He looked at me mulishly. “I’m going to the supply room.” We get building materials down in the workshop and alchemy supplies in the labs, but for everything less exotic, like pencils and notebooks, you have to forage in the big stockroom at the far end of the language hall.

“Can we come with you?” Nkoyo asked instantly. Cora and Jowani were both just gawking, but she’s sharp. And it was obviously worth getting to class towards the late end to have a big group for company going for supplies, even leaving aside Orion himself—if only I could have left him aside—so I went along, stewing. I grabbed paper and ink and took some mercury for trading and a hole puncher, and I even found a vast ring binder for my increasing pile of spells. I spotted three eyes peering out at us from a crack in the ceiling, but it was probably just a flinger, and there were too many of us for one of those to make a try.

Afterwards, Orion walked us all back to the nearest language hall, even though there wasn’t any reason. The narrow stairwell next to the stockroom does disappear sometimes—it’s not on the blueprints, it got added belatedly when they realized it was inconvenient to have to go a quarter mile back to the next nearest stair—but today it wasn’t just present, the door was actually standing wide open and the light inside was working.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, taking a risk to stay in the corridor: the others had already dashed in to claim decent booths. “Please tell me you aren’t trying to go out with me.”

It didn’t seem likely: no one ever has. It’s not that I’m ugly; on the contrary, I’ve been growing increasingly beautiful in a tall and alarming way, as befits the terrible dark sorceress I’m meant to be, at least until I presumably collapse into a grotesque crone. Boys often think for about ten seconds that they might want to go out with me, and then they look into my eyes or talk to me and I suppose get the strong impression I’m likely to devour their souls or something. Also, in Orion’s case, I’d been aggressively rude to him and nearly got him killed by mimics.

He snorted. “Want to date a maleficer?”

I had a moment of indignation over that, about to snarl at him yet again that I wasn’t, and then I got it. “You’re keeping an eye on me? In case I start doing evil things and—what, you need to kill me?”

He folded his arms across his chest and regarded me with a cool, righteous expression: enough of an answer. I was violently tempted to kick him in the goolies. One of the things people do believe in at the commune is about seventeen different forms of Westernized martial arts, and though they’re surrounded with a huge pile of mumbo jumbo about your inner center and finding your balance and channeling your spiritual force, the actual kicking and punching gets taught, too. I wasn’t an expert, but I could definitely have made Orion Lake extremely unhappy right then, given the wide-open way he was standing.

But there was a classroom full of kids behind me watching us, most of whom would have been glad for any decent excuse to completely ostracize me, and the first late bell was about to ring, at which point the door would swing shut and leave me stuck in the hallway for the whole class period. Nobody would let me in. So I had to just stalk away from him seething and take one of the empty language booths.

There aren’t any teachers at the Scholomance. The place is filled to capacity with kids; there are two applicants for every spot as it is, and our dorm rooms are less than seven feet across. Anyone who gets in doesn’t need external motivation. Knowing how to make a potion that will heal the lining of your stomach after you’ve accidentally drunk some lyesmoke-infused apple juice is its own reward, really. Even maths becomes pretty necessary for a lot of advanced arcana, and history research brings you loads of useful spells and recipes that you won’t be handed in your other courses.

So in language class, you just go to any one of the eight language halls arranged around the third floor and put yourself into one of the booths. Choose wisely; if you try the ones closest to the loo, or the really good one next to the stairs so you can get to lunch in under ten minutes, you’ll have a harder time getting a decent booth, or a booth at all. Assuming you do get one, you sit inside the soundproofed cocoon, hoping you aren’t missing the footsteps of something coming at your back, and read textbooks or work on exercise sheets while disembodied voices whisper to you in whatever language you’re studying that day. Usually they tell me horrible gory stories or describe my death in loving detail. I had meant to work on my Old English, to try and get more use out of the spells I had learned from the household charms book, but I didn’t make much progress. I just hunched over the same single page of my notebook, boiling with resentment, while my whisper tenderly recited an epic alliterative poem all about how Orion Lake, “hero of the shadowed halls,” was going to murder me in my sleep.

Which would make it self-defense when I killed him, which I gave some newly serious thought to doing: it was starting to seem like I might really have to. People seem to have no trouble convincing themselves that I’m dangerous and evil even when they aren’t actively looking for reasons. Of course, I could have killed him just by draining his mana, but I didn’t want to actually become a maleficer and then go bursting out of this place like some monstrous butterfly hatching from a gigantic chrysalis of doom to lay waste and sow sorrow across the world as per the prophecy.

The problem was Luisa, I realized abruptly. He hadn’t bought my answer about her. Just like I have a good sense of who’s using malia, what they’re doing, he’s almost certainly got a sense for—I don’t even know. Justice? Mercy? The pathetic and vulnerable? Anyway, he knew I was lying to him about Luisa, without knowing exactly how I was lying, so he’d probably decided that I really had killed her. I’d taken his question about her as a minor point, but he hadn’t. I didn’t know much about her, except that she’d been one of the deeply unlucky few who don’t have wizard parents. The ability to hold mana does pop up in mundanes every so often, but usually they don’t get in here, they just get eaten. Probably a kid who lived near her was slated to come, got eaten before induction, and she got sucked up instead because the parents didn’t bother notifying the school, I can’t imagine why. So in some sense she was lucky, but from her perspective, one morning she just found herself sucked up out of her ordinary life and dumped without warning into a black hole of a boarding school, surrounded by strangers, no way to get in touch with her family, no way out, and a horde of maleficaria coming to kill her. I’m sure her plight was calculated to pull on every one of Orion’s finely tuned heartstrings.

And thanks to my own fit of temper the other night, he’s also just discovered I’m a potential dark witch of apocalyptic proportions. Put all of that together, probably every instinct he had was now going wild with the desire to put a stop to my not-yet-begun reign of terror.

Naturally that made me want to go and launch said reign of terror immediately, but first I had to sit through two hours of language and one of Maleficaria Studies, everyone’s favorite, which is held in a massive hall on the cafeteria level. We all get lumped into the room together regardless of language, as there’s no lecture. The walls are covered with a huge and vividly detailed mural of the graduation ceremony, set in the moment when the senior hall rotates down. The landing is just coming into view, and the marble hall is crammed full of the various delightful creatures waiting ravenous for the buffet to begin. We each get a textbook in our mother tongue, and read along while the current mal we’re studying comes alive off the walls and prowls around the stage demonstrating all the ways it might kill us. Occasionally the animated version will try to upgrade itself from being a temporary construct by actually killing someone in the front rows and consuming their mana.