicely and died on red-hot blades instead of cold ones. I used up every last drop of power in the crystal and vaporized the thing completely.

  Mum got back not long afterwards. She doesn’t like to use either healing magic or medicine for ordinary sickness; she thinks that being ill is part of life and you should usually just give your body rest and healthy food and respect the cycle, but in the hospital, they’d put her on an IV drip with antibiotics and she’d woken up in the middle of the night well enough to realize I was all on my own. By the time she rushed back to the yurt, I was standing outside in a ring of little smoldering flames. The metal of the scratcher had turned back into liquid almost instantly and splattered out the entrance in a long rectangle of muddy streaked metal that ran down the hill like a gangway, long drips trickling away, and at all the edges the molten metal had set the bracken on fire. I was screaming down at the crowd of people who had finally come after all, to keep the fire from spreading, and I was telling all of them to go away, that I didn’t care if they did all burn up, I hoped they all died, all of them, and if anyone came near me I’d set them on fire myself.

  Mum shoved through them and took me inside. I was already as tall as she was, and she had to drag me away. She spent a long time crying and holding me tight in her burning-hot sweaty arms while I kicked and beat at her and fought to get loose, until I finally gave up and burst into tears myself and clung to her again. After I collapsed on the bed in exhaustion, she brewed a tea and made herself well, and she sang me to sleep with a spell that made the whole thing feel like a dream the next morning, not quite real.

  But there was still a walkway outside our yurt made of boiled scratcher. It was real, it all really happened, and it didn’t stop happening after that, because even at nine years old, I was a good healthy snack for any hungry mal, and by the end of the summer I turned fourteen, they were coming at the rate of five a night. Mum wasn’t looking plump and pink anymore; the more fussy women around the commune chided her for not getting enough rest and told me off for being more trouble than I was worth, even though they didn’t know that I really was. When she asked to keep me out of the Scholomance, what she was offering to do was let me watch her get eaten before I got eaten myself.

  So I don’t get to be safe. I don’t get to take a deep breath. I don’t even get to lie to myself that after I get out of here, I’ll be okay. I won’t be okay, and Mum won’t be okay if I stay with her, because the mals are going to keep coming for me, and people don’t like me enough to help me even if I scream. So I don’t bother to scream, but right then in the lunchroom I wanted to stand up on the table and scream at all of them the way I screamed at those bastards in the commune; I wanted to tell all of them I hated them and I’d set them all on fire gladly for five minutes of peace, and why shouldn’t I, since they’d all stand by and watch me burn instead. I’d had that scream inside me since I was nine, knotted up with Mum’s love, the only thing keeping it in, and it wasn’t enough. Mum wasn’t enough. She couldn’t save me all on her own, not even she could do that, and for a few days of stupid pretending, I’d had other people, too, what I needed to survive, and that had been long enough for me to forget it wasn’t real.

  I was bent over my tray and my book, fighting not to scream, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ibrahim sitting down with a couple of his friends and glancing over at me, and his mouth went happy for a moment. He was pleased that Orion had dumped me, and I’d asked for that, too, hadn’t I? I’d asked for that smirk, because I’d told him off, only fuck him anyway. Sarah and Alfie were sitting down at a London table, carefully not even looking my way, as if I’d suddenly gone invisible.

  And then Aadhya put her tray down across from me and sat down. I didn’t get it for a second; I just stared at her stupidly, and she said, “Would you swap for milk? The lower tray was looking weird, I steered clear.”

  My throat was just shut up for a moment, choking around a solid knot like stale bread. Then I said, “Yeah, I’ve got spare,” and held my second milk carton out to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, and gave me back a roll. Liu was sitting down next to me by then with a friend of hers from writing class. A couple of maintenance-track kids, English-and-Hindi-speakers from Delhi, sat down next to Aadhya, and they said a hello that didn’t go out of its way to exclude me. I said hello back, and I sounded normal to my own ears, I don’t know how, and a couple of the moderate-loser kids I didn’t actually know, but whose table I had sat at last week—last week, had it been only one week?—were going by, and they hesitated and then tentatively came over and one said, “Taken?” pointing to the bench, and when I shook my head, they didn’t slide in all the way towards me, they left some room, but they still sat down next to me. Nkoyo said, “Hey,” as she went by with Cora and a couple of her other friends, on her way to another table.

  I had to work hard to keep my hands from shaking while I ate the bread roll, carefully breaking it into small pieces and putting a thin scraping of cream cheese on each one. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. This was exactly what I’d been aiming for when I’d made sure to ask Liu to sit with me, when I’d invited Aadhya to work on the mirror. I’d shown them I was reliable, that I’d share what good luck came my way with people who had thrown me a crumb, and now they were showing me they’d recognized it, and that they were willing to throw me more of those crumbs. And that was just good sense on their part, even without knowing that I was going equipped. It wasn’t a miracle, it wasn’t that they’d suddenly decided they liked me. I knew that. But I didn’t want to scream anymore, I wanted to cry, like a new freshman dripping tears and snot into their food while everyone at their table pretends not to notice.

  I managed to get through lunch without really embarrassing myself. Aadhya asked if she could come by and look at the mirror, and I told her she could, but I was pretty sure it had come out cursed. “Oh, seriously?” she said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It kept trying to tell me something last night without my asking it anything.” When an artifact tries to do things for you on its own, that’s a really good sign that it doesn’t have your best intentions at heart. Aadhya knew as much, and she was looking annoyed, as well she might, as that meant she’d nearly got killed helping me for absolutely fuck-all. “I did get the sirenspider leg,” I added; I’d snagged it on my way out of the workshop, thinking of just this moment. “D’you think you could get some use out of it?”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” Aadhya said, mollified: sirenspider shells are really good for making magical instruments, if you can figure out how to handle them, which she probably could, with her affinity. We talked a bit about what she might do with it, and I offered to do the incantations part for her, too, which would make us even. Liu and I talked about our final papers for history, as we’re both in the honors track—no one wants to
be in honors classes unless they’re going for valedictorian; the school puts you in them against your will—and we each had to write twenty pages on an ancient magical civilization, but for a special vicious twist, one whose language we didn’t know. We agreed on a swap: I’d do mine on the two Zhou-dynasty enclaves and she’d do the Pratishthana enclave, and we’d translate each other’s primary sources.

  We all paced our eating and cleared up our plates at the same time, so nobody was left sitting on their own at the table. I was still feeling weird and shaky inside when I went to bus my tray. I was glad Ibrahim was right ahead of me: I glared at the back of his head, thinking about his smirk. I desperately wanted to be angry again, just a bit angry. But he glanced back at me as he walked away, and he didn’t smirk; instead his face just fell. I stared back at him in confusion, and then Orion shoved his tray onto the rack just behind me and said, sounding irritated, “Hey, what was that about? Do you have a problem with Chloe and Magnus or something?” exactly like he’d expected me to come and sit with them.

  Which he probably had. Who wouldn’t sit at the New York table if they had the slightest chance; what kind of fool wouldn’t take that over sitting on her own, wondering if anybody else was going to join her? “Oh, was I supposed to trot along behind you?” I snapped back. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d attained hanger-on status; I imagined I’d have to genuflect properly first. You ought to have a badge or something to give out to people. You’d get to watch them fight over it and everything.”

  I felt just as mean as it sounded. Orion made a little half-twisting move away to stare at me, his face gone mad and surprised at the same time, blotchy on the cheeks under the greenish dots where he’d been spattered with something in his last lab session, probably. “Oh, go to hell,” he said, a little thickly, and walked away from me fast, his shoulders hunched in.