Mum shoved through them and took me inside. I was already as tall as she was, and she had to drag me away. She spent a long time crying and holding me tight in her burning-hot sweaty arms while I kicked and beat at her and fought to get loose, until I finally gave up and burst into tears myself and clung to her again. After I collapsed on the bed in exhaustion, she brewed a tea and made herself well, and she sang me to sleep with a spell that made the whole thing feel like a dream the next morning, not quite real.

But there was still a walkway outside our yurt made of boiled scratcher. It was real, it all really happened, and it didn’t stop happening after that, because even at nine years old, I was a good healthy snack for any hungry mal, and by the end of the summer I turned fourteen, they were coming at the rate of five a night. Mum wasn’t looking plump and pink anymore; the more fussy women around the commune chided her for not getting enough rest and told me off for being more trouble than I was worth, even though they didn’t know that I really was. When she asked to keep me out of the Scholomance, what she was offering to do was let me watch her get eaten before I got eaten myself.

So I don’t get to be safe. I don’t get to take a deep breath. I don’t even get to lie to myself that after I get out of here, I’ll be okay. I won’t be okay, and Mum won’t be okay if I stay with her, because the mals are going to keep coming for me, and people don’t like me enough to help me even if I scream. So I don’t bother to scream, but right then in the lunchroom I wanted to stand up on the table and scream at all of them the way I screamed at those bastards in the commune; I wanted to tell all of them I hated them and I’d set them all on fire gladly for five minutes of peace, and why shouldn’t I, since they’d all stand by and watch me burn instead. I’d had that scream inside me since I was nine, knotted up with Mum’s love, the only thing keeping it in, and it wasn’t enough. Mum wasn’t enough. She couldn’t save me all on her own, not even she could do that, and for a few days of stupid pretending, I’d had other people, too, what I needed to survive, and that had been long enough for me to forget it wasn’t real.

I was bent over my tray and my book, fighting not to scream, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ibrahim sitting down with a couple of his friends and glancing over at me, and his mouth went happy for a moment. He was pleased that Orion had dumped me, and I’d asked for that, too, hadn’t I? I’d asked for that smirk, because I’d told him off, only fuck him anyway. Sarah and Alfie were sitting down at a London table, carefully not even looking my way, as if I’d suddenly gone invisible.

And then Aadhya put her tray down across from me and sat down. I didn’t get it for a second; I just stared at her stupidly, and she said, “Would you swap for milk? The lower tray was looking weird, I steered clear.”

My throat was just shut up for a moment, choking around a solid knot like stale bread. Then I said, “Yeah, I’ve got spare,” and held my second milk carton out to her.

“Thanks,” she said, and gave me back a roll. Liu was sitting down next to me by then with a friend of hers from writing class. A couple of maintenance-track kids, English-and-Hindi-speakers from Delhi, sat down next to Aadhya, and they said a hello that didn’t go out of its way to exclude me. I said hello back, and I sounded normal to my own ears, I don’t know how, and a couple of the moderate-loser kids I didn’t actually know, but whose table I had sat at last week—last week, had it been only one week?—were going by, and they hesitated and then tentatively came over and one said, “Taken?” pointing to the bench, and when I shook my head, they didn’t slide in all the way towards me, they left some room, but they still sat down next to me. Nkoyo said, “Hey,” as she went by with Cora and a couple of her other friends, on her way to another table.

I had to work hard to keep my hands from shaking while I ate the bread roll, carefully breaking it into small pieces and putting a thin scraping of cream cheese on each one. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. This was exactly what I’d been aiming for when I’d made sure to ask Liu to sit with me, when I’d invited Aadhya to work on the mirror. I’d shown them I was reliable, that I’d share what good luck came my way with people who had thrown me a crumb, and now they were showing me they’d recognized it, and that they were willing to throw me more of those crumbs. And that was just good sense on their part, even without knowing that I was going equipped. It wasn’t a miracle, it wasn’t that they’d suddenly decided they liked me. I knew that. But I didn’t want to scream anymore, I wanted to cry, like a new freshman dripping tears and snot into their food while everyone at their table pretends not to notice.

I managed to get through lunch without really embarrassing myself. Aadhya asked if she could come by and look at the mirror, and I told her she could, but I was pretty sure it had come out cursed. “Oh, seriously?” she said.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It kept trying to tell me something last night without my asking it anything.” When an artifact tries to do things for you on its own, that’s a really good sign that it doesn’t have your best intentions at heart. Aadhya knew as much, and she was looking annoyed, as well she might, as that meant she’d nearly got killed helping me for absolutely fuck-all. “I did get the sirenspider leg,” I added; I’d snagged it on my way out of the workshop, thinking of just this moment. “D’you think you could get some use out of it?”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” Aadhya said, mollified: sirenspider shells are really good for making magical instruments, if you can figure out how to handle them, which she probably could, with her affinity. We talked a bit about what she might do with it, and I offered to do the incantations part for her, too, which would make us even. Liu and I talked about our final papers for history, as we’re both in the honors track—no one wants to be in honors classes unless they’re going for valedictorian; the school puts you in them against your will—and we each had to write twenty pages on an ancient magical civilization, but for a special vicious twist, one whose language we didn’t know. We agreed on a swap: I’d do mine on the two Zhou-dynasty enclaves and she’d do the Pratishthana enclave, and we’d translate each other’s primary sources.

We all paced our eating and cleared up our plates at the same time, so nobody was left sitting on their own at the table. I was still feeling weird and shaky inside when I went to bus my tray. I was glad Ibrahim was right ahead of me: I glared at the back of his head, thinking about his smirk. I desperately wanted to be angry again, just a bit angry. But he glanced back at me as he walked away, and he didn’t smirk; instead his face just fell. I stared back at him in confusion, and then Orion shoved his tray onto the rack just behind me and said, sounding irritated, “Hey, what was that about? Do you have a problem with Chloe and Magnus or something?” exactly like he’d expected me to come and sit with them.

Which he probably had. Who wouldn’t sit at the New York table if they had the slightest chance; what kind of fool wouldn’t take that over sitting on her own, wondering if anybody else was going to join her? “Oh, was I supposed to trot along behind you?” I snapped back. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d attained hanger-on status; I imagined I’d have to genuflect properly first. You ought to have a badge or something to give out to people. You’d get to watch them fight over it and everything.”