It didn’t feel bare to me, but I grew up in a one-room yurt with a couple of boxes under our bed and Mum’s worktable under the one round window. Except there I had the whole green world outside the door, and here this was clearly the room of a miserable loner, somebody like Mika, who couldn’t even afford the risk of cupboards. It made me even more furious, looking at it through another person’s eyes. Magnus probably had a quilt and a spare pillow, made sometime in the last thirty years by another New York student who’d passed them down on graduation day. His walls were probably covered with cheery cards and pictures people had made for him, or even actual wallpaper, if he’d wanted it enough. His furniture would be polished warm wood, with warded locks on the drawers and cubbyholes. Maybe he had a keep-fresh larder box; he certainly had a proper desk lamp. His pens never disappeared on him.

I could go and find out. Magnus would be in his room by now; it was close to curfew. I could force my way in and tell him I knew what he’d tried to do to me, and then I could shove him into the dark—not like Todd had done Mika, not all the way in, just enough to make clear that I could do it; that anytime I wanted to, I could push him in and take his lush, comfortable room all for me, since he and his enclave buddies thought that was a reasonable thing to do to another human being.

I had my hands clenched again, and I had almost forgotten Aadhya was there, and then she said, abruptly, “Did—El, did you take out the maw-mouth?”

It was like having a bucket of just-melted ice thrown all over me. My eyesight actually fuzzed out a bit, going dim: for a moment I was back inside the maw-mouth again, the horrible pulsing wet hunger of it, and I lunged for the middle of the room and threw up into the floor drain, heaving up wet chunks of my half-digested dinner burning with stomach acid. The feeling of them in my mouth made me heave again, sobbing in between rounds. I kept going until I was empty and for a while afterwards. I was vaguely aware that Aadhya was holding my hair back out of my face: my plait had come undone. When I stopped, she gave me a cup of water, and I rinsed and spat over and over until she said, “This is the last of the jug,” and then I made myself sip a little, trying to wash the last bile back down my throat.

I crawled a few steps back from the drain and eased myself against the wall with my knees pulled up and my mouth wide open, trying not to smell my own breath.

“Sorry,” Aadhya said, and I raised my head and stared at her. She was sitting on the floor just a little way from me, cross-legged with the jug in her hands. She was in her pajamas already, or what passes for that in here, a ratty pair of too-small shorts and long-sleeved top let out with cheap mending, like she’d got herself ready for bed and had been about to get in and then instead she’d come to ask me—ask me—“You did, didn’t you,” she said.

I wasn’t in any state where I was going to think through what the right answer was, or what it would mean to tell her. I just gave a nod. We sat there for a bit and didn’t say anything. It felt like a long time, but the curfew bell didn’t ring, so it couldn’t have been. I still couldn’t think at all. I just sat there existing.

Eventually Aadhya said, “I started on a mirror for next quarter. I asked Orion what he did to the pour to make it come out so great, and he said he didn’t do anything special. He’s not really a great alchemist, anyway. He’s just doing it, you know? Then I remembered you used some kind of incantation after the enchantment. So I tried to find it, except all I found was this section in my metals handbook that said using incantations to smooth the pour is stupid, because that’s trying to force your will onto the materials against their nature, and almost nobody can do it unless they’re really powerful, so you shouldn’t bother trying. It didn’t make any sense anyway. You’re an incantations-track junior, but you got assigned a magic mirror? That doesn’t happen.”

I gave a snort, more than half a snuffle: my nose was running. It happens to me.

Aadhya kept going, talking faster; she sounded almost angry. “That phase-control spell—you said you burned through it in a couple hours after dinner. Meanwhile the seniors who are thinking about bidding, they’re all discussing if they can learn it in time for graduation. Besides, that whole book is a crazy big deal. Luck like that doesn’t happen. You had to do something really horrible to get it, or really amazing. And you were so wiped out Sunday—and Todd wasn’t hallucinating, no way. A maw-mouth is the only thing that would have freaked him out that hard. He could survive anything else.” Then she asked, “Where’d you get the mana?”

I didn’t want to talk. My throat was really sore. I reached over to my little box and opened it and showed her my crystals; the two cracked ones and the dull drained ones next to the primed empties and my last nine full crystals. “Push-ups,” I said briefly, and shut the box again and put it away.

“Push-ups,” Aadhya said. “Sure, why not, push-ups.” She let out a bray of a laugh and looked away. “Why aren’t you telling anyone? Every enclave in the world is going to be drooling over you.”

The half accusation in the words made me angry and want to cry at the same time. I got up and got my little half-full jar of honey off my shelf. I take it to meals every weekend for the chance of a refill, but it’s hard to get, so I use it sparingly. But this called for it. I whispered Mum’s throat-soothing charm over a small spoonful and washed it down with the last lukewarm swallow of water in the glass before I turned back to Aadhya and stuck out my hand down at her, mockingly.

“Hi, I’m El. I can move mountains, literally,” I said. “Do you believe me?”

Aadhya stood up. “So you do a demo! You should’ve done one freshman year, just asked some enclavers to spot you the mana. They’d be fighting to have you on their teams—”

“I don’t want to be on their teams!” I yelled hoarsely. “I don’t want to be on their teams at all!”

I LOVE HAVING existential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful. I lay awake for at least an hour after the final bell, staring furiously at the blue flicker of the gaslight by the door. Every five minutes or so I told myself to unclench my hands and go to sleep, with no effect. I tried to get up and get a drink of water—Aadhya felt bad for me being mental, I suppose, so she’d gone with me to the loo so I could refill my jug—and I even tried doing some maths homework, and I still couldn’t fall to sleep.

I’ve been bellowing at Mum about joining an enclave ever since I was old enough to work out that when enclave wizards from as far away as Japan are turning up at your yurt for advice, it probably means that they would be happy to have you in-house. After the scratcher attack, she even went to visit one. She wouldn’t look at London, but she tried this old place in Brittany that specializes in healing. She picked me up from school that afternoon and said, “I’m sorry, love, I just can’t,” and only shook her head when I demanded to know why. I told her flat-out I was going into an enclave after I graduated if I could get one to take me, and she just looked sad and said, “You’ll do whatever’s right for you, darling, of course.” Once—I still feel a bit sick about it remembering—when I was twelve, I even screamed at her in tears and told her if she loved me she’d take us to an enclave, and she just wanted something to get me so nobody would blame her and it wouldn’t hurt her perfect reputation. Three mals had tried for me that afternoon.