“Liu put a shield up, and Aadhya and I got the wall fixed in time,” I said, and didn’t tell Chloe it was okay, which I’m sure she wanted me to. I’d been right about her not wanting the deal. She’d run away exactly the way that every enclave kid ran away when bad things showed up, letting their entourages take the hit. That was why they had the entourages, and the kids in those entourages were doing it because they were desperate for a way out at graduation, and they had nothing else to offer that would get an enclaver to recruit them. So they made shields out of their bodies, and if they lasted all the way to graduation, at least the most dedicated of them would be offered filler spots in enclave kids’ alliances. And that wasn’t okay, and she could work out for herself it wasn’t okay.

She didn’t ask me for the comforting lie again. She just said, “I’m really glad you’re all right,” quietly, and then fell back in with Magnus.

THE BELL FOR DINNER hadn’t rung yet; the line wasn’t open. But we were such a big crowd that we didn’t even need to worry the way you normally would if you tried to go to the cafeteria alone while classes were still in session. We got six tables together and did perimeters and checks on all of them, and sat down to wait for the food to be served, sharing gossip instead.

“What happened to our senior friends?” I asked Orion.

“Hiding out somewhere in the library, I guess,” Orion said. “I managed to get out of the yanker spell on the landing on this level, but they kept going up the stairs.”

“They’ll be back downstairs trying to bash through your work ten minutes after dinner,” Magnus said. He and Chloe had taken seats at our table. He was talking to Orion only, though; English might inconveniently leave the pronoun ambiguous, but in this case the your in your work was very clearly intended to be singular. “We should call a tribunal on them.”

However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another. People do lose it all the time, but if you lose it for any length of time, something hungry finds it and you, too. If anyone tries to organize anything especially alarming, like a gang of maleficers, and other kids find out about it but don’t have the firepower to stop it on their own, they can call a tribunal, which is just a pretentious word for standing on a table in the cafeteria at mealtime and yelling out that Tom, Dick, or Kylo has gone over to the dark side and asking everyone to help take them down.

But that’s not justice. There’s no hand of the law that comes down to ceremonially spank you if you’ve been bad. Todd was still around, going to classes, eating; presumably sleeping, although hopefully not very well. If someone’s giving you a hard time, that’s your problem; if you’re giving someone a hard time, that’s their problem. And everyone else will ignore any situation that’s remotely ignorable, because they’ve all got problems of their own. It’s only worth calling a tribunal if you can reasonably expect that everyone else in the school is going to instantly agree that there’s a very clear, very imminent threat to their lives from the person you’re accusing.

Which wasn’t the case in this situation. “The seniors will be on their side,” Aadhya said, since Magnus apparently needed it said.

He didn’t like it at all. I imagine he had always blithely operated on the assumption that he could call a tribunal if ever he saw an imminent threat to his life, and naturally everyone would agree: like Chloe and her maintenance requests. “The seniors can’t take the whole rest of the school,” he said defensively. “And they can’t afford a fight the week before graduation anyway.”

“We can’t either,” I said. “What’s it going to get us? Those five kids are graduating in a week. Do you want to punish them for wanting to improve their odds at someone else’s expense? I could think of some people in our year who’d do the same.” He gawked at me, shocked that I’d even hint at a parallel.

Orion didn’t weigh in himself; he was getting up from the table. The line had just opened, and we all headed in for the reward of virtue, namely being first into the buffet loaded with fresh hot food. Orion checked the line ahead of us all, taking out a couple of mals on the way, and we all came out with our trays crammed full. Nobody talked for the rest of dinner: it was probably the best meal any of us had eaten in a year, even the enclavers, if not in the last three years.

The rest of the school came in round us. Perhaps halfway through the meal, our ambitious group of seniors even warily came back down from the library: they’d got tired of waiting for the general screaming and slaughter to begin, I suppose. They stared at us from the door and then slowly headed to the line themselves after a quick discussion. They were in for a lot of hostile looks along the way, as by then everyone knew what they’d tried to do. But Aadhya had been absolutely right: none of the hostile looks came from the other seniors. In fact, by the time they came out, room had been made for all of them at prime tables, and they ate with other seniors watching their backs, the sort of thing you do for someone who’s at least taken a shot at helping you.

“They are going to try and do something,” Magnus said, throwing a hard look at me. “If the new wall is going to hold, they’ll hit the other stairwells. And if we don’t make it hurt, all the seniors are going to help.”

“No, they won’t,” Orion said quietly. He put his hands on the table and started to stand up, but I was ready for it; I kicked him right in the back of the knee, and he gave a sharp, loud gasp and fell back into his chair clutching at it, panting. “El, that freaking hurt!” he squalled out.

“Yeah? But did it hurt like getting pasted into a wall with a steam tray?” I said through my teeth. “Just put the theatrics to rest for once, Lake. You’re not graduating early.”

The half of our table that had begun glaring at me turned to stare at Orion instead, and he was red and obvious by then. Anyone’s welcome to graduate early: you just make sure you’re in the senior dorms when the curtain comes down. It’s about as good an idea as skipping out on school entirely, but you’re welcome to do it.

Orion’s mouth had gone mulish. “I’m the one who’s set them up—”

“And you’ll also be the one who’s set us up, if you starve the mals of half this year’s graduating class,” I said. “How is that better? Even assuming you don’t just get yourself killed.”

“Look, even if the seniors don’t break the stairwells open, the mals are going to break them open. If not now, then next term, probably next quarter. If they’ve got hungry and desperate enough to start hitting the wards, they’ll keep at it. I’m not planning to just get the seniors out. I’m going to cull the graduation mals.”