And that’s where I found my desk. I risked the shortcut last year because I made up a special project for myself: analyzing the commonalities between spells of binding and coercion in Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Old English, and Middle English. I know, charming subject, but perfectly aligned with my affinity, and it let me out of taking a final exam for languages at all. Otherwise, I’d have had five hours in a classroom full of other delicious sophomores who’d have made sure I was the one sitting in the very worst spot. The topic also near-guaranteed that I’ll be assigned the Proto-Indo-European seminar next year, which always has at least ten students in it, a good healthy size for a senior languages-track seminar. But you do need a reference or two, or more accurately fifty, to get a passing mark on a project like that. Just collecting up the books from each language was going to take me a good half hour of my every work period.

I couldn’t just keep them—or rather, I could; I could hide them in a dark corner or take them back to my room or set them on fire; there’s no one here to stop you at the door or charge you late fees. But if you’re even a little careless with a library book, it’ll be gone the next time you want it, and good luck finding it on the shelves ever again. So I reshelve every time, and I have a pocket notebook I’ve been carrying since freshman year with the title and catalog number of every book I’ve used, a note about which aisle it was in, how many bookcases from the end, which shelf from the floor, how many books on either side on the shelf, and the titles of the immediate neighbors. The really valuable ones, I even do a sketch of the spine in colored pencil. Thanks to that, I can lay my hands on almost any of them, and next year I’ll probably be able to sell the notebook off to a younger languages-track student right before graduation in exchange for some mana. That’s the value of making loads of work for yourself.

But before I found my desk, what that meant was, anytime I had to do a paper, each day after an abbreviated lunch I dashed up here, got the books I needed, hauled them all downstairs to an empty classroom, got forty minutes of work done, hauled them back up and reshelved, and did the same thing all over again to get two hours of work done after dinner. I couldn’t get a place in the reading room to save my life, even at the lousy tables in the dark corners where you have to spend your own mana to cast a light.

That was hard going for a single-subject paper where all the books were in one aisle if not in one shelf. Slogging down to Sanskrit, then all the way back through all the modern Indian languages to the main incantations aisle, and then going all the way to Old English, every single time I had to get some work done on the paper, would’ve been too much work. Instead I took the gamble and went round the back. As a reward, I found my desk. Yes, it’s underneath the walkway, but it’s got a light of its own that takes only a tiny drop of mana to start, and apart from that it’s properly tidy: solid wood with a wide flat top, heavy carved legs with open sides, no drawers, no hiding places for mals to lurk in. And it’s more than big enough for two. I’ve just never had anyone to invite.

Orion had always avoided the library like the plague, for what turned out to be the opposite reason: the moment we came into the reading room, half of the heads came up—the half facing the door—and started to smile invitations. You could just see everyone looking round at the other kids at their tables, mentally picking off the two weakest to open up a pair of seats. His shoulders hunched up. I didn’t blame him for not liking it, but I gave him a hard shove on the back for being such a drip. “Stop looking like someone’s about to bite your head off. I promise I’ll protect you,” I added, which I meant as a joke, except after we went into the stacks, three separate people tried to casually follow us, and I really did have to turn round and tell them off for being creepers. He didn’t do anything about it himself.

“I’m not going to be your personal bouncer,” I told him when we finally got rid of the third one, a girl who didn’t quite make it all the way to suggesting that Orion might have even more fun in the dark recesses of the stacks with two girls instead of just one—obviously the only reason he could possibly want to hang out in the library with me—but only because I cut her off before she got that far. “You can be rude to your groupies for yourself.”

“But you’re so good at it,” he said, and then, “No, I’m sorry, I just…” He trailed off, and then he said, “Luisa asked me. Three days before…” He stopped.

“Before Jack did for her,” I supplied. He nodded. “So since then you’ve decided that you’re under a moral obligation to bestow your magnificent favors on anyone who asks? I don’t know where you’re finding the time.”

“No!” He glared at me. “Just, I got mad and shoved her off, and then she was dead, and I didn’t even know how. And I thought that when it happened, maybe she thought I didn’t come, I let whatever it was get her, because I was still mad. I know it’s stupid,” he added. And it was stupid, mainly because he was blaming himself for the completely wrong thing. Which was quite obvious to me, and he noticed. “What?” he said belligerently.

I could have considered not telling him. I suppose that would’ve been a kind thing to do. Instead I said, “She died because after you wouldn’t go for it, she looked for somebody else who would, and Jack took her up on it.” He stared at me appalled. “He would’ve needed some kind of consent to get power out of another wizard. Most maleficers do.”

Orion looked vaguely sick. He didn’t talk for the rest of the way to my desk. Nobody else popped up to bother us, and the walk was a lot shorter than usual. Normally I have to stop and read the book spines every three shelves just to make ostentatiously sure that I’m moving in the right direction, and to check the lights. That’s another trick the school loves. There isn’t any overhead to put a lamp on, so the aisles are lit up with glowing wispy mana lights that float around. They’ll grudgingly help you read the book spines, even bob along if you fly up a shelf—or climb up it, for those of us who don’t have mana to waste on floating around like giant ponces—but if you aren’t actively using them, they’ll go dim so carefully that you don’t notice until they’re about to wink out, and then you have to cast your own light, because they will go out if you keep going, even if you turn around. But with Orion walking alongside me, they all stayed bright enough around us that I could just glance over once in a while, to make sure we were still going in the right direction.

There was even a second chair waiting for him at my desk. Orion sat down without a first—much less a second—glance and immediately started unpacking his bag. I kicked his chair and made him help me look through the shelves at our backs and shine a light up and down the walls of the nook and over the legs of the desk and pull it away from the wall and push it back. “Okay, seriously, we’re in the library,” he said finally, sounding exasperated.

“I’m sorry, am I boring you with my basic precautions?” I said. “We’re not all invulnerable heroes.”