A Deadly Education Page 36
“Holy shit, El,” Aadhya said, when I knocked on her door the next morning before first bell to show it to her. “What did you do for it?”
I was working really hard to forget what I’d done for it. “The library was trying really hard to keep me stuck in with the mals yesterday. It slipped the book onto an upper shelf after I started label-reading down the aisle, and I got lucky and spotted it.”
“That’s unbelievable.” She eyed it longingly. “I don’t know Sanskrit. But I’ll help you run an auction for the phase-control spell, if you want?”
“An auction?” I said. I’d only meant to ask her for help trading it.
“Yeah,” she said. “This is huge, you don’t want to swap it for just anything. I’ll collect secret bids, and the top five bidders get it, for whatever they’ve put up. And they have to promise that they won’t trade it on themselves after. Can you put a copying curse on?”
“No,” I said, flatly. The actual answer was yes, easy as winking, and it would be a good and proper curse, too, but I wasn’t going to.
“You want to ask Liu to do it?”
“No curses,” I said. “No one’s going to be photocopying this or anything. It’s major arcana in Vedic Sanskrit. It’s going to take me a week to make five clean copies, for that matter.”
“You’ve already learned it?” Aadhya gave me a squint. “When? You were a human dishrag yesterday.”
“After dinner,” I said sulkily: obviously all thanks to that boost from Orion.
After a moment, she said, “Okay. Can you run a demo? In the shop on Wednesday, maybe? That’ll give me a couple of days to pass the word. Then we can run the auction over the weekend. Seniors will really want in on this with time to get the spell down before graduation. And hey, if we’re lucky, all five of the winners will be seniors and we can do a whole second auction next term after they’re gone.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Thanks, Aadhya. What cut do you want?”
She gnawed her lip for a moment, looking at me, then abruptly she said, “You okay with figuring it out after the auction? See what comes in and what we think is fair. Maybe there’ll be enough shareable stuff I won’t need anything exclusive.”
I had to work at it not to squeeze the book too hard against me. “Fine with me, if you’re sure,” I said, casual around the lump in my throat.
WE WENT to the bathroom and got ready together, and met Nkoyo and Orion to walk to breakfast. “Oh, sweetness,” Nkoyo said, when I showed her the book: I was keeping it on my person, possibly for the rest of my life; I’d rigged up a sling to carry it in across my chest, separate from my other books. “Are you willing to do trades? I know a couple of Somali girls doing Sanskrit.”
I was so happy that when Chloe almost burst out of the girls’ with her hair not quite done, obviously having hurried to catch us up, and called, “Wait for me, there in a second,” I even said, “Sure,” like an ordinarily civilized person, feeling magnanimous, and showed her the book, too, as we walked. She admired it appropriately, although she spoiled my five seconds of friendly feeling by darting a look at Orion that I had no trouble interpreting: she thought he’d got it for me. I couldn’t kick her off our table at this point, any more than she could’ve shoved me when I’d been walking with Orion, that’s just not on, but I would’ve liked to.
I was still looking forward to my breakfast with anticipation, though. Once Aadhya and I passed the word in the food line that I had something really good on offer, people would stop at the table just to get a quick look. It would be a good way to make more connections, especially with other students who had Sanskrit; I could get even more trades out of it in future. Except then we got to the cafeteria and I knew straightaway my book wasn’t going to be the big news of the morning: a senior was sitting alone at the middle of an absolutely prime table. Completely alone, hunched over his tray.
Seniors don’t sit alone, no matter how much the other seniors hate them. Freshmen and even sophs will fill in the spaces at their tables for the cover. Seniors get access to a lot more advanced magic, and by graduation time, they’re also bursting with power, especially by comparison with the average fourteen-year-old. The kind of mals that want to hunt freshmen and sophs avoid them. But this one had been isolated so hard there weren’t even any seniors sitting at the tables around him: they were full of hunched-over desperate loser freshmen.
I didn’t recognize him, but Orion and Chloe had both frozen, staring. “Isn’t he…New York?” Aadhya said, low, and Chloe said blankly, “That’s Todd. Todd Quayle.” That made it even more incomprehensible. Shunning an enclave kid? And Todd hadn’t gone obvious whole-hog maleficer or anything; he looked totally normal.
A freshman was just making a quick dash back from the busing station, having managed to get his tray on the conveyor without problems. Orion reached out and caught him. “What did he do?” he asked, jerking his head over.
“Poached,” the kid said, without really lifting his head; he darted a wary look at Orion and Chloe from under his untrimmed bangs and hurried on; Orion had dropped his arm and was looking sick. Chloe was shaking her head in denial. “No way,” she said. “No fucking way.” But it was almost the only thing big enough to explain it.
Our rooms are handed out on the day we get dropped into them, and you don’t get to change, even if someone dies. The empty rooms do get cleared out at the end of the year when the res halls rotate down, but the Scholomance decides how to reshuffle the walls to hand out the extra space. The only way you can deliberately change to another room is if you take it, and not by killing someone. You have to go into their room and push them into the void.
Nobody knows what that really means. The void isn’t a vacuum or instant death or anything like that. Occasionally someone will go crazy and try to walk out into the void on their own—you can, actually, walk into it. It doesn’t seem to matter that you can also drop things over the edge. Like that slime you can squish between your fingers or roll into an apparently solid ball: it depends how you’re pushing on it, only with your will instead of your hands.
However, those people never make it very far. They panic and run back, and none of them has ever been able to describe what it’s like in there. If someone’s really determined and takes a running start, occasionally their momentum carries them a little further in before they can turn around, and when they do come out, those people can’t talk anymore at all, at least not in any comprehensible way. They make noises like they’re talking, but it’s not a language anyone else knows or can understand. They mostly end up dead some other way, but a couple of them have made it out of the school alive. They’ve still got magic. But no one else can understand their spells, and if they’re artificers or alchemists, the things they make don’t work for anyone else. Like they’ve been shifted sideways somehow.