That’s as deep as anyone can get into the void on their own. But you can push someone else all the way in—with magic, so you get them far enough in to vanish completely, even though they don’t want to go. And if you do that, if you go into someone’s room after curfew and you push them all the way into the dark like a spellbook you don’t want anymore, even while they’re screaming and begging and trying to get back out, then after they’re gone, you can spend the night in their room, and you won’t get swarmed, because there’s only one person in the room, and it’s your room after that.

Of course, it doesn’t make you very popular with, for instance, anyone else who has a room. And it’s not like you can cover it up, either. As soon as people see you coming out of your new room the next morning, they know what you’ve done. Orion clearly wanted to go right at Todd, then and there; I had to shove him towards the food line instead. “We already missed lunch yesterday. If you want to find out more, we can go sit with him after we’ve got breakfast; it’s not like there isn’t room.”

“I’m not sitting with a poacher,” Orion said.

“Then endure the burning curiosity,” I said. “Anyone in the school will be able to tell you all the gory details by lunchtime.”

“It’s a mistake,” Chloe said again, her voice high and fraying. “There’s no way Todd poached. He doesn’t need to poach! He’s going with Annabel and River and Jessamy, and they’ve got the valedictorian on board. Why would he poach?”

“It’s not like we’ll be with him for long. The senior bell will go five minutes after we sit down,” Aadhya offered, more practically, and Orion clenched his hands and then shot off to the food line at top speed.

I’d underestimated the power of the gossip chain: we got most of the gory details before we even got out with our trays. Todd had taken out a guy named Mika: one of the last stragglers left, the solitary kids who hadn’t made it into any graduation alliance. If stragglers aren’t maleficers, they pretty much don’t make it out alive, and Mika wasn’t a maleficer; he was just an awkward loser who couldn’t manage decent social skills and wasn’t talented enough for even other losers to overlook the lack. If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like a crime deserving of a death sentence, I would agree with you, since I’ll be in the same boat next year if I don’t set myself up in time. But that’s what it was, more or less. Which meant, of course, he’d been the perfect target.

Orion got out first, and he made a beeline for Todd at his table, slammed his tray down across from him, and didn’t sit. “Why?” he said flatly. “You’ve got a team, a belt shield, a power-sharer, plenty of mana—you made a spirit glaive last quarter! But it wasn’t enough? You had to have a better room?”

I put my own tray down next to Orion’s and sat and started eating while I had the chance. Aadhya sat down next to me and did the same thing. Chloe hadn’t come with us after all. After hearing the word in the line, she’d peeled off to a different New York table; all the other New York kids were sitting as far away from Todd as they could and still be in the cafeteria. She’d made the right call; I could already tell Orion wasn’t going to get an answer he was going to like much, if he was going to get one at all. Todd hadn’t even reacted to the question. He was hunched over his tray eating systematically, but his hands were shaking, and he was forcing the food down. He wasn’t a maleficer, either; he wasn’t even enough of a sociopath not to mind killing someone. I didn’t know why he had, but he hadn’t done it for malia. He’d done it in desperation.

“Where was his old room?” I asked.

“Next to the stairs,” Orion said, still staring down at Todd like he could bore a hole through his skull and pull out answers. That is a crap room. A stairwell is for moving round the school, and the mals can use it as much as we do, so next to the stairs on the senior dorm level is the equivalent of being the first item on the food line.

But it’s hardly an insurmountable threat. None of us will take the first item on the food line if there’s a lid covering it, not as long as there’s an easier option in the next tray along. Which there would be, because Todd’s an enclaver, with more than enough mana to put up a good shield every single night, and the other enclave kids would have skipped recruiting a few of the neighboring kids, in solidarity. It didn’t seem worth screwing up his alliance and maybe even his whole life—enclaves don’t openly harbor murderers and maleficers, and literally everyone in the school knew what he’d done.

“Answer me,” Orion said, and reached for Todd’s tray, maybe because he planned to pull it away or shove it in his face, but Todd grabbed it himself first and heaved it up, taking Orion’s tray with it, throwing the whole mess all over him before reaching across the table to give him a good shove. We don’t do a lot of physical fighting in here, everyone thinks of that as a mundane thing, but you don’t need much practice when you’re a six-foot guy who hasn’t been shy about letting other people give you extras for the last four years and the kid on the other side is a shrimp of a junior. Orion staggered back, dripping milk and scrambled eggs, and nearly went over into the next table.

“Fuck you, Orion,” Todd snarled, his voice cracking into a shrill frantic note, undermining his thug line. “You want to get in my face? Big hero on campus, clearing out the mals for everybody. Guess what, you haven’t made a dent in the real crowd. They’re all still down there, and thanks to you, they’re starving. No little ones to snack on. So they’re not waiting for dinner to be delivered this year. I’ve been hearing them working at the stairwell every night for a week, so loud I can’t sleep. Some of them are already getting through.” He pressed his clenched fists to his temples, his whole face crumpling like a toddler having a wail, tears leaking down. “A fucking maw-mouth went by my room yesterday. Headed upstairs. Didn’t get that one, did you, hero?”

Murmurs and freaked-out gasps went out from around us like an expanding ripple as everyone at the nearby tables overheard. The whole room was absolutely agog and watching the drama unfold, some kids actually standing on benches to peer over other people’s heads and see. Todd laughed a little hysterically. “Yeah, I wonder where it’s gonna settle down. Keep an eye out at the supply room, everybody!” he called out, turning to the whole room and spreading his arms wide and up to take in the kids leaning over from the mezzanine, a parody of a friendly warning. “But yeah, Orion, we’re so lucky to have you here protecting us. What would we do without you.”

It was almost down to the letter my own thoughts about Orion’s heroic campaign, and even more obviously accurate after the last week: a soul-eater in the junior res hall, mimics and sirenspiders in the shop, manifestations and maw-mouths in the library. Todd was right: there had to be a hole somewhere letting them through, a hole they’d forced through in hungry desperation.