There wasn’t a whiff to be had today. She hadn’t started using it again, I could tell. She still had color, and a shine to her eyes, but it was more than that: she just seemed softer, more pulled-in, a snail mostly tucked into a shell. I wondered if that was an aftereffect or if it was just her: probably her, since that’s what Mum’s meditation spell does. It didn’t really line up with the malia use. Her family might have pushed her to do it: strategically there was good sense to it, and once she’d come in with a basket full of sacrifices, probably all her weight allowance dedicated to that, she’d have been hard-pressed to do anything else.

I didn’t ask her what her new plan was, if she had one. It wasn’t like she’d been openly using malia, and we weren’t allies yet, so that was the kind of question that could cause alarm, particularly coming from the supposed girlfriend of the local maleficer-slaying hero. She might be in a tough position for graduation now, for that matter, if she didn’t go back to it. She wouldn’t have been storing mana along the way if she’d been planning all along to get a big chunk of malia out of her remaining sacrifices.

Which didn’t make her a great choice for me to ally with, but I didn’t actually care. I wanted her, I wanted Aadhya, and not just because I didn’t have another option. I wanted this thing here between us, walking to lunch together after a morning working hard side by side, a small warm feeling that we were on the same team. I didn’t just want them to help me live. I wanted for them to live. “I’d like to,” I said to her abruptly, on the way to the cafeteria. “If you do.” I didn’t need to tell her what I was talking about. I knew she was thinking about it, too.

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said softly, “I’m pretty behind on mana.”

So I was right: she’d decided not to go back to malia, and now she was reasonably screwed. But—she’d said so. She wasn’t letting us sign on with her under false pretenses. “Me too. But we won’t need as much with that spell of yours, and the phase-control spell,” I said. “I don’t mind if Aadhya doesn’t.”

“I can’t cast the spell yet myself,” Liu said. “My grandmother…My mom and dad are working really hard, they take jobs at enclaves a lot. So my grandmother raised me. She gave me the spell to bring, even though she wasn’t really supposed to. It’s an advanced spell, only a few really strong wizards in our family have got it working. But I thought…if I managed to translate it, maybe it might get easier.”

“If you can’t get a translation working by the end of next quarter, I’ll drop some of my other languages and pick up Mandarin,” I said.

She looked at me. “I know you can sing, but it’s really hard.”

“I’ll be able to cast it,” I said positively. Mana amplification is more or less a prerequisite for any of the monstrous spells I have, even with the loads of power they require to begin with. I’ve never got hold of anything nearly so useful as an incantation that separates out the amplification step enough that I could tease just that piece of the spell away from the bits with all the screaming and death, but the process is happening along the way.

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Then…if Aadhya’s okay, too…”

She didn’t go on. But I nodded, and we just looked at each other for a moment, walking down the corridor, and Liu smiled at me, just a little tentative wobble at the corners of her mouth, and I was smiling back at her. It felt strange on my face.

“Want to work on the history paper after lunch?” I asked. “I have a carrel in the library, in the languages section.”

“Sure,” she said. “But isn’t Orion going with you?” And what she didn’t mean by that was whether Orion was going to be there for her to hang out with; she just meant, was there enough room for all three of us.

“It’s a monster of a desk,” I said. “It’ll be fine, we’ll just grab a folding chair on the way,” but actually after lunch Orion said to me hurriedly, “I’m going downstairs, I’ve still got some stuff to do.”

“Are you saying that because you’ve got some stuff to do, or because you’d rather lurk below than endure even modest amounts of human interaction?” I asked. “Liu’s not going to be a twat around you.” I firmly didn’t offer to ditch her for his sake: we weren’t actually dating.

“No, she’s fine,” Orion said. “I like her, she’s fine. No, I’ve got stuff to do.”

He didn’t sound very convincing, but I wasn’t going to point that out. He didn’t owe me excuses. I shrugged. “Try not to dissolve yourself in acid or anything.”

Liu and I had a great work session: we blazed through almost half our history papers. “I’ve got a group project down in the lab after dinner tonight, but I’d do work period again tomorrow,” she told me as we left. I nodded, aglow with the thought that maybe I’d ask Aadhya or even Nkoyo to come up with me after dinner instead. I had people, in the plural, that I could ask to join me in the library, and even if they said no, they weren’t really saying no, they were only saying not this time. It almost made me happier when Aadhya did cry off when I asked her at lunch, because she said she wanted to do some artifice work in her own room, and I could believe her; it wasn’t just an excuse.

“But stop in before bedtime,” she said. “We could go for a snack bar run, if you’ve got credit,” and Liu and I nodded: we’d all had a chance to think it over, it was time to talk about it, to decide if we were going ahead.

I hugged the feeling to me all through afternoon classes, and I didn’t even let it be spoiled when I saw Magnus and Chloe talking to Orion outside the cafeteria at dinner, asking him to come to the library with the New York crew afterwards. “Bring El,” she was even saying, asking him to serve me up for the next attempt on a silver platter.

“I can’t, I’m—going to the lab,” Orion said.

“The lab, huh?” Magnus said. “Not a room?”

Orion did sound like he was making up an excuse, but Magnus shot a look over at me that made clear what he thought was getting covered up. Orion just said, obliviously, “Huh? No, not a room,” about as convincing as before.

“Yeah, okay,” Magnus said. “Galadriel going to be in the lab with you?”

“Afraid not,” I said, with a snap: if he was going to be asking about me, I felt every right to intrude on the conversation. “I’m working on a paper.”

“You want to join us in the library, El?” Chloe actually said to me outright. “We’ve got room at our table.” A sure sign of the magnitude of their desperation: enclave kids didn’t ask you to join them. At most they told you that you were welcome, with enormous condescension. Magnus himself looked highly annoyed by the necessity.