But I wasn’t just taking a jaunt down there for my own amusement. I’d got myself into this making a play for all our lives, and in some sense, being in alliance with me meant that they were supposed to back me, arguably to the point of coming along themselves. On graduation day, at best you have fifteen minutes between the first step into the hall and last step out the gates. You don’t sign on with someone if you aren’t willing to swerve when they yell, “Go left!” By saying anything, Aadhya was practically inviting me to ask her and Liu to come.

I hugged my knees to myself on the bed. I wanted to take the excuse, badly, and bail myself out. There was even some tiny whimpering selfish part of me that would desperately have liked to take Aadhya up on the other side of her offer. Of course I wanted her and Liu at my back, not a bunch of seniors I didn’t know, who had an excellent strategic reason to ditch me if things went badly. But I wasn’t going to put them on this line with me. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t coming back, and neither was anyone else. Ten, maybe fifteen kids, jumping into the graduation hall alone to fix the machinery? One in a hundred odds, at best. Better to have stayed in Wales, after all.

So I told Aadhya, “I can’t let Orion go it alone with all the worst piranhas of the senior class. Someone’s got to watch his back for him. They’ll let him save their skins, and then they’ll cut him off the yanker and leave him down there so he does have to graduate with them. He won’t be paying attention to anything but the mals.”

I suppose the seniors really might have tried something like that. But I wasn’t really worrying about that possibility. If we actually got the machinery fixed, the seniors would probably garland Orion with laurel: they’d all be graduating through a cleansed hall, with guaranteed enclave spots. But it was plausible enough to serve as an excuse, an excuse for me to go, and her and Liu to stay behind.

And I had to go. Because Orion was going, and I couldn’t do anything about that. He’d have gone down without even a golem, the git. The only thing I could do for him, which Clarita had helpfully spelled out, was go along and give him a fighting chance. He had one now because we were going with a dozen seniors, and top seniors at that, who actually could do the repair work. And I’d only got that for him by throwing myself on the line.

I wasn’t the shining hero of the school. And yeah, everyone thought I was dating Orion, but they didn’t think I was in love with him. They thought I was using him, and clever me for doing it. People expected the worst of me, not the best; when I’d volunteered to go along, I’d made it seem like something that wasn’t completely effing insane. In their heads, if I was going, it was because I’d made the cold hard decision it was a good bet, at least for a loser girl with no prospect of getting into an enclave if she lost Orion.

We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet. We’re always looking to one another for signals and information. Do you think that’s the best table to sit at? Do you think that’s a good class to take? Everyone wants to jump on any advantage. Me saying I was going meant that at least one presumed-to-be-rational person thought she had a sliver of a chance of making it out, and then the enclave kids had sweetened the pot. That’s why there were now more volunteers than places, because I’d put my finger on the scales.

If I took it off again now, who knew how many seniors would start to have second thoughts? They might decide that actually I was playing a double game of my own: maybe I was just trying to wipe out a dozen of the top seniors, and delay the rest of them long enough to stop them from either smashing open the school or dragging my class along with them to graduation. That would’ve been clever, now I thought of it, and surely the geniuses coming along had thought of it, too, and were keeping a wary eye on me to see if I bailed out at the last minute.

Clarita was going; so was David Pires, the still-resentful salutorian, saluditorian, whatever you call the number two besides “not the valedictorian,” which was in fact exactly what I was inclined to call him. He was an incanter also, and he hadn’t spent his academic career hiding his light under a bushel; he’d spent it informing everyone who talked to him for so much as thirty seconds that he was going to be valedictorian, and brandishing his every mark like a trophy. He’d told me back in my freshman year, when I’d accidentally knocked over one of his precariously balanced stacks of books in the reading room. He’d yelled at me and demanded to know if I knew who he was, which I hadn’t until then, and didn’t much care to afterwards. And he was going, as far as I could tell, because he wasn’t satisfied with the guaranteed enclave spot he already had coming in Sydney; he wanted to be able to pick and choose. Getting close to valedictorian does require a muscular ego, but his was on steroids.

After the first wave of volunteering, that boy from Berlin had rounded up a couple of other senior enclavers from the bigger places, the ones we all had in our heads as the most powerful kids, and we’d huddled up in the library—Orion included for obvious reasons, my own presence tolerated—to discuss the situation with Clarita and David and the third obvious candidate, Wu Wen. He was actually ranked only fifteenth overall in the senior class, and also made the discussion require more translation, because he was the only one there who didn’t know a word of English. He had copped out and claimed Mandarin was his native language so he could take Shanghainese—his actual native language—for his languages requirement. And he’d all but flunked the coursework for that. In fact, he’d barely squeaked through every course he’d taken that wasn’t shop or maths.

Since literally everyone else in the top twenty had almost perfect marks on everything and fought it out with extra-credit work, that gives you an idea of the kinds of marks he got on his artifice projects. He already had a guaranteed spot in Bangkok enclave, but he’d volunteered to come with Orion the instant that Shanghai enclave put one on the line.

I didn’t have any part in the planning, except to annoy the senior enclavers even more by insisting that we weren’t going until the morning of graduation day itself. “Don’t be ridiculous,” the boy from Jaipur enclave informed me coldly. “You can’t leave your rooms until morning bell, and graduation is two hours later. We need to allow more time than that. What if something goes wrong?”

“Then we’re all dead, and everyone left in the school has a worse-than-usual time of it for the next few years until things balance out. Shut it, Lake,” I added to Orion, who was opening his mouth to say that actually he was ready to go this evening, or something else similarly dim. “Sorry, but you don’t get to keep a tidy murder plan in reserve in case we don’t succeed.”

That could’ve turned into more of a fight, except Clarita and David and Wen weren’t on the enclavers’ side of it anymore—they weren’t going to be enjoying the benefits of any reserve plan if we didn’t make it back. Wen even suggested that the more time we had to build the parts and practice installation, the better.