“Orion, she’s a maleficer,” I overheard her saying. “Jack Westing disappeared last night, people found bits of his shoes outside her door. She probably killed him.”

“I killed him, Chloe,” Orion said. “He was the maleficer. He killed Luisa.”

That news distracted her enough for her to abandon her lecture on his terrible dating choices, so by the end of the day Orion was the only person in the school who didn’t know we were now unquestionably an item, and for that matter an insane, spending-the-night-together item. It was almost entertaining to see the effects. The New York enclave kids all got immediately anxious: I saw the ones from our year taking time during lunch to go and tell the seniors about it, and meanwhile enough kids from the London enclave began saying nice things to me that it became clear there was a concerted effort under way on their side.

The point being, of course, if Orion was really sold on me, I had just become a chance to poach him. And I’d previously made clear to the London crowd that I’d be interested in an invitation. Not asking openly, of course, since I didn’t want the scornful rejection that would have ensued, but I’d told people my mum lived nearish London, and mentioned I was thinking of applying to the enclave myself. Just enough to plant a seed for the future, once graduation started looming and I’d demonstrated some firepower. People are always more likely to make an offer if they think it’s going to be accepted.

Of course, it was absolutely ridiculous for anyone involved to start either panicking or courting me over a junior-year relationship of two days’ supposed standing, but that was the degree of everyone’s idiocy over Orion for you. I would have been more amused if it weren’t a repeated reminder of how little anyone valued me for my own sake. And if I didn’t still have a barely healed gut wound, which soured my mood considerably.

I didn’t let it stop me from taking advantage of everyone offering me good seats and minor bits of help all day. I needed every one to get through. I’d managed to get a bit ahead of my work over the course of the term, meaning to use the banked time to review for my final exams, but instead I had to blow it all just resting quietly while everyone else made themselves slightly more appealing targets around me. I didn’t even try to get any classwork done; I just saved my energy, and that night I spent some power out of my crystal on some very heavy-duty shielding before I fell into bed and slept the sleep of those with the Aegis Ward on their door.

The next morning, the healing patch fell off, leaving me with a very faint scar, a lingering ache, and several calculated thoughts about my looming deadline in shop class. If you don’t complete a shop assignment on time, your unfinished work will animate on the due date and come after you with whatever power you’ve put into it. And if you try and get around that by not putting anything into it, or doing it wrong, the raw materials you should have used will all animate separately and come at you. It’s quite a solid teaching technique. We get a new assignment every six weeks. My final one this year was a choice of either a mesmeric orb that could be used to turn a group of people into a frenzied mob who’d tear each other apart, or a really lovely clockwork worm that would wriggle into someone’s imagination and dredge up their worst nightmares one after another every night until they went mad, or a magic mirror that would give you advice and glimpses of the possible future.

If you can guess the sort of advice the mirror would offer me, well, so could I. Also, the mirror was at least ten times more complicated to make than the other two. But if I made one of the others, they’d end up getting used for definite. If not by me, by someone else.

I had already forged the frame in plain iron, and made the backing plate that the enchanted silver would go on. But it was a fair bet that the silver pour would go completely wrong the first dozen times I tried it. That was going to involve alchemy and incantation on top of the artifice, and whenever you try and cross two or more of the disciplines, it’s loads more difficult, unless of course you can get a specialist from each discipline to help you. Which I couldn’t.

Except today, Aadhya voluntarily walked down to the shop with me from breakfast, and took the seat next to me at one of the long benches. “I’m too tired to get anything done today, but I can’t afford to fall behind on this one,” I told her, and showed her my assignment.

“Ouf. That’s the one you went with?” she said. “Magic mirrors are for artificer-track seniors.”

“The others I got were worse,” I said, not specifying how. I could have whipped up that frenzy orb in one session with a handful of broken glass. Oh, I’d probably also have needed the life’s blood of one of my fellow students, but who’s being picky? “What are you working on?”

Her assignment was a personal shield holder—that’s an amulet you put round your neck or bind onto your wrist. You cast a shield through it, and then you can cast other things with both hands instead of holding the shield up with one. Enormously useful, and relatively quick work; looking at her workbox, I could see she was making half a dozen of them, the spares of which she’d undoubtedly trade to maximum effect. Of course, she was specializing in artifice, but even so.

She looked at me narrowly and said, “The pour would go a lot easier with an artificer and an alchemist.”

“I hate to ask anyone for help,” I said. That was certainly true. “It’s not three weeks to the end of term, everyone’s busy.”

“I could maybe spare a bit of time, if you found an alchemist,” Aadhya said, of course thinking of having a chance to work with Orion. “If you’d be willing to let me use it.”

“Anytime you like,” I said. That was a magnificent deal, and in fact I’d probably have to find some other way to compensate her, or have her angry with me, as she almost certainly wouldn’t like using the mirror after the first go, unless it came out as the kind of mirror that encouraged you to think all your plans were the most brilliant and you were dazzlingly clever and beautiful all the way until you walked yourself into total ruin.

Of course, that still left me to ask Orion for help, which I grudgingly did at lunchtime. I thought I’d best take advantage of my brief window of opportunity before he finally worked out that we were supposedly dating and started avoiding me instead of pulling his continuing white-knight routine: he’d checked in on me at every meal yesterday in a muttering way, and he’d allowed himself to be pulled into a table with me by Aadhya and Ibrahim in turn. It was massively irritating, to the point that I almost let Ibrahim pester him all during dinner—it was nonstop “I still can’t believe you killed a soul-eater all by yourself,” and “Do you like silver or gold better as an agonist? I’d really appreciate your advice,” et cetera—except the hero-worshipping was even more irritating, so I finally snapped and told Ibrahim to shut it and stop behaving like a celebrity stalker, or find another place to sit. He did shut it, and looked embarrassed, and also tried to glare at me, but I just stared back and I’m fairly sure he got the strong sense that a monstrous and terrible fate awaited any who stirred my wrath. He flinched and pretended he’d actually just been staring into space past me.