I really could have used a dedicated hour a day of quiet time to work on Sanskrit. The spellbook I’d managed to get my hands on last term was a priceless copy of the long-lost Golden Stone sutras; the library had let it come in range in an effort to keep me from taking out that maw-mouth. I still slept with it under my pillow. I’d just barely managed to fight my way through twelve pages to the first of the major invocations, and it was already the single most useful spellbook I’d ever so much as glimpsed in my life.

But what I got instead was a dedicated hour a day, alone in a tiny room on the outer perimeter of the very first floor, squeezed in around the edge of the big workshop. To even get there, I had to go almost as far as you could possibly go into the labyrinth, open an unmarked windowless door, then walk down a long, narrow, completely unlit corridor that felt like it was anywhere from one to twelve meters depending on its mood that day.

Inside the room, the one large air vent at the top of the wall shared an air shaft with the workshop furnaces. It alternated between whooshing blasts of superheated exhaust air and a steady, whistling stream of ice-cold cooling air. The only desk in the room was another ancient chair-desk, the whole iron contraption bolted to the floor. Its back was to the grating. I would have sat on the floor, but there were two large drainage channels running across the whole room, coming from the workshop and going to a big trough along the full length of the back wall, and ominous stains around them suggested that they overflowed routinely. A row of taps were stuck in the wall overhanging the trough as well. They dripped constantly in a faint pinging symphony, no matter how much I tried to tighten them. Every once in a while, horrible gurgling noises came out of the pipes, and weird grinding sounds happened under the floor. The door to the room itself didn’t lock, but did slide open or shut at unpredictable moments with an incredibly loud bang.

If that sounds to you like an absolutely magnificent setup for an ambush, well, a significant number of mals agreed. I got jumped twice in the first week of classes.

By the end of the third week of term, I actually had to dip into my mana stash instead of adding to it. That night I sat on my bed staring at the chest of crystals Mum sent in with me. Aadhya had done another auction, and now I had a grand total of seventeen of them glowing and full of mana. But all the rest sat there empty, and the ones I’d emptied taking out the maw-mouth were starting to go completely dull. If I didn’t start reviving them soon, they’d become as useless for storing mana as the kind you buy in bulk online. But I couldn’t find the time. I was building mana as hard as I possibly could and cutting every corner possible on my schoolwork, but I was still stuck on the very same crystal I’d been trying to fill back up since last term. That morning I’d been attacked in my seminar yet again, and I’d had to empty it completely.

I had gone back to doing sit-ups sooner than any doctor would’ve told me to, just because the struggle to do them with my aching gut actually made it easier to build mana. But I was pretty much healed up now, and I couldn’t even rely on crochet anymore for real mana-building. I just didn’t hate it as much when I was doing it at night hanging out with Aadhya and Liu. My friends; my allies. Who were relying on me to help me get them out the doors.

I closed up the box and put it away, and then I went out. It was still an hour to curfew, but already quiet: no one hangs out in the corridors senior year. Either they were up in the prime spots in the library, or taking the chance to go to bed early in the last week or so before the mals were expected to come back full-force. I went down to Aadhya’s room and tapped on the door, and when she opened it I said, “Hey, can we go to Liu’s?”

“Sure,” she said, eyeing me, but she didn’t push for details: Aadhya isn’t a time-waster. She collected her bathroom stuff, so we could go brush teeth right after, and then together we went to Liu’s room. She was down on our level, now.

Everyone gets a private room in here, so to squash in each year’s delivery of freshmen, the rooms are arranged cellblock-style, stacked on top of one another with a narrow iron walkway outside the upper rooms. But at the end of term, as the res halls rotate down to their new levels, any empty rooms disappear and the space gets parceled out to the survivors. Often not in useful ways. I’ve had a delightfully creepy and useless double-height room since the start of sophomore year. Liu’s had extended down in this last round, so we didn’t have to climb up one of the squeaking spiral staircases to see her anymore.

She let us in and gave each of us our familiars-in-training to hold while we sat on her bed. I stroked the tiny mouse’s white fur while she sat up in the palm of my hand nibbling a treat and looking around with bright and increasingly green eyes. I was still trying hard to name her Chandra, but the day I’d been thinking of names, Aadhya had said, “You should call her Precious,” then laughed her head off while I whacked her with a pillow, and Precious was unfortunately sticking. Mum’s never actually come out and apologized for saddling me with Galadriel, but I’m reasonably sure she knows she should be ashamed of herself. Anyway they kept forgetting Chandra and calling her Precious—all right, to be fair, I kept forgetting it myself—and pretty soon I was going to have to give up and accept it.

Assuming I was going to have her at all. I stared down at her in my hand because it was better than looking at their faces, and I said, “I’m falling really behind on mana.”

I had to tell them. They were counting on me to be able to pull my weight when it came time for graduation. If I wasn’t going to be able to, they had the right to back out. They didn’t owe anything to a bunch of freshmen they hadn’t even met. Liu might have felt she owed me something for Zheng, but I could be saving just Zheng without laying out a week’s worth of mana I didn’t actually have saved up, and meanwhile she was breaking her back building mana for our team herself.

At this rate, I was going to be lucky if I had enough mana for maybe three medium-power spells, and I didn’t even have any good medium-power spells. The only really useful spell I’ve got that doesn’t need absolute heaps of mana is the phase-control spell I got out of Purochana’s book, and it’s not a great crisis option, since it’s a good five minutes to prep the casting. I’ve used it in a crisis, but only when I had Orion thoroughly distracting the underlying cause for those five minutes, and he’s going to be a bit busy come graduation killing monsters for everyone.

“Zheng told me about Wednesdays,” Liu said quietly, and I looked up. She didn’t look surprised; actually she looked kind of worried.

“This is your weirdo library session? What’s going on?” Aadhya said, and Liu said, “It’s her and eight freshmen, and they keep getting hit with major mals.”

“In the library?” Aadhya said, and then she said, “Wait, this is on top of that horrible independent study and the three other seminars? Does the school have it in for you or something?”