Next year I desperately need people watching my back and helping me fill more. If I can only make it to graduation with fifty full crystals, I’m confident I can single-handedly blaze a path for me and my allies straight to the gates and out, no more clever strategy required. It’s one of the few situations in which a wall of mortal flame might actually be called for: in fact that’s how the school cleans out the cafeteria and does the twice-yearly scouring of the halls. But I’m not going to get there unless I stick to my pace. Which currently means, drumroll, two hundred push-ups before dinner.

I’d like to say I didn’t give Orion a thought, but actually I lost a good chunk of my push-up time pointlessly calculating the odds that he’d follow me to dinner. I settled on sixty–forty, but I admit I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen the flash of his silver-grey hair at the meeting point when I came out. He was waiting for me. Nkoyo and Cora were both waiting, too, failing not to stare at him. There was a wild struggle between jealousy and confusion going on on Cora’s face, and Nkoyo just looked woodenly blank. Liu joined me halfway down the hall, and Jowani came out of his room and hurried to meet us just in time for the walk. “Any of you know anyone else studying Old English?” I asked as we set out.

“There’s a soph, isn’t there?” Nkoyo said. “I don’t remember his name. Anything good?”

“Ninety-nine household cleaning charms,” I said, and the trio all made noises of sympathy. I was probably the only student in the place who’d gladly have traded a major combat spell for a decent water calling. Of course, no one else can cast the combat spells I get.

“Geoff Linds,” Orion said unexpectedly. “He’s from New York,” he added when we looked at him.

“Well, if he wants ninety-nine ways to clean his cell in Old English, send him my way,” I said sweetly. Orion frowned at me.

He frowned more through dinner, during which I was excessively nice to him. I even offered him the pudding I’d snagged, a treacle tart—not much loss there, I hate treacle tart—and he obviously wanted to turn it down, but he’s also a sixteen-year-old boy who has to inspect every calorie he can get for potential contamination. All the heroic power in the world won’t save you from dysentery or a charming bit of strychnine in the sauce, and it’s not like he swaps his rescues for anything useful in return, like an extra helping or something. So after a moment he grudgingly said, “Thanks,” and took the tart and ate it without meeting my eyes.

Afterwards he followed close on my heels as we took our trays over to the conveyor belt under the enormous sign saying BUS YOUR TRAYS, which even after three years I still think is a mad phrase that makes no sense. Admittedly, that’s less of a concern than the actual busing process, which involves shoving your dirty tray into one dark slot of a massive metal rack that is slowly rotating while the conveyor belt carries it along. The safest place to do it is towards the far end, as the dishes and trays are all cleaned using jets of mortal flame, which scares off the mals, but it’s almost impossible to find an empty slot at that point, and an extra minute exposed and hunting around the busing area isn’t worth it. I usually aim for just short of the midpoint area, which has the benefit of a shorter line.

Orion considered this a perfect place for private conversation. “Nice try,” he said over my shoulder, “but it’s too late. I’m not going to forget about it just because you started pretending to be friendly. Want to try again telling me what really happened to Luisa?”

He hadn’t even realized that he’d convinced everyone in school that we were dating. I rolled my eyes—metaphorically only; I wasn’t fool enough to look away from the rack for even a moment. “Yes, I’m passionately excited to share more information with you. Your demonstrated sense and good judgment just fill me with confidence.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded, but right then a six-armed thing vaguely like the offspring of an octopus and an iguana burst off the empty busing rack that had just rotated in, aiming right at the head of a sad-eyed freshman girl, and Orion whipped round and went for it, grabbing a knife off the girl’s tray even as he hurled a spell of engorgement. I saw the writing on the wall, and also an empty slot, so I got rid of my tray and dived clear before the thing swelled up like a bloating corpse and burst all over everyone in range.

I went back to my room unbesmirched, with plans to have breakfast with three kids from the London enclave—they’ve completely ignored me before now—and an offer from Nkoyo to trade Latin spells in language lab tomorrow. Orion slunk off to the showers, wafting a putrid stench. I didn’t feel quite even with him yet, but it was coming on nicely. So when he knocked ten minutes later with the lingering miasma wafting under the door, I felt magnanimous enough to open up and say, “Oh, all right, what will you give me for the information?”

I didn’t get past Oh, though, because it wasn’t Orion: it was Jack, smeared with a handful of the octopus thing’s guts for the smell—clever of him—and he shoved a sharpened table knife right into my gut. He pushed me collapsing backwards onto the floor and slid the door shut behind him, smiling with all his white teeth while I gasped around the shock of agony, yelling stupid stupid stupid at myself in my head. I’d already got ready for bed; I’d hung my mana crystal over the bedpost, where I could reach it in the night and where it was uselessly out of reach right now. He knelt down over me and brushed my hair away from my face with both hands, cupping my cheeks. “Galadriel,” he crooned.

My hands were wrapped around the hilt of the knife, involuntarily, trying to keep it from moving, but I made myself let go with one hand and tried to fumble it towards the other mana crystal, the half-full one I’d been working on this afternoon. It was hanging from the side of my bed right where my head went when I was doing push-ups, a few inches above the floor. If I could just reach it, I could connect to all my stored mana. I’d have absolutely no regret liquefying Jack’s bones.

It was just out of reach. My fingers were straining. I tried to shift my body over just a little, but it hurt a really huge amount, and Jack was stroking my face with his fingertips. It irritated me almost as much as the knife. “Stop that, you colossal dick,” I whispered, my voice thready with effort.

“Why don’t you make me?” he whispered back. “Come on, Galadriel, just do it. You’re so beautiful. You could be so beautiful. I’ll help you, I’ll do anything for you. We’ll have so much fun,” and I found my whole face crumpling like a sheet of cheap tinfoil. I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t want to know that I was going to say no. I didn’t want to know that I was going to refuse, even with this sack of putrescence crawling his fingers down my ribcage towards the knife he’d jammed into my guts so he could get on with butchering me like a hog.

I’d told myself it was just common sense—going maleficer meant dying young, grotesquely. But that still ought to beat dying right now, only it didn’t. It didn’t, and if it wasn’t an option now, it was never going to be an option, and even if I survived this, I wouldn’t survive the next thing, or the one after that. There’d always been a safety valve in the back of my head: I’d always told myself if all else fails, but all else had failed, and I wasn’t going to do it anyway.