I felt just as mean as it sounded. Orion made a little half-twisting move away to stare at me, his face gone mad and surprised at the same time, blotchy on the cheeks under the greenish dots where he’d been spattered with something in his last lab session, probably. “Oh, go to hell,” he said, a little thickly, and walked away from me fast, his shoulders hunched in.

There were about five different clusters of kids scattered between us and the doors, and they all turned towards him as he went past them, faces full of hope and calculation. Every single one of them running the same equations that were in my own head every single day, every single hour, and because they weren’t stupidly stubborn morons, they were all happy to be nice to Orion Lake in exchange for getting to live; they would have fought over the chance to be his hangers-on. And he knew it, and instead he’d actually been making an effort to hang around with me, and if he wasn’t waiting for me to turn maleficer anymore, that meant that what he wanted was—to hang out with somebody who wouldn’t genuflect to him.

I hated the idea; it made him too much of a decent person, and what right did he have to be a decent person, on top of a monumentally stupid gigantic hero? But it was more or less the only thing that made sense. Just standing around in the cafeteria as everyone else pours out is a bad idea, but I did precisely that for almost a whole minute, staring after him with my fists balled up, because I was still out of my tree: angry with him, and with Chloe, and with every last person around me; I was even angry with Aadhya and Liu, because they’d made me want to cry just by deigning to sit with me.

Then I went after him. He had gone to the stairs like everyone else, but instead of going up to the library like everyone else, he was heading down, alone, to do work period in the alchemy lab or something, like a lunatic. Or like someone who’d rather be attacked by mals than be gushed at. I gritted my teeth, but there wasn’t any help for it. I caught up to him halfway down the first flight. “Can I point out, not four days ago you accused me of being a serial killer,” I said. “I’m justified in not grasping that you wanted me to sit with you for lunch.”

He didn’t look at me and hitched his rucksack higher up on his shoulder. “Sit wherever you want.”

“I will,” I said. “But as you mind so much, next time I’ll tell you beforehand that I don’t want to sit with your enclave mates.”

He did look then, with a glare. “Why not?”

“Because they do want genuflection.”

His shoulders were starting to stop hunching. “It’s called sitting down together,” he said, dragging the words out exaggeratedly. “At a table. In chairs. Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war.”

“I’m not most people,” I said. “Also, the seating arrangements are an act of war, and if you haven’t noticed, that’s just embarrassing. Do you think that everyone’s always trying to sit with you for your amazing personality or something?”

“I guess you’re just immune,” he said.

“Bloody well right I am,” I said, but he was grinning at me a little from under his overgrown hair, tentatively, and apparently I was lying.

I DON’T HAVE a very good idea of how people behave with their friends normally, because I’d never had one before, but on the bright side, Orion hadn’t either, so he didn’t know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea we just went on being rude to each other, which was easy enough for me, and a refreshing and new experience for him, in both directions: being gracious to the little people had apparently been hammered into him from an early age. “I’d respond to that, but my mom’s pretty big on manners,” he said to me pointedly the next day after dinner as I yanked him away from the stairs down. I’d just told him he was a stupid wanker for trying to go and hide in the alchemy labs again.

“So is mine, but it didn’t stick,” I said, shoving him up the stairs to the library. “I don’t care if you like sitting hunched alone at a lab table like a ghoul. I get enough near-death experiences in here without creating extra opportunities.”

Unless you’ve got project work you have to do—and several friends watching your back—the library is always where you want to be: it’s the safest place in the whole school. The bookcases just keep going up and up until they vanish into the same darkness that’s outside our cells, so there’s no place for mals to get in above. There’s no plumbing on the library level at all; you have to go down to the cafeteria level if you need the loo. Even the air vents are smaller. It’s musty and smells of old paper, but that’s a trade-off we’re all willing to accept. We’d spend every spare minute here, except there’s not enough space in the reading room for everyone. Nobody gets into real fights very much in the Scholomance—it’s just stupid—but enclaver groups will fight each other occasionally over a table or one of the prime reading areas with lumpy sofas big enough to kip on.

There are a handful of smaller reading rooms, up on the mezzanine level, but each of those is claimed by a consortium of two or three smaller enclaves, the ones that don’t have enough firepower to claim a good section of the main reading room, but more than enough to keep out any outsiders who might want to intrude. Nkoyo gets invited to one up there fairly often, by the kids from Zanzibar and Johannesburg. If you’re not invited, it’s not worth going up there; on the rare occasion when no one’s there, the first person who shows up—almost certainly with at least three tagalongs—will chase you, even if there’s plenty of room. And for once that doesn’t just mean me; they’ll chase anyone, on principle: it’s too important a resource not to police it.

The only other reasonably good place to work is one of the study carrels tucked in and around the stacks, and they don’t always stay where they should. You can catch sight of one peering through a bookshelf, green lampshade like a beacon, and by the time you’ve got to the next aisle over, it’s gone. If you do find one, and you settle in to work and then doze off over your books, you might wake up in a dim aisle full of crackling old scrolls and books in languages you can’t even recognize, surrounded by dark, and good luck finding your way back before something finds you. The library is safer, not safe.

I’ve managed to claim one of them more or less, a scarred old monster of a desk that’s probably been here as long as the school itself. It’s tucked into a nook that you’d never see unless you go all the way to the end of the aisle with the Sanskrit incantations and then go around the back to the next aisle over, which has the Old English incantations. Almost no one would go that way, for good reason. The bookcases in between are full of crumbling scrolls and carved-stone tablets in some parent language so ancient that nobody knows it anymore. If you happened to look too long at a sliver of papyrus while going past, the school might decide you were now studying that language, and good luck figuring out the spells you’d get then. People can end up spell-choked that way: you get a dozen spells in a row that you can’t learn well enough to cast, and suddenly you can’t skip over them anymore to learn any new ones, even if you trade for them. Then the spells you’ve already learned are all you’ve got for the rest of your life. It’s not really a silver lining that the rest of your life isn’t likely to be very long if you’re stuck working with sophomore-year spells. On top of that, the path goes underneath one of the walkways that connect the mezzanine-level areas, so a good chunk of it sits in the dark.