“No,” I said. Then I went on into the cafeteria without saying bye to them, and Orion actually left them to catch up to me in the line.

“You can’t tell me that Chloe was trying to get you to suck up, just then,” he said.

“No, it was a pure and generous offer straight from her heart,” I said. “Meant to go straight to mine, too. That crawler last night didn’t go after me randomly.”

“Oh for—right, they’re being nice, so now they’re trying to murder you, for no reason,” Orion said. He had the gall to sound exasperated. “Are you kidding me? You want me to come after all and protect you from the evil schemes of Chloe Rasmussen?”

“I want you to shove your entire head in the mash,” I told him, and vengefully scooped up both of the last two sausages in the steam tray. But I gave him one at the table. It wasn’t his fault he’d grown up in a hive of entitled and murderous weevils.

I was fairly gobsmacked when, after all that, Chloe actually had another go at me in the library: she intercepted me in the reading room on my way into the stacks. “Still not interested,” I told her icily.

“No, El, listen,” she said. I walked away from her and into the incantations aisle, but she actually came in after me and grabbed my arm. “Look, will you quit being a bitch for five seconds?” she hissed, which was rich coming from her, and then she added, “It’s not—don’t go to your carrel.”

I stopped in the corridor and stared at her. She wouldn’t look me in the face. She had a vaguely hunted and half-guilty expression, actually, glancing back over her shoulder towards the reading room. We were in dim light, but probably at least partly visible from the New York corner. I could see Magnus there on one of the settees.

“Just—come sit with us, okay?” Chloe said. “Or go to your room or something.”

“How long will my room be safe? Surely that’s going to be Magnus’s next clever idea.” I was constructing a very detailed fantasy of marching over there and flattening his nose for him: a good punch straight down from above would do it, and have a really satisfying crunch. “Or maybe not: I suppose he’d be worried about getting Orion with it, too. That would be quite the goal, taking him out yourselves while going to all this trouble just to stop me poaching him.”

Chloe flinched. “Have you said yes to Dubai?”

“I haven’t been asked to Dubai! I fixed a chair in their corner because I’m looking to pick up a few measly words of Arabic. And if I had been asked and said yes, it wouldn’t justify you lot trying to murder me with crawlers!” I added through my teeth, because Chloe had the nerve to look relieved.

“What? No! We didn’t—” Chloe obviously realized halfway through her sentence that denial wasn’t going to work, and shifted tacks. “Look, Magnus thought you were a maleficer. The crawler only had a malia-siphon spell. As long as you weren’t a heavy-duty maleficer, the worst it would do was make you a little bit sick.”

She made it sound like a noble defense. I stared at her. “I’m strict mana.” Chloe stopped with her mouth agape at me, shocked like the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her. I’m sure it hadn’t, to any of them. That crawler had been about to turn into a shiny new mal. When you make a construct with the ability to collect power on its own in any way, that’s what you’re asking for. You can wag your finger at it and tell it to be good, but if ever it can’t get power from approved sources, the odds are at least fifty-fifty that it’ll start taking it from anywhere it can get it. And since Magnus had made this one with the secret hope in his heart that it would drain evil-me dry, I was reasonably certain its odds were a lot higher. And then it would have killed me.

Chloe agreed with me, for that matter; she’d gone sickly pale, for good selfish reason: when a construct goes malicious, one of the first people it heads for is its maker, and anyone around them who might have contributed to its creation. It creates a tidy vulnerability that helps the construct suck out their mana. Not that I felt particularly sorry for her. “What’s the present waiting at my desk, a box of jangler mites?” I demanded.

She swallowed and said, a little tremulously, “No, it’s—it’s an unbreaking sleep spell. He and Jennifer were going to put a hypno spell on you and ask you questions…”

“Assuming that nothing ate me before they got there.”

Chloe did have the grace to look ashamed. “I’m so sorry, I really am. We’ve been arguing about it all week—most of us didn’t think it, everyone’s just really worried…But—if you’re strict mana, that’s—great, that’s amazing,” she informed me earnestly—yes, so amazing how her mate had nearly killed me by accident!—and carried right on from there. “Honestly, even without knowing that, most of us already wanted to recruit you. Knowing you’re strict mana, I can just say it, five of us will vote you straight in, and Orion would make six. That’s a majority. You can have one of the guaranteed places, and—”

“Thanks ever so!” I said, incredulously. “After having a pop at me, twice?”

She stopped and bit her lip. “Magnus will apologize, I promise,” she said after a moment, as if she thought we were negotiating, as if she thought—

Well, as if she thought that I’d like a guaranteed enclave slot in New York City, which was more or less everything I’d ever desperately wanted and had spent most of the last six years strategizing to get, and here she was holding it out without even a single string attached.

And what I felt, because I’m me, was violently irritated, not at her but at Mum, who wasn’t even here to look at me with that shining warm smile in her whole face that she gets once in a very rare while when I’ve made her really happy. Like the time when I was twelve and we had an enormous fight about cheating, because I didn’t see why I shouldn’t just take the last bit of life out of this bird I’d found dying in the forest anyway, and I stormed away and then came back to the yurt very grudgingly an hour later and told her even more grudgingly that I’d just sat in the trees with the bird until it died, and then buried it. I hated having to tell her, I hated how happy it made me seeing her face glow. It felt like giving in, and I hated giving in more than anything.

And I hated it just as much now when Mum wasn’t here but I could see her face anyway, her happiness that I wasn’t going to take what Chloe was offering me, the priceless unattainable thing I’d declared with enormous firmness I intended to get. Except I couldn’t take it. It was so obviously rubbish after Liu saying quietly, I’m behind on mana. And not even because she and Aadhya wanted me, and Chloe only cared about clinging to Orion. They were just the better deal. When they were offering an alliance, they were offering their lives. They were offering to go all-in, asking me to do the same. Chloe didn’t have a thing on the table by comparison.