She kept a calm face on with me, but then she went back to the trees and cried herself sick where I couldn’t see her, or at least where I couldn’t have seen if I hadn’t gone after her to scream at her even more. When I saw her sobbing I went back to the yurt and threw myself on the bed crying and determined to let the next mal that came along take me, as I was such a horrible daughter. But I didn’t do it. I wanted to live.

I still want to live. I want Mum to live. And I’m not going to live if I try to go it alone. So I should show off and make clear to all the enclavers that I’m available to be won: a grand prize up for grabs to the highest bidder, a nuclear weapon any enclave could use to take out mals—to take out another enclave—to make themselves more powerful. To make themselves safe.

That’s all Todd wanted. That’s all Magnus wanted. They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.

When the enclaves first built the Scholomance, the induction spell didn’t pull in kids from outside the enclaves. The enclavers made it sound like a grand act of generosity when they changed it to bring us all in, but of course it was never that. We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

But why should they do anything else? They don’t have any reason to care about us. We’re not their children. We’re the other gazelles, all of us trying to outrun the same pack of lions. And if we happen to be faster than their children, more powerful, their children will get eaten. If not while we’re in here, when we get out, and we decide that we want some of the luxury they have tucked into those enclaves for ourselves. If we’re too strong, we might even threaten their own lives. So they shouldn’t care about us. Not until we sign on the dotted line. That’s only sensible. You can’t blame people for wanting their own kids to live. I understand it, every last bit of it.

And I wanted to want in. I want to have a daughter one day, a daughter who will live, who won’t ever have to scream alone in the night when monsters come for her. I don’t want to be alone in the night myself. I want to be safe, and I really wouldn’t mind a little bit of comfort, and even a taste of luxury now and then. It’s all I’ve been hungry for my whole life. I wanted to pretend that all of that was fair and okay, like Orion bleating how we’ve got the same chances.

But I can’t pretend that, because I didn’t grow up in that lie, so I don’t actually want in. I don’t want that safety and comfort and luxury at the cost of other kids dying in here. And sure, it’s not like that, it’s not some simple equation like me in an enclave means kids are dying in here; the kids will go on dying in here anyway, whether I’m in an enclave or not. But just because it’s a forty-sixth-order derivative equation or something doesn’t mean that I can’t work out which side of that equation is the guilty one.

And I’ve probably known it all along, maybe even before I got here, because otherwise Aadhya’s right, I should have just blown the bloody doors off in my freshman year and shown everyone back then. Instead I’ve spent three years putting it off and coming up with convoluted plans for how I was going to arrange my dramatic revelation and meanwhile, at the first chance I got, I just started being as rude as I could to every enclave kid who crossed my path. I’d certainly done my very best to chase Orion off. If he wasn’t a towering weirdo who liked that in a person, I’d have succeeded. And now Aadhya saying, “I won’t tell,” like she was making me a promise, and I’d said, “Thanks,” instead of saying No, no, tell everyone!

But if I’m not joining an enclave, I really don’t want anyone to know, after all. If people in here find out I destroyed a maw-mouth, some of them are going to look up that same journal article I read on the subject and understand what I am, what I can do. I could certainly stop being angry at Magnus then, because probably half of the enclavers would start trying to take me out. Especially if any of them pick up a whisper of my great-grandmother’s prophecy. And I still want to live.

Filled with all these cheery and relaxing thoughts, I passed a comfortable night in which I slept perhaps three hours all broken up with marvelous nightmares of being back in the maw-mouth and wide-awake bursts of gnawing anxiety in which I contemplated my odds of making it out of here alive all on my own with my nine remaining crystals against a whole graduation hall full of maleficaria. There was a side of gnawing hunger, too; I’d thrown up most of my day’s food. My throat was still sore and painful the next morning, and my eyes were gummy.

Aadhya had been knocking on my door in the mornings on the way to the loo. I half expected her not to come that morning, but she called round, and then Liu poked her head out and called, “Will you wait a moment?” We stopped at her door while she grabbed her toothbrush and flannel and comb, so I didn’t even have the worry of whether we were going to talk about the things I didn’t want to talk about. As we walked, Liu and I talked about our history papers instead, and in the bathroom Aadhya and I took first watch while Liu grimly attacked the mysteriously appearing snarls in her waist-long hair. She was having to pay back three years’ worth of great hair days all at once. Malia is great for your looks, right up until it really really isn’t.

“I need to cut this all off,” she said out loud, with gritted teeth. It was the sensible choice, and not just for saving time on hair care: you don’t want to offer any mals a convenient handhold. Almost everyone in here shares the same fabulous hairstyle: half grown out after having been shingled as short as possible, as quickly as possible, the last time you had a chance to use a pair of proper scissors or hair clippers. Bringing a pair of bad ones that close to vital bits like eyes and throats is a very iffy proposition. If you’d like to know the hard-and-fast rule for telling whether a pair has gone to the bad, so would all of us. There’s a senior named Okot from Sudan, one of the maintenance-track kids, who blew most of his induction weight allowance on a battery-powered electric razor and a hand-crank charger. He’s made an absolute killing loaning it out to people over the years, and at the start of this year, he promised it to a group of five freshmen, who’ve spent all their free time since building him mana for graduation. Now he’s in an alliance with three enclavers from Johannesburg.