“Shut up, this is actually important! You can’t smother it, you have to burn it hotter to burn it out.”

“You’ve seen one of these before?”

“I’ve got a summoning spell that raises a dozen of them,” I said. “It was used to burn down the Library of Alexandria.”

“Why would you ask for a spell like that!”

“What I asked for was a spell to light my room, you twat, that’s what I got.” To be fair, the incarnate flame was in fact doing a magnificent job of lighting the room. My room went double-height after the sophomore-year reshuffle—at term-end the school gets rid of any rooms that aren’t being used anymore—and I hadn’t seen the upper corners of the wall above my bed since. A whole bunch of agglo grubs up there were humping around in blind circles trying to get away from the light and getting vaporized in flaring-blue pops by the vermin stripe I’d tacked on the wall as high as I could previously see. “Do you want to keep arguing with me until it smashes through?”

He actually snarled wordlessly and then hit the incarnate with a magnificent incineration spell, barely four words long—all his spells seemed to be like that, ideal for combat—and it shrieked and went up into a towering pillar of flame that burnt out along with the spell. He sat back down on my bed breathing in hard gulps, but there was almost a static-electricity crackle coming off his skin: he was bursting with mana.

He didn’t break a sweat killing the next five things that made it in, including a disembodied wight that floated through the opening he hadn’t blocked under the door and a horde of little squeaking fleshy things like naked mole rats that appeared from under the bed apparently hoping to nibble us to death. He was almost glowing by the time he disposed of the last ones.

“If you have more mana than you can handle, you could put some in my crystals,” I said, as a way of fighting the urge to just claw his and my own faces off with envy.

He did actually pick up the half-empty crystal dangling from my bed, gave it a double-take, then stared at the one I was wearing. “Wait—I thought—what enclave are you from?”

“I’m not in any enclave.”

“Then how did you get your hands on Radiant Mind crystals? You’ve got two.”

I compressed my lips, regretting I’d got us on this conversational road. Mum will give her crystals to other wizards sometimes, if she gets a good feeling from them, and since Mum’s judgment on that sort of thing is fairly unerring, her crystals have developed a bit of a side reputation, out of proportion to the mana they can hold. “I’ve got fifty,” I said shortly. The crystals were what I packed instead of more clothes, supplies, tools; anything I could live without. “They’re my mum’s.”

He gaped at me. “Gwen Higgins is your mother?”

“Yes, and I don’t mind the massive incredulity at all, really, it’s why I make a point of telling everyone.” Mum is classic English rose, small and pink and blond and going gently plump in middle age. Dad—Mum’s got one photo of him that his mum gave her, from before he went to school—was six feet tall already even at fourteen, gangly with coal-black hair and serious dark eyes and a nose with just a bit of an interesting hook. She tells me earnestly all the time how wonderful it is I take after him so strongly, because she gets to still see him in me. From my perspective, it meant no one ever realized I belonged to her unless they were told. Once someone visiting our yurt spent a solid hour hinting that I might go away and stop pestering the great spiritual healer, as if I didn’t live there.

But that wasn’t why Orion was incredulous. Wizards tend to mix a lot more, since we all get jumbled in here together during our formative years, and the distinction that matters is between the enclavers and the rest of us have-nots. Orion was just shocked that the great spiritual healer had produced creepy proto-maleficer me, exactly the way everyone else in here would be, which is why in fact I make a point of not telling anyone.

“Oh,” Orion said awkwardly, and then jumped and reflexively blasted a shadow-thing that didn’t even have a chance to take enough form for me to recognize which variety it was. But he really did put some mana into my crystal afterwards, possibly as some sort of apology, or just because he was about to come apart at the seams: he filled it the rest of the way in a single go and gave a small gasp of relief after. I restrained my feelings and put it into my chest with the others and fished out a new empty one.

I managed to sleep a bit, towards the end of the night. Either the maleficaria had got discouraged, or Orion had exterminated all of the ones in range of my room; there were half-hour stretches where nothing came in. He also filled two more crystals for me. I gave him one of them, grudgingly. I’d started to feel irritatingly guilty about it, even though he hadn’t asked for anything in return like a normal person would have.

* * *

I WOKE UP the last time to my alarm going off. It was morning, and we weren’t dead. Orion hadn’t slept at all, and he was looking faded; I gritted my teeth and then painfully shuffled myself upright and out of the way. “Lie down, I’ll fix it,” I told him.

“Fix what?” he said, and yawned massively.

“That,” I said. You can’t actually replace sleep, but my mum’s got a technique she uses on really bad insomniacs to get their third eye to close—yes, well, it’s not scientific or anything—and it usually makes them feel better. I can’t do most of my mum’s spells very well, but this one’s simple enough that I can manage it. He lay down on my bed and I had him hold the crystal I’d given him, then I put my hands over his eyes and my thumbs between his eyebrows and chanted her “inner eye lullabye” seven times over him. It worked, the way all Mum’s ridiculous stuff works. He fell asleep instantly.

I let him keep sleeping for the twenty minutes until the breakfast bell rang, and he sat up looking at least five hours better. “Help me up,” I said. There’s no such thing as a sick day in here. Staying in the residential halls all day just means that whatever things are making their way up from below for the nighttime feasting get a midday snack. No one stays in unless they’re all but dead anyway. We catch endless colds and flu, as you might imagine. There’re more than four thousand of us in here, and the incoming freshmen bring along a delightful assortment of viruses and infectious diseases from around the world at the start of every year. And even after those have made the rounds, new things crop up inexplicably. Possibly they’re just smaller maleficaria; isn’t that a lovely thought.

As I was in fact exhausted and overwhelmed, I wasn’t calculating the effect of me and Orion coming out of my room together looking exhausted and overwhelmed. But a couple of other kids who had also slept in until the bell came out the same time we did, and naturally it was everywhere by the time we arrived at the cafeteria. The scale of the gossip reached such elevated levels that one of the girls from the New York enclave dragged Orion aside after breakfast to demand to know what he was thinking.