Getting marked down in languages means you get assigned remedial work that’s just the same stuff you’ve already done, for days or even weeks sometimes. That might not sound like a punishment, but as we’re all studying languages to learn spells, it’s absolutely brutal. The next time you ask for a spell, you’ll get one that has material you theoretically should be up to, but don’t actually know, and you won’t be able to move on past it until you get through your stupid remedial backlog and finally reach whatever lesson you were at before.

I handed in my Arabic worksheet and then sat down at a booth to open the waiting folder and discover my fate, which turned out to be three Arabic worksheets, along with a vicious quiz in Classical Sanskrit that was labeled as taking twenty minutes but actually needed the entire lesson. I had barely finished enough of the questions to get a pass mark when the warning bell rang. I had to scribble my name on the sheet, pile all my things into my bookbag, and carry it awkwardly with my arm wrapped around it like a basket just to get in the line to stick the quiz into the slot before the final bell. I’d have to get the three worksheets done tonight instead, eating into my mana-building time, which I didn’t have enough of to begin with.

Even that couldn’t wreck my mood, which had been whipsawing so aggressively lately that I was beginning to feel like a yo-yo. I’d got used to my ordinary level of low-grade bitterness and misery, to putting my head down and soldiering on. Being happy threw me off almost as much as being enraged. But I wasn’t in the least bit tempted to refuse when I got to the writing workshop and saw Liu looking around: she had the neighboring desk saved for me. I took myself over and got my bag down between our chairs: with someone on the other side who wouldn’t object, I’d be able to steal a few moments here and there to sort it out.

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

I worked on it for the first five minutes before I belatedly thought that I might want to talk to Liu, if we were friends now. “What are you working on?” I asked her, as dull as small talk can get, but at least it had the benefit of an obvious answer.

She glanced sidelong over at me and then said, “I have a song spell passed down from my great-grandmother. I’m trying to write English lyrics for it.”

Translating spells is basically impossible. It’s not even reliably safe to do something like take a Hindi spell, rewrite it in Urdu script, and pass it along to someone else to learn. That would work three times out of four, but the fourth one would really get you. Song-spells are the only exception. But you don’t exactly translate them; it’s more that you write a new spell in the new language, but set to the same music and on the same theme. It’s often harder than writing a new spell from scratch, and most of the time it still doesn’t work, the same way most writing assignments don’t successfully turn into a spell. Sometimes you just get a pale imitation of the original spell. But once in a while, if the new spell is good on its own, you get an almost doubled effect out of it: whatever your new spell does, and a significant part of whatever the original spell did. Those can be really powerful.

But more to the point for me, that was exactly along the lines of the alliance Aadhya had suggested this morning. Liu added, “Do you want to hear?” and held out a tiny music player, the kind with no screen that play for a million hours on a charge. Even so, the only way you can get battery power in here is by hand-cranking, and you could use that kind of work to generate mana instead, so you don’t spend it for nothing. I put in the headphones and listened to the music—no lyrics, which was just as well, since I did not have time to start Mandarin right now. I hummed along with it under my breath, tapping my fingers on my leg to try and beat it into my head. Even wordless, it still had the feel of a spell to it, subtle but building. I don’t know how to describe a spell song as opposed to an ordinary song; the best I can do is that it’s like holding a cup in your hand instead of something solid all the way through. You get a sense that you can put power into it, and how much. This one was deep, a well going far down instead of a cup, something you could drop a coin or a pebble into and hear an echo coming back a long way. I took out the headphones and said to Liu, “Is it a mana amplifier?”

She had been watching me intently. She gave a start and then said, “You can’t have heard it,” which meant it was a family spell they weren’t trading yet; they were probably saving it to exchange for some other piece they’d need to build an enclave of their own.

“I haven’t,” I said. “It just has that feel.”

She nodded a little, her eyes on my face thoughtful.

We walked to history together afterwards and sat next to each other at the uncomfortable desks. The history classrooms are all scattered round on the cafeteria floor, reasonably high up. The worst part of history is that our assigned textbooks are incredibly boring, and there aren’t booths like in the language labs, so you can hear every single noise everyone else is making, whispers and coughs and farts and the endlessly squeaking desks and chairs. Up at the front there’s always this droning flickery video lecture going on that you have to strain to hear, ninety percent of which is completely useless and doesn’t matter even to our grades except for a few random bits that show up for enormous points on quizzes. All the sections are either before lunch, so you’re starving and it’s hard to focus, or after lunch so you’re ready to fall asleep. I always take before lunch, because it’s safer, but it’s a slog.

Having someone next to me, actually with me, made class at least a hundred times more bearable. We traded off watching the lecture and taking notes in fifteen-minute chunks, and worked on our final papers in between. We’d already exchanged translations of our source materials, and I could see her using the ones I’d given her, so they’d been useful. Liu’s were good, too. I didn’t have to try to think well of her just because she’d maybe put up with me.

Liu takes history in English so she can use it for her language requirement and get more class choice flexibility, so we’ve been in most of the same sections. But we’d almost never sat next to each other before. A couple of times, if she had to get supplies and came a bit late, and it was a choice of me or someone poorly and coughing, or the boy who puts his hand in his pants all class long—he tried sitting next to me once and once only; I stared straight at him with all the murder in my heart and he stopped and took his hand out—she’d take me. But most of the time she’d walk over with whoever she’d sat with in the previous class: there are a dozen other Mandarin-speakers doing English history who were fine letting her sit next to them, even if they got a vague whiff of the malia.