“I don’t cheat,” I said through my teeth. “I’ve never cheated.”

She gave me a dubious look. “For serious?”

So that was really helpful. Of course, it should have been. Aadhya was one hundred percent correct, and I should’ve listened to her and parlayed my one week of not-dating Orion into the outright invitation to join at least three separate enclaves that I could have got for the asking right then and there, setting myself up for half a dozen more to come during each further week we kept not-dating. Because I feel like rain.

But instead what I did the very next morning was say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” with immense coldness when Sarah invited me to swap spells with her Sunday Welsh revision group. Full of UK enclave kids, each with an inherited spellbook crammed with top-notch and thoroughly tested spells, all the more valuable because the language is completely phonetic: just about anyone who can get through the full name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll—that isn’t, by the way, the full name—can pick up most of the spells without even knowing what all the words are, so you get all the benefits of a rarer language, with a bigger trading group. My own Welsh is quite solid, thanks to good old Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi, although I never got to use it outside of lessons. Anytime I walked into shops or the pub, they’d switch to English to talk to me without even thinking, and sometimes keep on even if I spoke Welsh back. Sarah sounded a bit dubious asking herself: “I heard you grew up in Wales, I thought perhaps,” was how she phrased it. Oh, and she wanted to do this at their table in the library, after breakfast, and of course I was completely welcome to bring a friend.

“I don’t mind,” Orion actually said to me as we sat down with our trays; he’d overheard.

“I do,” I snarled at him viciously, and if he’d said another patronizing word I’d probably have tipped my porridge over his head, but instead he went all red and stared down at his tray hard and visibly swallowed, looking on the outside roughly the way I’d felt on the inside when Aadhya had sat down with me. Like it was exactly as new an experience for him, somebody who didn’t want to use him to the last drop. I nearly upended my porridge over his head anyway, but instead I ground my teeth and just shared the jug of cream I’d scrounged that morning, half full.

So the end result was, I was just as knee-deep in it as I’d been a week ago when he’d white-knighted into my bedroom, if not worse. Apparently I wasn’t going to actually use his friendship to get anywhere, and he was going to be worse than useless as help himself: it was already blindingly obvious to me that he was going to be the last one out of the gates on graduation day. Meanwhile I was well on the way to successfully making myself violently, instead of just modestly, hateful to every enclave kid in the place, probably before the end of term at my current pace. And while Aadhya and Liu and Nkoyo might not actively avoid me anymore, they weren’t going to choose me over survival. The alliances were going to begin forming up next year in earnest, and all three of them were sure to get scooped up early by one group of enclavers or another. For all Aadhya wants to talk about being a loser, she has a well-polished reputation; they all do. Mine started out grimy and was in the process of being covered in the slop of my own stupid pride.

But fine: since I didn’t have the self-restraint to swallow it and just make a smarmy git of myself for long enough to save my own life, the obvious answer was I had to find a way to let everyone in on the amount of power I had. Then some people would want me for myself, and then maybe I’d stop sabotaging every possible alliance offer I could get.

Anyway that’s been my plan all along, to sacrifice a few crystals and establish my reputation somehow, and now was the time for it, since maleficaria activity drops off quite a bit after graduation. Loads of mals down below get killed off by the escaping seniors or eaten by each other in the feeding frenzy, and the rest are well fed and busy finding quiet corners in which to make lots of little baby mals. And up here, the pest control has wiped out most of the ones living among us. The builders knew that some mals would wriggle their way up to us, so twice a year the halls get a good scouring. A very loud warning bell goes, we all run for our dormitory cells, shut ourselves in, and barricade our doors as thoroughly as we can. Then massive cleansing walls of mortal flame get conjured up and sent running on their merry way throughout the whole building, from top to bottom, incinerating hordes of desperate fleeing mals. It also helps warm up the machinery at graduation time, just before the dorms all rotate down to their new places.

If you’re wondering why they don’t also run this excellent system down in the graduation hall to clear out the mals before dumping in the seniors, the answer is they meant to, but the machinery down there has been broken since about five minutes after the school opened. No one’s going down to the graduation hall to do maintenance.

Anyway, that’s why induction happens literally the evening after graduation: it’s the safest day of the year in the Scholomance, and the place stays relatively quiet for a good month or two afterwards. So if I can’t dredge up a decent excuse for blowing a lot of power by then—like a soul-eater, not that I’m nursing a lingering bitterness or anything—I’m not going to get a better one until the end of the first quarter, and by then loads of alliances will have been formed.

I hardly got any work done the whole morning. The Zhou enclaves, which destroyed each other about three thousand years ago, had a hard time competing in my brain with the very compelling question of what I ought to do to show off. I could just make a scene in the cafeteria some morning and disintegrate a row of tables, but I writhed at the idea of wasting mana like that, and just throwing it away would make me look more than a bit thick. Or worse, people might get the idea that I had absurd amounts of power available to throw away, which I wouldn’t except if I was, you guessed it, a maleficer. And they all wanted to believe that anyway.

I gave up on my own paper and started doing the translations I owed Liu for hers instead. The only Sanskrit dictionary on the shelf today was the monstrous six-kilo one, but at least slogging through its pages was mechanical, and left a considerable portion of my brain able to keep worrying the problem. I decided I’d set myself a deadline to come up with something by the end of next week. Otherwise, I’d just pretend I’d been startled by something, maybe in shop class where Aadhya would see—

My train of thought got interrupted just then as Orion turned his head to look behind us, and I realized that was the third time he’d done it. I hadn’t really noticed before because that’s a normal thing to do; I glance over my shoulder probably once every five minutes, automatically. But it wasn’t normal for him, and before I could ask what he’d picked up on, he was up from the table, just leaving all his books and everything, and running back into the stacks towards the reading room. “What the hell, Lake!” I yelled after him, but he was already going.

I could have chased after him quickly enough to catch up, maybe, except then I’d’ve been running towards whatever it was at top speed, and undoubtedly the whatever was really dangerous. If he was already too far ahead, the aisles could just stretch enough to keep me from catching up, and then I’d be running full-tilt in the dark stacks all alone, which is just as brilliant an idea as it sounds.