“Thanks,” she said, softly, and bent over her food.

There almost wasn’t room when Orion and Ibrahim arrived from lab. A couple of people shifted to let him sit next to me without so much as a word. I was mostly resigned to that, too. After my performance this morning, people would now assume we were dating even if I tipped his soup over his head. If he did start actually dating someone, everybody would have us in a love triangle for the year.

Todd was in the cafeteria, too. He already wasn’t being frozen out completely: a group of loser freshmen had taken seats at the end of his table. He’d probably have a new alliance in time for graduation, if his old one didn’t just swallow it and take him back and leave it to the grown-ups to deal with him when they got out. Maybe they wouldn’t. His parents were powerful and important if his alliance had the right to offer a guaranteed-in to the enclave, which they would’ve needed to get the class valedictorian. He’d tell them about the maw-mouth going past his room and they’d understand, of course he had to protect himself, and it wasn’t like he’d really committed murder. Mika was going to die anyway in a week. It made sense to trade him for an enclave kid, a kid who had a chance, a kid who had a future. Just thinking about it made me angry enough to want to push Todd into the dark myself.

I didn’t have a concrete plan for work period, but without even saying it, I’d more or less assumed Orion and I would go to the library together again. But as we were busing our trays, he said to me abruptly, “Go ahead, I’ll find you.”

“Suit yourself,” I said shortly. There wasn’t any great stroke of genius needed to guess what he was planning to do, but I didn’t tell him he wasn’t going to find a maw-mouth lurking anywhere in the school, or that he was a moron for trying. I just went on to the library alone.

I meant to go to my desk, but when I came in through the reading room, the place was half empty. Most of the tables and squashy chairs had been badly scorched, and there was a lingering stink of smoke mingled with something smelling a bit like the cafeteria brussels sprouts. They’re the one thing that’s never ever poisoned. But even taking all of that into account, the place was unusually deserted. There were freshmen with actual seats instead of just being on the floor. After a moment I realized that everyone was probably thinking—accurately, as it happened—that if you were a hungry maw-mouth, the library would be the perfect hunting ground. Probably anyone who wasn’t desperate would also avoid the stockroom, exactly as Todd had suggested.

It was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Move on,” I told one of the more ambitious freshmen, who’d dared to snag one of the coveted armchair-and-desk combos in the corner that was normally filled with kids from the Dubai enclave, none of whom were in evidence at the moment.

The kid gave it up without a fight; he knew he’d been reaching. “Can I sit by you?” he asked. That was new. Probably he was betting Orion might turn up.

“Suit yourself,” I said, and he shifted to the open patch of floor next to the chair.

The seat back had a bad rip in the upholstery from one corner to the other, but that was why I’d wanted it. I dug the remnants of a half-scorched throw blanket out from under a sofa and got to work on it with my crochet hook. It took most of work period and a few layers of enamel off my molars, but I got the end of the blanket back into a raveled state. Then I folded it up into a pad, tied it over the rip with some stray bits of string, and sacrificed the whole thing and the mana I’d built up to do a make-and-mend on the chair back. I made sure to scribble El on the repaired bit. The unwritten rule is, if you fix a broken piece of school furniture, you get dibs on it for the rest of the term. The rule goes out the window often enough when there’s someone more powerful on the other side, but I suspected that not even enclavers were going to pick a fight with Orion Lake’s girlfriend, even if she was an enclave-hating weirdo and he turned out to be saving losers at their expense.

Afterwards, I took out the Golden Stone sutras, petted the book lovingly for a bit, then spent the rest of work period hunting up a Classical Arabic dictionary so I could start translating the first few pages. Those turned out to be just the usual foreword bits like offering acknowledgments and thanks to various important patrons—in this case senior wizards at the enclave—and talking about how hard it had been to make a precise copy. It wasn’t what you’d call brilliantly productive, but I got some Arabic practice in, which was just as well since it was an absolute certainty that a quarter of my language final was going to be in Arabic.

Orion never showed. He even skipped lab that afternoon. I didn’t see him again until I got to the cafeteria for dinner and he was already there alone at a table, eating like a wolf from a loaded tray: he’d clearly been first into the line, which is a great way to get plenty of food and also get eaten yourself. For most people.

I didn’t ask him where he’d been, but I didn’t have to. Ibrahim wasn’t even in our lab section and he’d still heard that Orion had skipped class; he was asking why before he had even got into his seat.

“I didn’t find it,” Orion said, low, after everyone else finished making the appropriate shocked noises when he admitted he’d gone hunting the maw-mouth. It was insanely stupid, even for our hero. He only shrugged it off. “I checked the supply room, the shop, all over the library—”

I was eating on, determinedly ignoring his catalog, but Liu, who was next to me eating almost as mechanically, slowly began to lift her head from over her food as he talked, and when he finished up in frustration, she said, sounding a bit more like herself, “You’re not going to find it.” Orion looked over at her. “A maw-mouth wouldn’t be hiding. If it was in the school, it would be eating. We’d all know where it was by now. So there isn’t a maw-mouth in the school. Either Todd made it up, or he hallucinated it.”

Everyone loved that idea, of course. “He did say he hadn’t been sleeping,” one of Nkoyo’s friends said, and by the end of the meal, the whole cafeteria had talked the maw-mouth out of existence and Todd into temporary insanity, to enormous and general relief.

Even mine: at least they’d all stop talking about it now. And with the maw-mouth disposed of, my find became real news at last. By the end of dinnertime, fourteen kids—eight of them seniors doing Sanskrit—had come by to take a look at the sutras, and they got so excited that some other seniors who weren’t doing Sanskrit came over to express interest: they were mostly kids from wizard groups roughly like Liu’s family, just a bit bigger, starting to get into reach of the resources to build an enclave. Getting the phase-change spell for relatively cheap would be a substantial savings.

I went back to the library after dinner pleased despite the shedload of Arabic work I still had to do. Ibrahim even volunteered to help me out with translations, in exchange for English help that he didn’t really need, which was clearly meant as an apology for being a twat previously. I took it, if a little grudgingly; I’d sat down at his table, after all.