But Chloe didn’t say a polite goodbye; she just stood there in my doorway turning the power-sharer over in her hands. I was about to excuse myself to go and fall into my bed for twelve hours or so, and she blurted, “El, I’m sorry.” I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t clear on what she was apologizing for. After a moment she said, “You just—you know, you get used to things. And you don’t think about whether they’re good. Or even okay.” She swallowed. “You don’t want to think about it. And nobody else seems to, either.

“And there’s nothing you can see to do about it.” She looked at me, her whole soft face and clear eyes unhappy. I shrugged a little. “Because there’s not meant to be anything you can do about it.”

She was quiet, and then she said, “I don’t know anything I can do about it. But I don’t have to make it worse. And I—” She was a collection of fidgets suddenly, looking away and licking her lips, uncomfortable. “I lied. In the library. We weren’t…we weren’t really worried that you were a maleficer. We wanted to be worried about that, because we didn’t like you. We’d all been talking about how you’re so awful and rude, how you were trying to use Orion to make everyone suck up to you. Except it’s the total opposite. That day Orion introduced us, I acted like all I needed to have you be my friend was to let you know that I was willing to let you talk to me. Like I’m so special. But I’m not. I’m just lucky. Orion’s special,” she added, with a huff that was trying to be a laugh and didn’t quite manage it. “And he wants to be your friend because you don’t care. You don’t care that he’s special, and you don’t care that I’m lucky. You aren’t going to be nice to me just because I’m from New York.”

“I’m not nice to anybody, really,” I said grudgingly, feeling squirmy inside being on the other end of her speech; it was too much of a real apology.

“You’re nice to people who are nice to you,” she said. “You’re nice to people who aren’t fake. And I don’t want to be fake. So—I’m sorry. And—I’d like to hang out sometime. If you wanted.”

Yes, because just what I wanted was to make a friend of a rich enclave girl so I could routinely rub my face around in all the luxuries I couldn’t have, all of which were in fact quite nice even if they didn’t measure up to the things I’d chosen in their place. And if Chloe Rasmussen turned out to be an actual decent person and a real friend, that would mean the things I didn’t have weren’t necessarily incompatible with the things I really cared about, and how exactly I was meant to put that together without being discontented all the time, I didn’t see, only I was reasonably certain that saying no and on your way now would in fact make me rude and stuck-up after all, just in a quixotic and contrary way.

“Yeah, all right,” I said, even more grudgingly, and the only good thing that came of it was that then, finally, after she smiled at me a little shyly, she said I looked tired, she’d go and let me rest, and then she did go, so I could shut the door and flop myself down on my bed and sleep like the dead I somehow miraculously wasn’t.

There was another knock on my door some time later, and I heard Liu say, “El, are you awake?” I’d been asleep, but the alert on my door had woken me, and I got up for her and Aadhya. They’d brought me some lunch down from the cafeteria. I gave Aadhya the forge apron and the supplies I’d found for the lute. They’d both got decent supply hauls, if not as amazing as the one I’d managed, and Liu had picked up some good notebooks and spare pens for me while she’d been picking some up for herself.

“Do you want to tell us about it?” Liu said, after I’d finished wolfing down the food and had sprawled back out on my bed.

“The machinery was broken in some different exciting way that took them more than an hour to fix,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “We lost one of the artificers on the way in, and Pires keeled over doing the shield, and we got back late and got caught on the shop floor during the cleaning and Orion kissed me,” which I hadn’t actually meant to say, but it came out, and Liu gave a squeak of excitement and covered her mouth.

“But how did you get clear of the cleaning fires?” Aadhya said, deadpan, and Liu shoved her knee and said, “Stop that! Was it nice? Is he a good kisser?” and then blushed bright red and burst into giggles and covered her face.

I would probably have been the same color if I could have managed it. “I don’t remember!”

“Oh, come on!” Aadhya said.

“I don’t! I—” I groaned and sat up and put my face against my knees and finished in a mutter, “I kneed him and shoved him off me so I could cast a firebreak,” and Aadhya laughed so hard she fell off the bed while Liu gawked at me, totally stricken on my behalf.

“ ‘I’m not dating Orion at all, we’re just friends,’ ” Aadhya wheezed from the floor without even getting up, mimicking what I’d told her and Liu the night before we’d shaken on our alliance: I hadn’t wanted them to come into it on false pretenses. “You fail at dating so hard.”

“Thanks, I feel loads better,” I said. “And I wasn’t wrong! I wasn’t dating him.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Aadhya said. “Only a boy would date somebody for two weeks and not mention it to them.”

We all kind of sniggered together for a bit, but after we settled back down, Liu said, tentatively, “Do you want to?” Her face was serious. “My mother told me it was a really bad idea.”

“My mom told me that all boys are carrying a secret pet mal around in their underwear, and if you get alone with them they let it out,” Aadhya said. We both shrieked with laughter, and she laughed, too. “I know, right? But she did it on purpose, she told me to pretend that was true, the whole time I was in here, because it would be true, if I let a boy get me pregnant.”

Liu gave a shiver all over and wrapped her arms around her knees. “My mother got me an IUD.”

“I tried one. I got massive cramps,” Aadhya said grimly.

I swallowed. I hadn’t bothered; it had seemed the least likely of my many worries. “My mum was almost three months gone with me at graduation.”

“Oh my God,” Aadhya said. “She must have freaked.”

“My dad died getting her out,” I said softly, and Liu reached out and squeezed my hand. My throat was tight. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone.

We sat quiet for a bit, and then Aadhya said, “I guess that means you’ll be the only person ever to graduate twice,” and we all laughed again. It didn’t feel like tempting fate, just then, to talk about graduating like something that was going to happen.