Going fully shaved like that is popular if you can afford it. Dreadlocks are unfortunately not a great idea thanks to lockleeches, which you can probably imagine, but in case you need help, the adult spindly thing comes quietly down at night and pokes an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside, and creeps away. A little while later the leech hatches inside its comfy nest, attaches itself to your scalp almost unnoticeably, and starts very gently sucking up your blood and mana while infiltrating further. If you don’t get it out within a week or two, it usually manages to work its way inside the skull, and you’ve got a window of a few days after that before you stop being able to move. On the bright side, something else usually finishes you off quickly at that point.

So the very longest anyone usually lets their hair get is shoulder-length; mine only ever gets a couple inches longer than that because no one goes out of their way to let me know when they’ve got hold of good scissors. Even most enclavers won’t bother to grow their hair. Liu’s hair had been a power statement, an announcement of her family’s growing strength for anyone who met her. But without malia, it was probably going to be too much of a liability for her to maintain.

Aadhya threw me a quick look to make sure I was still attending, then broke bathroom silence. “Are you serious?”

“Getting there!” Liu said, letting her arms drop for a rest, panting.

“I’d buy it off you,” Aadhya said. “I could make you something of your choice next term, first quarter.”

“Really?” Liu said.

“Yeah,” Aadhya said. “It’s long enough to string the sirenspider lute I’m making.”

“I’ll think about it,” Liu said, and went back to combing the tangles out of her hair with more enthusiasm. Aadhya went back to watching. She wasn’t entitled to an answer right then: bathroom and table company is important, but it’s not like an alliance. And if Aadhya wanted Liu’s hair, there would be other kids who’d want it. Enclave kids in artifice track, making themselves top-notch weapons for graduation, and some of them with extras or maybe even an alliance slot to offer in trade.

I thought about it hard while I took my turn in the shower. Aadhya was even more clearly my best shot for an alliance at this point. She was the only person who knew what I had going, and she at least wanted me for bathroom company. But I still was a long way from being a good bargain for her. I certainly wouldn’t have picked me in her place: if she pulled off a sirenspider lute during the first half of next term, she was sure to get at least a dozen alliance offers from enclavers. Nobody else in here was going to have a sirenspider instrument: they’re too large to bring inside, except maybe a tiny flute or something, and wind instruments aren’t a great bet for graduation. You need your breath for casting incantations and running and optionally screaming. With a prize like that, she might even get one of those guaranteed placement offers, like the one Todd and his crew had dangled to get the valedictorian. Enclaves favor applications from kids who have been allies with their kids, but they don’t actually take everyone.

I was increasingly sure to get zero alliance offers from enclavers, and apparently I wasn’t going to take them if they did come. I couldn’t even offer Aadhya the strategy of putting together a solid small team that one of the more loserish enclaver kids would pick to get them out. If I wanted her to even think about taking the chance of going with me, I was going to have to score a lot of points between now and New Year’s.

So when we were all done and waiting at the meeting point for two more kids to walk to breakfast, I said casually, “Liu, I was just thinking. Do you need the phase-control spell?”

They both looked at me. Liu said slowly, “My family could really use it, but…” But they weren’t rich enough to put her in the running. She was on her own in here almost as much as we were; she’d got a box of hand-me-downs from an older cousin who graduated six years ago, but that was it, and it had been passed to her through a kid who had graduated in our freshman year, who had agreed to be the go-between in exchange for getting to use the stuff until Liu came in.

“You could bid your hair,” I said. “Aadhya’s running the auction for me, she gets a cut.”

It meant losing out on one of five bids, and on top of it, I’d be making Aadhya an even more appealing target for enclavers to recruit for their own alliances. A sirenspider lute strung with wizard hair would be really powerful. But it was also a chance I couldn’t pass up: Aadhya would owe me for this, and—

“Or you could give it to me,” Aadhya said to Liu, abruptly. “And El could give you the spell. And we’d have the lute for graduation. You could write some spells for it, and El can sing.”

I just stood there dumbly staring at her. Liu looked more than a little surprised, and she had a right to be. That was alliance; that was an alliance offer. You don’t give things to other people in here. When you lend somebody a pen for one class, that’s ink gone, ink that you’ll have to replace by going to the stockroom. They have to pay you back for it. That’s why you know you’re dating if you don’t have to pay it back. But you can break up with someone you’re dating. You can’t break up with your allies unless they do something exceptionally horrible, like Todd, or you all agree to split up. If you ditch an ally, even a weirdo loser girl that everyone hates, nobody else is going to offer you a slot. You can’t possibly trust someone to watch your back in the graduation hall if you can’t trust them to stick with you during the year.

Liu looked at me, a question: was I making the offer, too? I couldn’t even make myself nod. I was on the verge of crying again, or possibly vomiting, and that was when an unholy shriek went off right by my right ear, putting half the world on mute, and the charred and twisted remnant of some mal that I suppose had been about to bite flew past me and described a lovely curve through the air to smash into an unidentifiable heap of cinders and ash on the floor.

“Are you not paying attention anymore on purpose now?” Orion demanded, coming up from behind me. I flipped him off with the hand that wasn’t clamped protectively over my abused ear.

So that left the offer just sitting there through breakfast, and we couldn’t talk about it, either, not in front of other people. It would be like snogging at the table: there are people who’d do it, but I’m not one of them. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially because I could see Liu thinking about it, too: she watched the kids who came by to take a look at the phase-change spell with a different eye. Not just idle curiosity, or getting a sense of the market, but like she was considering what their bids might be worth to her, what might come in that she’d be able to use. It had been clever of Aadhya actually to make the suggestion now, before the bidding happened: if we did go in together and let people know about it, some of the bids would be tailored to have useful things for the two of them, our alliance as a whole, not just for me personally.