I’ll be grateful in a week or two. At the moment, what I have to do is stand up and do five hundred jumping jacks in a row, in perfect form, keeping my focus tightly on my current-storing crystal the whole time, to build enough mana so I could wash my floor without accidentally killing anything. I don’t dare cheat at all, not even a little. There’re no ants and cockroaches in here to suck dry, and I’m getting more powerful by the day, like we all are. With my particular gift, if I tried to cheat on a cleaning spell, it’s entirely possible I’d take out three of my neighbors to either side and this entire hall would end up the horrible gleaming clean of a newly sanitized morgue. I’ve got mana saved up, of course: Mum loaded me up with crystals she’d primed with her circle, so I could store mana for later, and I put some away every chance I get. But I wasn’t going to use one of those to clean up my room. The crystals are for emergencies, when I really need power right away, and to stockpile for graduation.

After the floor came clean, I added on fifty push-ups—I’ve got in really good shape over the last three years—and did my mum’s favorite smudging spell. It left my whole cell smelling of burnt sage, but at least that was an improvement. It was nearly dinnertime by then. A shower was more than called for, except I really didn’t feel like having to fight off anything that might come out of the drains in the bathroom, which meant that something was almost sure to come if I went. Instead I changed my shirt and plaited my hair again and wiped my face with water out of my jug. I rinsed my T-shirt in the last of the water, too, and hung it up so it would dry. I had only the two tops, and they were getting threadbare. I’d had to burn half my clothes my first year when a nameless shadow crawled out from under the bed, the second night I was here, and I didn’t have anywhere else to pull mana from. Sacrificing my clothes gave me enough power to fry the shadow without drawing life force from anywhere. I hadn’t needed Orion Lake to save me from that, had I?

Even after my best efforts, I still looked wonderful enough that when I came out to the meeting point at dinnertime—we walk to the cafeteria in groups, of course, it’s just stupidly asking for trouble if you go alone—Liu took one look at me and asked, “What happened to you, El?”

“Our glorious savior Lake decided to melt a soul-eater in my cell today, and left me to clean up the mess,” I said.

“Melt? Ew,” she said. Liu may be a dark witch, but at least she doesn’t genuflect at Orion’s throne. I like her, maleficer or not: she’s one of the few people here who doesn’t mind hanging out with me. She’s got more social options than I do, but she’s always polite.

But Ibrahim was there, too—carefully keeping his back to us while waiting for some of his own friends, making clear we weren’t welcome to walk with his group—and he was already turning around in high excitement. “Orion saved you from a soul-eater!” he said. Squealed, really. Orion’s saved his life three times—and he needed it to be saved.

“Orion ran a soul-eater into my room and sludged it all over my floor,” I said, through my teeth, but it was no use. By the time Aadhya and Jack joined us and we had a group of five to go upstairs, Orion had heroically saved me from a soul-eater, and of course by the end of dinnertime—only two people in our year vomiting today, we were getting better at our protective charms and antidotes—everyone in the school knew about it.

Most types of maleficaria don’t even have names; there are so many varieties of them, and they come and go. But soul-eaters are a big deal: a single one has taken out a dozen students in other years, and it’s an extremely bad way to go, complete with dramatic light show (from the soul-eater) and shrieking wails (from the victims). It would’ve made my reputation to take one out by myself, and I could have. I’ve got twenty-six fully loaded crystals in the hand-carved little sandalwood box under my pillow, saved for exactly a situation like this, and six months ago, when I was trying to patch up my fraying sweater without resorting to the horrors of crochet, I got an incantation to unravel souls. It would’ve taken a soul-eater apart from the inside out—with no stinking residue—and even left an empty glowing wisp behind. Then I could have made a deal with Aadhya, who’s artificer-track and has an affinity for using weird materials: we could have had it patrolling between our doors all night. Most of the maleficaria don’t like light. That’s the kind of advantage that can get you all the way to graduation. Instead all I had was the unwanted pleasure of being one more notch on Orion’s belt.

My not-very-near-death experience did at least get me a good seat at dinner. Usually I have to sit alone at the far end of the half-filled table of whoever else is being most socially rejected at the time, or else people change tables away from me in groups until I’m sitting completely alone, which is worse. Today I ended up at one of the central tables right under the sunlamps—more vitamin D than I’d got, apart from a pill, in months—with Ibrahim and Aadhya and half a dozen other reasonably popular kids: there was even one girl from the smallish Maui enclave who sat with us. But I only got angrier, hearing them talking reverently about all the wonderful things Orion had done. A few of them even asked me to describe the fight. “Well, first he chased it into my room, and then he blasted open my door, and then he incandensed it before I could say boo and left a stinking mess on my floor,” I snapped, but you can guess how well that went. Everyone wants to believe he’s a magnificent hero who’s going to save them all. Ugh.

AFTER DINNER, I had to try and get someone to come with me to the workshop, so I could get some materials to patch up my door. It’s an extremely bad idea to leave your door unlocked at night, much less with a gaping hole in it. I tried to make it casual, “Does anyone need anything from the shop?” But no one was buying. After hearing my story, they could all guess that I needed to go down, and we’re all alive to the main chance in here. You don’t make it out unless you use every advantage you can get, and nobody likes me enough to do me favors without payment in advance.

“I could come,” Jack said, leaning forward and smiling at me with all his shiny white teeth.

I wouldn’t need anything to crawl out of a dark corner if he went with me. I looked him straight in the eye and said hard, “Oh really?”

He paused and had a moment of being wary, and then he shrugged. “Wait, sorry, just remembered I’ve got to finish my new divining rod,” he said cheerfully, but his eyes had narrowed. I hadn’t really wanted him to know that I knew about him. I’d have to make him pay me for my silence now, or else he’d think he had to come after me to shut me up, and he might bet on that anyway. Yet another thing Orion had now cocked up for me.

“What’s it worth to you?” Aadhya said. She’s the sharp and pragmatic sort; she’s one of the few people in here willing to make deals with me. One of the few people in here willing to talk to me at all, really. But she was also brutally hard-nosed about this sort of thing. I normally appreciated that she didn’t beat about the bush, but knowing I was hard up, she wasn’t going to put herself on the line for anything less than twice the going value of a trip down, and she also would certainly make sure I took all the significant risk. I scowled.