“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to be crazy paranoid, either,” he said. “Come on, how many times have you gotten jumped?”

“In the last week? Do I get to count the maleficer you sicced on me?” I said, folding my arms.

“Until the end of time, obviously.” He rolled his eyes. “How many times have you gotten jumped before that? Five? Six?”

I stared at him. “A week, maybe.”

He stared back at me. “Huh?”

“I get jumped twice a week, if I’m careful,” I said. “If I wasn’t careful, I’d be getting jumped five times as often. I’m the class tiramisu, you spanner. The loser with a tidy bucket of mana that has to spend all her time alone. And even if I wasn’t, most people get jumped once a month at least.”

“They do not,” he said, positively.

“They really do,” I said.

He pulled up his sleeve to show me a piece of artifice on his wrist, a round medallion on a leather strap that looked enough like a watch to slip by at a first glance. He could have exposed it on any crowded street full of mundanes and nobody would have blinked. Then he popped it open, and it even was a watch, except through several tiny round windows cut out of the face, you could see into the interior where at least six layers of minuscule gears were turning, each in different metals, shifting through different glows of green and blue and violet. “I get buzzed if anyone from the enclave is in trouble, and there are eleven other kids from New York in this place right now.”

“Oh, fine, enclave kids don’t get jumped once a month,” I said. “Rank and power hath their privileges. I’m shocked. Is that what you all use for power-sharing?” I peered at it as he snapped it shut again: the lid had an elaborate engraving of a cast-iron park gate with a starburst behind it, the letters NY looped in calligraphic script around it.

“You think the maleficaria can tell?” he said. “You think they care?”

“I think they go for the lowest-hanging fruit on the vine, and it’s never one of you. Your mate Chloe has friends who offer to taste her food and get her supplies. When she does a project, she can get help for the asking from the best students in the place, and she doesn’t have to help them in return. She probably has two kids walk her back to her room at night, when she finally leaves her permanently reserved place on the sofa in there.” I jerked my chin towards the reading room. “You’ve got power-sharers and probably—” I reached for the bottom of his shirt and lifted it up over the buckle of his belt, which—you guessed it—was absolutely a top-notch shield holder, like the ones Aadhya was making, only by comparison hers were the equivalent of a Blue Peter craft project done by a five-year-old.

He made a little hop with a squawk, grabbing for my hand like he thought I was making a move on him, but I was already dropping the shirt again. I snorted and flicked my fingers up towards his face to make him jump back again. “In your dreams, rich boy. I’m not one of your groupies.”

“Yeah, I didn’t notice,” he said, even though he was blushing at the same time.

I settled down to my history paper, and the translations I was going to do for Liu’s. I’m pretty locked-in when I work, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Orion once I got going. Especially since I couldn’t even cut down on the number of perimeter checks I normally do. He wasn’t doing any. I stopped after I finished my outline and the first translation and got up to stretch: letting yourself go stiff in a chair is another bad idea. That was when I noticed he was just sitting there staring at the same page of his lab assignment. “What?”

“You really think other kids get jumped a lot more?” he said abruptly, like he’d been stewing over it the whole time.

“You aren’t that bright, are you,” I said, speaking from downward-dog position. “Why do you think people want to be in enclaves in the first place?”

“That’s outside,” he said. “We’re all in here together. Everyone has the same chances—”

He turned around to look at me halfway through that sentence, at which point my upside-down stare knocked him off track and he listened to the regurgitated rubbish coming out of his own mouth. He stopped and looked unhappy again, as he deserved to. I gave him the snort he’d earned as I got up and started planking. “Right. So Luisa had the same chances as Chloe.”

“Luisa was screwed!” Orion said. “She didn’t know anything, she wasn’t prepared for any of it. That’s why I was looking out for her so much. It’s not the same thing.”

“Fine. You think I have the same chances as Chloe?”

He couldn’t sell that to himself, either, and it obviously pissed him off. He looked away and said, “You’re screwing up your chances all on your own.”

I stood up and said, “Fuck off, then, and get away from me,” my throat knotted-up around it.

He just gave a huff without even looking back at me, like he thought I was joking. “Yeah, see, like that. You’ll barely talk to me and I’ve saved your life five times.”

“Six times,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said. “Do you know that literally everybody I know has tried to tell me the last three days that I need to watch out for you because you’re a maleficer? You act like one.”

“I don’t!” I said. “Jack acted like a maleficer. Maleficers are nice to you.”

“Okay, no one’s going to accuse you of that.” He bent back over his books, still frowning; he hadn’t even realized I was about to punch him in the head. And I still wanted to punch him in the head, and I wanted to shout at him that I didn’t have to do anything to make people assume I was evil, I never had, except—he hadn’t assumed it. He’d only ever thought I was a maleficer when I’d given him a really good solid reason, and more to the point he was there sitting at my desk talking to me like I was a person, and I didn’t want that to stop. So instead of punching him in the head, I just finished my sun salutation and then I went back to the desk and got on with my paper.

When the warning bell went off for curfew and we finally packed up, he said tentatively, “Want to come back after breakfast tomorrow?”

“Some of us can’t afford to outsource our maintenance shifts,” I said, but the anger had gone. “Who’s doing yours?”

“I don’t have one,” he said, with perfect sincerity, and only looked puzzled when I gave him a look. We’ve all got maintenance shifts, one a week; not even being the future Domina’s son from New York gets you out of being assigned. It only gets you out of doing it yourself. Enclavers generally club together in groups of ten and trade all their maintenance shifts to one kid in exchange for the promise that the kid gets to join one of their alliances at graduation time. We call that maintenance track, even though it’s strictly unofficial, and it’s one of the most reliable ways to get into an enclave after graduation. They’re happy to let in anyone who’s willing to literally do the shit work, and maintenance-track kids come out with practical experience in patching up the same kind of infrastructure that the big enclaves use.