Anyway, at lunchtime I made sure to touch my abdomen with a visible wince as I queued up in the cafeteria, and sure enough Orion pushed in—if you can call it that when the girls behind me immediately let him do it, all brightly, “Go ahead, Orion, it’s fine!” when he asked them—and said to me, “You all right?”

“Improving, now,” I said, which was true and would also stand in for flirtation, for the avid eavesdroppers. “I’ve fallen behind in shop class, though. Aadhya said she’d help me, but we need an alchemist, too—it’s a three-discipline project.”

If that sounds like a painfully bald invitation to you, well, it did to me, too, but subtlety didn’t seem called for, and indeed it wasn’t. “I’ll help,” he said instantly.

“Great,” I said. “After dinner tonight?” He nodded, and yet again didn’t ask for anything back, helpfully providing more grist for the mill. I felt simultaneously aggravated and magnanimous, so I added, “The rice pud isn’t, by the way,” and he jerked his head round and promptly went after the glutinous maggots waiting in the tray—if you put a spoon in them they’ll go boiling up it and get half your fingers to the bone unless you fling it away quick enough, in which case usually they land on a dozen different students in the line and promptly start eating whatever flesh they land on and dividing into new swarms.

Orion emerged ten minutes after I had made it out with my tray, faint blue-grey smoke following him out and his tray half empty. Everyone else behind him was also coming out with fairly minimal selections, so exterminating the maggots had evidently taken out most of the line. It wouldn’t be refilled until after the last kids from our year went through and the sophomores got their turn. I privately rolled my eyes and put my spare milk carton and second bread roll on his tray when he came over and sat down next to me: the noise and confusion behind me had made it easy to nab extras for once.

Sarah and Alfie had invited me to sit with them at the London enclave table. I wasn’t stupid enough to throw over Liu and Aadhya for them, though, so they’d actually had a quick private word and then had come with me, instead—a massive concession, which meant I was suddenly sitting at a surprisingly powerful table. Nkoyo with Cora and Jowani are networked with a lot of the other West and South African students, and Aadhya has a solid lineup of allies from the artificer track. They’re about as well positioned as you get aside from the actual enclave kids, and now I had pulled in a pair of those.

And then Orion sat down next to me again—Aadhya had carefully left herself enough room on the bench to scoot over quickly as soon as he got close enough for his intentions to be clear—and took things to a completely new level. By far the most obvious explanation to anyone looking on was that I’d thoroughly hooked Orion, and now I was using that to build myself a power base among the people who’d tolerated me on their fringes before, likely with the intention to leverage him to get us all into a major enclave. And London was actively displaying interest. That would have been a magnificent bit of strategy on my hypothetical scheming self’s part.

Chloe and Magnus—from New York—came off the line just a minute later. They had half a dozen of their usual tagalongs surrounding them, and another four holding a prime table and waiting for them, but their plans clearly changed when they saw Orion sitting with me again. They traded a quick whisper and then they came past and took the four end seats still left at our table—two tagalongs went on the outside edge, of course—leaving the rest of their uncertain crew to straggle on to the other table without them.

“Pass the salt, would you, Sarah?” Chloe said, very sweetly, by which she meant die in a fire, we’re not letting London steal Orion, and followed it up by asking me, “Galadriel, are you feeling better? Orion said Jack nearly killed you.”

I couldn’t have asked for better. Except actually what I wanted to do was dump my tray over Orion’s undeserving head, tell off Sarah and Alfie and Chloe and Magnus, and possibly set them all on fire. None of them were here for me. Chloe must have had to ask someone my name. Even Aadhya and Nkoyo and Liu—I was pretty sure they would at least have me at their tables after this; I’d demonstrated to them that when I did get an advantage, I paid my debts, and they were all bright enough to value proven reliability more than almost anything else. But as soon as Orion moved on to greener and less-likely-to-turn-violently-evil pastures, even they would relegate me back to bare tolerance. And the enclavers would make clear that I was dirt under their feet and had been lucky to have a minute when I’d imagined otherwise.

“Doing splendidly, thanks very,” I said, icily. “It’s Chloe, isn’t it? Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.”

Nkoyo darted a look at me across the table, incredulous—you didn’t snub enclave kids, and we all knew their names—but Orion jerked his head up and said, “Sorry—this is Chloe Rasmussen and Magnus Tebow, they’re from New York,” exactly as if he felt he should introduce me to his friends. “Guys, this is Galadriel.”

“Charmed,” I said.

Alfie evidently took that as an indication that I preferred London to New York, and leaned in smiling. “You live near London, El, don’t you? Any chance we’d know your family?”

“I’m out in the back of beyond,” I said, and left it woodenly right there. They’d have recognized Mum’s name, of course, if I told them. All of them would have. I wanted to trade on her name even less than I wanted to trade on being Orion’s not-girlfriend. Anyone who wanted to be friends with Gwen Higgins’s daughter very much didn’t want to be friends with me.

So instead I spent the meal being rude to some of the most popular and powerful kids in the entire school, ignoring them to discuss the mirror artifice with Aadhya and Orion, and talk Latin with Nkoyo. We’d had a really good spell-trade the other day. I’d given her a copy of the mortal flame spell. That might sound extreme, but it’s not explicitly a spell to conjure mortal flame, it’s a sliding-scale spell to conjure magical fire. Most people love those spells, because virtually anyone can cast them successfully and you just get different results depending on your affinity and how much mana you put into it. Even if you’re a fumbling child, you can use it to light a match, and get better at casting it. Or if you’re me, you can suck the life force out of a dozen kids and then incinerate half the school with you inside it. So helpful!

But for Nkoyo, it would probably be a fantastically useful wall-of-flame spell, and she felt she had to make equal return—I didn’t argue—so she gave me a choice of two in exchange. I picked two minors she had that needed almost no mana at all: a spell for distilling clean water from dirty, so I won’t have to go to the bathroom for water as often, and another that pulls in a bunch of spare electrons from the environment around you to deliver a good heavy electrical shock. As soon as I looked at the first line, I could tell it lined up with my affinity—I imagine it would’ve been very handy for purposes of torture—and it’ll give me some breathing room in a fight, either to run away or to do a major casting.