Apart from that, though, the plan was fairly obvious anyway. We needed a group of artificers and maintenance-track kids who’d build the parts and do the repair, and we needed a group of incanters to shield them while they did it. And Orion would be our offense, dashing out from behind the shield at every opportunity, hopefully taking out enough mals to let us keep the shield up for long enough to get the work done. The alchemists were out of luck, if that’s what you want to call it. In this case, the machinery was going to need maybe one liter of the common school lubricant, which the maintenance kids brew for themselves in massive vats.

“I have a shielding spell we can use,” Clarita offered a bit sourly, which I understood after she got it out and grudgingly shared it with me and David: she’d written it herself, and I’d never seen anything like it. There are plenty of shielding spells that you can strengthen by casting them through a circle, but you still have to funnel the power through a primary caster, and if that one person goes down, so does the shield. Clarita’s shield spell was fundamentally designed to be cast by multiple people, to cover a group. It wove between English and Spanish, and read almost like a song, or a play with different roles for each caster: there were lines and verses that we could cast either solo or together, chaining them together one after another, so we could all take a breather now and then, and the lines weren’t even nailed down: you were allowed to improvise as long as you kept the same basic rhythm and meaning, which is a massive advantage when you’re in a combat situation and you can’t remember which adjective you’re supposed to use.

It was undoubtedly a wrench to hand over a spell that valuable to other people for nothing. She’d probably have got into an alliance on the strength of it even if she hadn’t had anything else to offer. My own best shielding spell is top-notch, but it’s a purely personal shield. And everyone else already has it, as Mum invented it, and she gives her spells out freely to anyone who asks. There’s a wizard who comes to the commune once a year and collects up her new ones and sends out copies to quite a lot of subscribers. He charges. I’ve yelled at Mum for just giving him the spells, but she says he’s providing a service, and if he wants to charge for it that’s his concern.

“Four incanters, you think?” David said, looking up narrow-eyed from the bottom of the page before I’d even finished reading a quarter of the way down.

“Five,” Clarita said, with an unflattering look at me, even though another person meant diminishing returns: the bigger an area we had to shield, the more mana we’d need to use, and the harder it would be for Orion to keep mals from hitting the shield in the first place. But I kept my mouth shut; I wasn’t going to convince any of them to rely on me by telling them that I was brilliant.

The next incanter down the list, number five, already had a guaranteed spot from Sacramento and wasn’t as loony as Pires, so he wasn’t volunteering to go along. But number seven was Maya Wulandari, a languages-track girl from Canada, who had both English and Spanish, but not the guaranteed spot in Toronto that she badly wanted. That’s one of the few enclaves with the remarkably civilized practice of allowing any new recruit to bring their entire family in with them, which in her case meant that her little brother and sister would come here as enclavers.

Those enclaves are all unusually picky, though. If she’d been top three, the Toronto enclaver kids could have offered her a guarantee; top ten only got her an alliance and a promise of serious consideration. She could’ve taken a guaranteed spot for herself somewhere else; instead she’d taken the gamble that when she got out, she’d be able to persuade the enclave council that she and her family were a good choice to bring in. And now she’d taken a different gamble: she’d talked to the Toronto kids about the guarantee, and they’d agreed that even if she didn’t make it back from what we were with excessive drama now calling the mission, they’d consider the spot hers—and her family would get to come in.

The next incanter down the rankings who’d volunteered and had both Spanish and English was Angel Torres, at lucky number thirteen: also not good enough to get a guaranteed spot anywhere, after three and a half years fighting tooth and nail for every mark; he was one of the nose-to-grindstone workhorses, the kind who sleep five hours a night, get ten extra spells a week down in their books, and do extra-credit projects in every lesson.

That made five of us. Wen ran over the list of volunteers and picked out five artificers and ten maintenance-track kids, ignoring the rankings entirely. The senior enclavers all peered over his shoulders while pretending to be casual, paying close attention to which names he passed over and which ones he immediately put down. Expert information about which artificers and maintenance-track kids coming out are the best is both hard to get and extremely valuable, not so much in here, but for any enclave recruiting new people. He went for Mandarin-speakers, obviously, so I didn’t recognize any of their names myself except for Zhen Yang, a maintenance-track kid who had come in already bilingual and done the same thing as Liu: took her maths and writing and history classes in English so she could avoid taking any language classes and get more time to do shifts.

Everyone else in school spent hell week in the usual mix of panic and frenzy, with a special side order of building shared mana for the mission, three times a day, after every meal. All the bigger enclaves have a large mana store in the place, built over generations, which the enclavers get to pull from: they keep them hidden somewhere in the upper classrooms or the library and only the seniors from each enclave know where they are. Ten of the biggest enclaves contributed power-sharers to our little team—Chloe gave me back the same one as before, from New York—and in return, everyone poured mana into their battery packs. There were rows of kids doing push-ups in the cafeteria like it was a military training exercise and they were all being punished.

Our group spent it in the workshop, also in panic and frenzy. The artificers had the worst of it, obviously; they had to do most of their work in advance, and the rest of us ferried in their meals and raw materials and also protected them from the five-daily mal attacks that came at our heads, which I suppose was good practice at that. Clarita did get a bit less hostile to me after the first time we all cast her spell together successfully, in a practice session on Wednesday. That might sound like the hour was late, given that graduation was on Sunday, and it was, but that was also probably as good as we could possibly have hoped for. Casting a single spell with a circle of people isn’t like going to a yoga class with an instructor who encourages you to all go at your own pace; it’s like learning a choreographed dance with four people you barely know for an aggravated director who yells at you if you put a toe out of line.

We were all looking round at the shield, pleased with ourselves, when the big air shaft overhead exploded open and a hissingale the size of a tree came writhing down at us: it literally wrapped us up completely in pulsing snaky limbs and started trying to rip us apart, without noticeable success. I confess I yelped, which mortified me because none of the seniors so much as paused for a second. They’d all spent the last six months doing obstacle-course runs in the gym; you could probably have crept up to one of them sleeping and exploded a balloon next to their heads, and they’d just have killed you before they opened their eyes.