She finished up this litany and stopped defiantly, as if she was waiting for me to yell at her, but I just stood there, disappointing as usual. I was too something to speak. Not angry, exactly. I’d been angry at Magnus when I’d thought he was trying to murder me to hang on to Orion in all his strategic value, filthily and remorselessly selfish. Oh, how I’d enjoyed all that sweet crisp righteous anger, my favorite drug: I’d nearly ridden the high straight into murder. This sensation felt murky as sludge by comparison, thick with exhaustion.

I’d already worked out that what Orion wanted was someone who didn’t treat him like a shining prince; I just hadn’t understood why. Now I understood so well it made my stomach hurt. Chloe, Magnus, all of them, probably everyone in their entire enclave, had come up with this story that Orion was some kind of inhumanly heroic monster-slayer, who loved nothing more than spending all day and all night saving all their lives, who didn’t give a thought to his own happiness. They’d made up that lie because of course they desperately wanted that from him. Oh, they’d have been happy to cosset him and flatter him and give him the best of everything in return—why not, they had it to give, that didn’t cost them anything. They’d gladly hand that priceless enclave spot to me, to any rando girl Orion so much as smiled at; they’d probably have taken Luisa in just because he pitied her. Cheap at the price.

They were desperate to keep him in the exact same way that everyone back at the commune wanted to get rid of me. He was living the same garbage story I was, only in mirror image. Trying so hard to give them what they wanted, trying to fit himself into the beautiful lie they’d made up about him, staring obediently at flash cards his mum made so he could be polite to them. But of course he couldn’t be friends with them. He could tell, surely, that they only wanted to be his friends as long as he stayed in the lie. Chloe with her big eyes telling me how wonderful he was, how they’d all tried so hard.

But I couldn’t just be angry at her. Obviously I wanted to scream at her and set her whole enclave on fire, but that was just habit. What I really wanted, what I wanted with frantic desperate hunger, was to change her mind, the same way I wanted to change everyone’s mind about me. I wanted to grab her and shake her and make her see Orion—me—for five seconds as a person. Only I knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, because that would cost her. If Orion was a person, he didn’t owe it to her to keep wearing that convenient little buzzer on his wrist, just in case she or any of her actual friends needed help, for nothing in return. If he was a person, he had as much right as she did to be scared and selfish, and she was supposed to pay back everything he gave her. She wasn’t interested in that deal, was she? She wasn’t going to come running if he needed help. She’d be running the other way.

Her expression faded into uncertainty as I went on standing there: probably hearing the faint rumble of storm clouds in the distance. “Right,” I said, through a sour throat. “Of course I’ve got to be a maleficer. Surely there can’t be any other reason he’d prefer my company to you absolute doorknobs.” Chloe flinched back. “Keep the enclave seat for someone who wants it. But ta very much for saving me the pleasure of having your friends poke through my head. In return, I’ll let you in on my secret handling technique. I treat Orion like he’s an ordinary human being. You might all try it yourselves and see how you get on, before you go to any more trouble on my account.”

I DIDN’T TRy to find somewhere else to work. I knew I wasn’t going to get a thing done. I just shouldered past Chloe and went for the stairs, and I ran down the whole way to our res hall, although I knew better. Over the weekend, everything had started to warm up for graduation, oil pumping to lubricate the big gears in the core; they were coming loose, helped along by a bit of preliminary rocking. The stairs were shifting along with them, like glacially slow escalators that might reverse direction at any time. And I paid for being careless: a couple of stairs up from the landing, there was the start of a putrid opalescent slick, a remnant of something that had been killed just recently, and I stepped onto it too fast, skidded, and had to throw myself onto the landing in a hard tumble to keep from going headfirst onwards down the stairs.

I was limping down the corridor to my room when I realized I was going past Aadhya’s door. I paused, and after a moment, I slowly knocked. “It’s El,” I said, and she cracked the door, made sure it was me, then saw the blood.

“What happened?” she said. “You want some gauze?”

My throat was tight. I was almost glad for falling down the stairs. Who cared about changing Chloe’s mind? “No, it’s not worth it, it’s just a scrape,” I said. “I was just stupid, I tripped coming off the stairs. Come with me to the girls’?”

“Yeah, sure,” Aadhya said, and she walked with me and kept watch while I rinsed off my bloody elbow and my bloodier knee. My gut was aching all over again. I didn’t care.

Liu got back shortly after we had finished, and the three of us climbed the stairs—more cautiously—up to the cafeteria. The main food line and the tables were locked away behind the movable wall, and we could smell the smoke of the cleansing fires going back there—self-clean ovens have nothing on mortal flame—but there were a few dozen kids around waiting their turn at the snack bar. That’s a glorified term for what it is, a bank of vending machines that take tokens. Each of us gets three a week. I actually had almost twenty saved up: the risk of coming without other people isn’t worth the boost of calories, unless you’ve had a few days in a row of really bad luck at meals and are starting to feel light-headed or sluggish.

You don’t get to choose what comes out, of course. The items are rarely contaminated, as they’re all things in packets, but they’re usually aged, and sometimes inedibly ancient. Once, I got a military ration from World War I. I’d come up that time because I was feeling light-headed, so I was hungry enough to open it, but even then I couldn’t bring myself to risk anything but the biscuit, and by biscuit I mean the kind of hardtack they sent on yearlong sea voyages. Today I got a bag of off-brand crisps, a packet of mostly crumbled peanut butter crackers, and the prize, a Mars bar only three years past the sell-by date. Liu got a bag of salted licorice, which is inexpressibly vile but you can swap it with the Scandinavian kids for almost anything, another packet of crisps, and a slightly questionable box of cured meat. Aadhya got a small packet of halvah, a completely fresh salmon onigiri dated this very morning, amazing, and a whole tin of chestnut spread so large it clanged the whole machine when it came down.

“Let me try and get something to put it on,” I said, and put in another token: when you use a token you’ve saved for a while, usually you get something particularly good or particularly bad. This time I was in luck: out came the glorious orange plastic of a packet of Hobnobs.

We got our little paper cups of tea and coffee from the lukewarm urns and went back to Aadhya’s room to share the lot. She had tapped the gas line of her room lamp to build herself a little Bunsen burner, which we used to boil the meat in an alchemy beaker while we wolfed down the onigiri, and then ate Hobnobs slathered with chestnut spread and topped with halvah and crushed peanut butter crackers. When the meat had cooked long enough, we ate it with the crisps, a feast finished off with celebratory slices of Mars bar. Aadhya sat at the desk, working on the belly of her lute, and Liu and I sat on the bed and worked on our papers.