“Just take it from your enclave power-sharer,” I said. “You put enough in, they can’t complain, surely.”

“Well—I could ask Magnus—”

“Wait, what?” I said. “Why would you have to ask anyone?”

He paused for a weird moment, and then he swallowed and said, “I don’t…I have a hard time paying attention to…if I have open access to the power bank, I’ll just use it. So my sharer’s got a block.” He tried to sound casual about it, but he was looking away.

None of us said anything. Ibrahim looked utterly horrified. It was a shocking feet-of-clay moment for him, I suppose: Orion Lake, blocked from his own enclave share because he didn’t have basic mana control. That’s like admitting you wear nappies because you wet yourself now and again.

Only in this case, it was more like he was being forced to wear a nappy and wet himself now and again so all of his enclave mates could go on happily enjoying the mana he was pouring into their share, the streams of mana those greedy selfish bastards were milking out of him every time he took out another mal. I wanted to rip the power-sharer right off his wrist and go and chuck it at Chloe’s head and tell her that Orion was right not to care about a single one of them, and we were going it alone, I was taking him to live in a yurt in Wales when we got out of here, and every last wizard in New York could set themselves on fire and cry about it.

I couldn’t speak because I was so mad. And annoyingly, I’d underrated Ibrahim again; he was actually the one who broke the silence and said, “But—aren’t you the one who—I heard you get mana from the mals—”

Orion shrugged a little without meeting anyone’s eyes. “Everyone puts in mana. It’s not a big deal. I can get some whenever I need it.”

“But,” Ibrahim said.

“Later,” I told him, and he looked over at me and I assume gathered from my expression that yeah, it was an absolute mountain of rubbish that I wasn’t going to let stand five seconds longer than it needed to, once we weren’t all a few days away from even more sudden and unpleasant death than normal. He subsided, and I said to Orion, “Not Magnus. We’ll ask Chloe.”

* * *

CHLOE’S BRILLIANT INPUT on our plan was, “But wait, why don’t we just put in a maintenance request?”

She said it as if that was a completely reasonable and obvious suggestion, and Orion actually rubbed his face and looked over at me a bit sheepishly, like oh, he hadn’t considered that option, he really should have had more sleep. We went in for a round of staring around at each other with equal degrees of what sort of moron are you expressions, and then I said, “Does that ever actually work for you?”

“What do you mean?” Chloe said. “Of course it does. I put in requests all the time.”

It shouldn’t’ve been a surprise. The maintenance request form, which I haven’t bothered filling out since second half of freshman year, has a box for your name. I had assumed they were all just going straight into a bin, and we got assigned to repair work by random and malicious chance, but now I realized of course the forms went into a box instead, somewhere in the hidden janitorial rooms that only the maintenance-track kids know about, and they fished out requests made by, for instance, New York enclavers, and saw to it that those got handled. In fact, after a brief moment, it wasn’t a surprise, and I went right on past it. “Right, have you ever put in one at graduation time?”

“No!” Chloe said, like I’d insulted her. “I know we’re not supposed to put in unnecessary maintenance requests at midterms and finals. But I think this qualifies as life-threatening damage!”

“It certainly does qualify,” I said. “It’s especially life-threatening to anyone who goes down there to fix it, which is why you won’t get any maintenance-track kids to do it for you. They’ll give you half an hour of their time to patch your desk lamp, Rasmussen; they won’t face down the graduation horde on your behalf just because you ask nicely. Not to mention the seniors are probably the ones who dole out the shift assignments. So are you going to help us or not?”

Chloe did come round, especially after I made several very sharp and pointy remarks about Orion’s contributions to the New York mana supply, which I suppose conveyed the extent of my desire to take Orion’s power-sharer and throw it with great force at her head. She did have one useful suggestion, namely, “Shouldn’t we try this out first?” even if it came from the unflattering direction of doubting that we were competent enough to actually manage the process.

What she really wanted to do was to ask in a half-dozen other New York kids, including Magnus, all of whom had many close senior friends. She only agreed to hold off temporarily after we agreed to do a practice run. I think she expected it wasn’t going to work, and we’d have to give in to her afterwards. Whatever her reasons, I was just as glad for the practice, as long as she was putting up the mana.

We got together in the shop the next day, during work period, and Chloe gave me and Aadhya each a power-sharer. When I clasped it round my wrist, I tugged experimentally and got a line of mana that felt roughly like a hose being fed by the Atlantic. I’d already known that the enclavers had access to gobs of mana, loads more than the rest of us, but I hadn’t realized how much more. I could’ve razed a city or two without even making a dent. I had to work really hard not to just start pulling it down as wildly as if I didn’t have any basic mana control of my own. I couldn’t help but tell that I could’ve filled every crystal I had, twice over, with a few good gulps.

Orion trotted round the supply bins to collect up all the materials for us, with about as much hesitation as usual. He was less exhausted this morning; I’d made him go to bed early last night, on the grounds that whoever was going to get munched during the night was going to get munched just as much along with everyone else in the school on Sunday if he couldn’t keep the mals off us while we worked.

“I still think it would be a really good idea for us to get some more people in on this,” Chloe said, looking around nervously. The shop was completely deserted: after yesterday’s excitement, no one was risking it down here unless they absolutely had to go to class, and anyway, I doubt she’d ever been in the shop with less than ten kids around her. Ibrahim and Liu had come along with us to stand watch—well, Liu was standing watch, and Ibrahim was trailing Orion around the room trying to chat with him—but that was it.

“Ready?” I asked Aadhya, ignoring Chloe; then I spoke the phase-change incantation and pushed the first few inches of the bar of wrought iron we were testing with—left over from some failed project, presumably—into liquid form. Aadhya had the crucible heated and waiting, right underneath it, and as soon as the metal ran in, she sprinkled in the soot with her free hand, in a smooth pattern, frowning in concentration as she made them merge. Then she gave me a quick nod, tipped the crucible over the edge of the rod where the iron had been, and I shoved the metal back into a solid form.