“Orion, I was hoping to catch you,” Chloe said. “I’m having some trouble with my focusing potion. Would you look at the recipe over lunch?”

“Sure,” Orion said. Neatly done, and it left me the choice to tag along after Orion to their table like a trailing girlfriend, or what I actually did, which was take my tray to an empty table of my own. He’d distracted me enough I’d forgotten to pay attention, too, so I was early, and there wasn’t anyone for me to even tentatively try joining. I put my tray down in the middle of the empty table—at least it was a relatively good one—and checked the underside of the table and all the chairs, did a quick cleaning charm on the table surface—there were a few suspicious stains, probably just from some senior’s lunch, but if the cleaning charm hadn’t worked on them, they could’ve been a sign of something worse—and burned a small smudge of incense, which would probably nudge along anything lurking in the ceiling overhead. By the time I was done and sitting down, more people were starting to come off the line, all of them seeing Orion over at the New York enclave table and me alone at mine.

I was sitting with my back to the queue. That’s the safer way to sit—if you’re friendless—since it puts you that much closer to the mass of moving students, with a better view of the doors. I resolutely started eating with my Latin book open on the table in front of me. I wasn’t going to watch for any of the people I’d waved over to sit with me and Orion, the last few days. They’d decide for themselves what they wanted to do. It was just as well he wasn’t sitting with me today: I’d find out where I stood. I was glad of it.

I almost managed to convince myself. Almost. I didn’t want Orion’s help and I didn’t want him to sit with me and I didn’t want any fair-weather tagalongs sitting with me, I didn’t, but—I didn’t want to die, either. I didn’t want a clinger to jump me and I didn’t want anoxienta spores to erupt out of the floor beneath me and I didn’t want some slithering mess to drop on my head from the ceiling tiles, and that’s what happens to people who sit alone. For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I’ve ever done. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them. It’s so hard, it’s so hard in here all the time, and what I was really glad of was having half an hour three times a day where I could take a breath, where I could pretend that I was just like everyone else, not some queen of popularity like an enclave girl but someone who could sit down at a good table and do a decent perimeter and people would join me instead of going out of their way in the opposite direction.

And the reason I hadn’t planned my lunch out today was because Orion had been walking with me, so I’d assumed that I would get to pretend for one meal more, and that had been stupid of me. I’d been asking for this. If I’d hung back and waited, I could’ve joined Liu or Aadhya or Nkoyo’s tables. Maybe. Or maybe they’d have done what people have always done when they see me coming towards their tables: invited the nearest loose person to sit down, to fill in any open spots before I can get there. And if they did, I’d have asked for that, too, picking a fight with the enclave kids yesterday like I thought I was as good as them. I wasn’t. We’re all in this shitty place together, but they’re going to get out. They’re loaded up with powerful artifacts and the best spells, guarding each other’s backs and pumping each other full of power; they’re going to survive unless they get unlucky. And when they get out, they’ll get to go back home to their beautiful enclaves, walled round with spells and anxious new recruits for sentries, where you can just walk into your bedroom and go to sleep, not spend an hour each night helping your mum lay wards all around your one-room yurt just so nothing comes in to rip you both to shreds.

I was barely nine years old the first time something came at me. Mals don’t usually come after wizards in their prime, like Mum, and they don’t usually come after little ones because we don’t have enough mana yet. But Mum was ill that week; she’d got a raging fever, and after she went delirious, someone at the commune took her to hospital and left me alone. I ate our cold leftovers from the night before and huddled down in our bed, trying to sing the lullabies Mum sang me every night, to pretend she was there. When the scratching started at the wards, tiny sprays of sparks going up outside the entrance like knives on steel, I got the crystal she’d been wearing with her circle that fall. I was clutching it in my hands when the scratcher started working its way in, fingers first, long jointed things with claws like the blades of paring knives.

I screamed when they poked through. Back then, I still had the idea somewhere in me that someone would come if I screamed. I was enough of an oblivious kid that I only considered whether I liked someone, or more often didn’t, so I hadn’t really noticed yet that people didn’t like me, and I hadn’t worked out that people not liking me meant they wouldn’t sit at even a good table in the cafeteria with me, and they’d leave me alone and hungry in a yurt without my mum, and they wouldn’t come when I screamed in the night, the way a kid would scream when something full of knives was coming at her. Nobody came even after I screamed a second time, when the scratcher’s other hand squirmed in, too, knife-fingers clawing the wards open like a mouse getting into a sack. And other people heard me, I know they heard me, because through the doorway I could see the yurts on the next rise where a group of silhouettes were still up and sitting around a fire.

It was just as well that I could see them not getting up, not coming, because by the time I finished the second scream and the scratcher was inside with me, I’d understood that I was alone at my table, and there was only me to save me, because no one else cared. They were stupid not to care, though they didn’t know it. It was lucky for them that I had Mum’s crystal in my hands, because otherwise I would have gone grabbing at them for power instead.

Scratchers aren’t hard to kill, any reasonably skilled freshman could do for one with the basic blunt-force spell we all learn in the second month of Maleficaria Studies, but I was nine, and the only spell I knew was Mum’s cooking spell, which I’d picked up just because I heard it so often. It might have worked all right on a bestial-class mal, but scratchers aren’t suitable for cooking: they’re made almost completely of metal. That kind of mal is the work of some artificer that either deliberately or accidentally gave one of their creations enough of a brain to want to keep going; then it creeps off on its own, hunting for mana, building on armor and weapons as it goes. The average nine-year-old wizard in a panic throwing a cooking spell at a scratcher would have heated it through nicely and died on red-hot blades instead of cold ones. I used up every last drop of power in the crystal and vaporized the thing completely.

Mum got back not long afterwards. She doesn’t like to use either healing magic or medicine for ordinary sickness; she thinks that being ill is part of life and you should usually just give your body rest and healthy food and respect the cycle, but in the hospital, they’d put her on an IV drip with antibiotics and she’d woken up in the middle of the night well enough to realize I was all on my own. By the time she rushed back to the yurt, I was standing outside in a ring of little smoldering flames. The metal of the scratcher had turned back into liquid almost instantly and splattered out the entrance in a long rectangle of muddy streaked metal that ran down the hill like a gangway, long drips trickling away, and at all the edges the molten metal had set the bracken on fire. I was screaming down at the crowd of people who had finally come after all, to keep the fire from spreading, and I was telling all of them to go away, that I didn’t care if they did all burn up, I hoped they all died, all of them, and if anyone came near me I’d set them on fire myself.