We didn’t talk very much: none of us had time to waste. But we’d said enough, and shaken hands. While the meat had been cooking, I’d gone to my room and come back with crystals for each of them. After we finished the food and it was getting on a bit, I began on my mana-building crochet, and Liu sat down on the floor and did yoga. Aadhya did sudoku puzzles. When the first bell rang, we went to the bathroom together, and after we had our wash, we went to the stretch of wall between the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms and wrote our three names there together: Liu wrote our names down in Chinese characters, and I did us in Hindi and English. We weren’t the absolute first set, but close to it: there were only three other alliances already written up, nobody I knew. On our way back, Liu waited by her door until I got to mine, we both waited until Aadhya was at hers, too, and we waved to each other before we went inside to bed.

I slept really well. I don’t usually remember dreams, which is probably for the best all things considered, but that morning I woke up just before the bell and while I was lying there in bed I had a vague half dream of Mum sitting in the woods looking at me worried. I said out loud, “It’s all right. I’m all right, Mum, I’m not joining an enclave. You were right,” and I didn’t even mind saying it, because I didn’t want her to be worried, and she was still worried, reaching out to me with her mouth moving silently, trying to say something. “Mum, I have friends. Aadhya and Liu and Orion. I have friends,” and in the dream my eyes were blurry and I was smiling, and I woke up still smiling. It’s supposed to be impossible to communicate with anyone inside the Scholomance, because if message spells could get through, so could some kinds of mals, so I wasn’t sure if I’d really seen Mum, but I hoped so. I wanted her to know.

It’s not that I was suddenly in charity with the whole world or anything. I saw Chloe coming out of her room as I went back to mine after washing up, and I did manage to get angry again. Orion wasn’t at the meeting point, and Ibrahim said he hadn’t seen him in the boys’ that morning, either. I had been absolutely determined that I was never going to wait for him, but with indignation hot in my belly, I said, “Save us two seats, all right?” to Aadhya and Liu, and I went and banged on his door, loudly. I did it once more before I got back the sound of some thumping around, and he opened it without the slightest precaution, shirtless and with his hair sticking up, to blink at me bleary and haggard.

“Come on, Lake, breakfast won’t eat itself,” I told him, and he mumbled something incoherent and then turned back in, shoved his feet into his trainers and got a T-shirt off the floor, dropped it again—there was an enormous blue stain down the front—got a different T-shirt off the floor, pulled it over his head, and staggered off to the loo.

“Did you get high or something last night?” I asked in curiosity as we finally made it up the stairs: I’d had to catch him and give him a shove to get him onto the cafeteria landing, after he’d previously tried to turn off both onto the alchemy lab landing and the sophomore res hall landing.

Whipping up recreational substances is a fairly popular pastime for alchemy-track kids, but Orion said, “No!” in wounded tones like I’d insulted him. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep.” He emphasized the point by yawning so widely that he looked like he was about to unhinge his jaw.

“Right,” I said skeptical. We can all deal with routine sleep deprivation by the end of freshman year, because by then the ones who can’t have been winnowed out. “Too much saving the world to do? Go and sit down with Aadhya and Liu, I’ll get you a tray.”

I wasn’t even that hungry myself today, thanks to our snack bar orgy the night before, so I kept the porridge for myself and let him have the egg and bacon butty I’d been able to snag. But he had to be poked, and then ate it with his eyes half closing, not responding even when Ibrahim asked him a direct question. He put his head straight back down after wolfing down the sandwich.

Aadhya and I had been discussing the demo I was going to do in shop class today; she paused, eyeing him, and asked, “Is he high or something?” Orion didn’t register any protest this time.

I shrugged. “He said not. Just no sleep.”

Fortunately he was in language lab first thing this morning, so I was able to shepherd him along and get him tucked into the booth next to mine. He promptly put his head down on the desk and fell asleep to the sweet lulling murmur of voices singing of violent death in French. There was only a single worksheet in his folder, dead easy, so I filled it in for him. He looked a bit more functional when I shook him awake at the end of class. “Thanks?” he said uncertainly when he saw the worksheet, but he got it and mine to the slot and managed to submit them without cutting off his own fingers or anything.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Are you going to be all right getting to your next lesson?”

“Yeah?” he said, in even more doubtful tones.

“Do you need to be walked?” I asked, eyeing him.

“No, I don’t need—what are you doing?” he burst out.

“What?”

“Why are you being this nice?” he said. “Are you mad at me for something?”

“No!” I said, and was about to inform him that I was a decent human being and nice quite regularly or at least once in a while, and it wasn’t a sign I was angry, and then I realized that actually he was right, only it was his useless enclaver friends I was angry at; I was feeling sorry for him. Which I would have hated myself, with a violent passion. “Am I allowed to be in a good mood occasionally, or do I need to register this madness with the authorities first?” I snapped instead. “Go on and fall into the rubbish chute if you like. I’m off to the workshop.” He looked relieved as I huffed off away from him.

The shop is never fun this near to graduation, and today was no exception: the floor trembled approximately every fifteen minutes, and it was so hot in the room that some of the boys were taking off their shirts. Almost anyone who could had finished off their final projects and was skipping class, so it would normally have been very thin of company, but a reasonably big crowd had shown for my demonstration. Aadhya sorted everyone out for best views, prioritizing seniors: what she really wanted was to get five seniors with top bids and then do a second auction after the term ended and the five original buyers were gone.

Meanwhile, I did a careful and slightly painful stretching routine to raise a bit of mana—the slight pain helped—and then I picked up the piece of wood that I was going to work with. I didn’t want to waste the effort, so I was using the demo to start on the chest I’d promised the sutras I would make to hold them. It was going to be only just large enough to hold the one book: aside from conveying how special they were to me, I needed it to be light enough for me to carry out of the graduation hall next year. Aadhya and I had worked out a design that would end up shaped like a slightly larger version of the book itself, only carved of wood, and she’d given me a really nice piece of purpleheart wood to make the spine.