We all fell silent. The question answered itself in the asking, really. My throat felt knotted up right around the tonsils, awful and choking. I hadn’t even thought about it that way before, but it was obviously true. And that was worse, so much worse, than just being unlucky.

The Scholomance has been hurting for power almost as much as I have. It’s not cheap to keep this place working. It’s easy to forget from our perspective when we’re suffering through this place and getting hit with mals on a regular basis, but they’d be coming at every last one of us in a continuous stream, and lots more of them, if it weren’t for all those incredibly powerful wards on every single air vent and plumbing pipe, and all the highly improbable artifice that makes sure there are almost none of those openings in the first place, and despite that we’re all breathing and drinking and bathing and eating, and all of that takes mana, mana, mana.

Sure, the story is, the enclaves put in some mana, and our parents all put in some mana if they can afford it, and we put in mana with our work, but we all know that’s a story. The single biggest source of the school’s mana is us. We’re all trying to save mana for graduation; everyone’s working on it all the time. The mana we grudgingly put into our schoolwork and our maintenance shifts is nothing compared with the amounts we put away for that rainiest of rainy days. And when the mals tear us apart, of course we grab for all that nice juicy power we’ve desperately been saving up, and they suck it out of us, only built up more by all our terror and final agony and struggles to live. The Scholomance gets the spillover, and then thanks to all those wards, it kills off a good healthy number of the mals, too, and it all ends up in the school’s mana stores—where it goes to keep the rest of us luckier ones alive.

So when an enthusiastic hero—read, Orion—shows up and starts saving lives, and the mals start to starve, the school starts to starve, too. And at the same time, has more of us alive in here, breathing and drinking et cetera. It’s all a pyramid scheme, and if there aren’t enough of us on the bottom being eaten, there’s not enough for the ones at the top.

That’s why we had to go down and fix the cleansing mechanisms in the graduation hall: all those starving mals down there, waiting in the one place Orion wasn’t, getting ready to tear the entire graduating class apart because they hadn’t had enough to eat for the last three years. They were on the verge of breaking into the rest of the school because they were all so desperate that they started collectively pounding on the wards at the bottom of the stairwells.

And Orion—well, Orion’s from the New York enclave, with a power-sharer on his wrist, and his affinity for combat somehow lets him suck power out of the mals he kills anyway. They don’t even come after him, because he has a bottomless supply of mana and an almost equally infinite supply of fantastic combat spells.

But I don’t. I’m the girl destined to make up for him, but who’s obstinately kept refusing to become a maleficer and start killing kids by the double handful, and now I’ve gone the other way entirely. I stopped a maw-mouth heading for the freshman hall. I helped Orion keep the mals from breaking into the school. I was down there in the graduation hall with him, helping to hold up a shield so the senior artificers could fix the cleansing equipment. And now I’m even copycatting his stupid noble-hero routine one day a week.

Of course the school was going to come after me.

And if the Wednesday mals didn’t work—it would try something else. And something else after that. The Scholomance isn’t exactly a living thing, but it isn’t exactly not, either. You can’t put this much mana and this much thinking into a place without it starting to develop a mind of its own. And theoretically it’s been built to protect us, so it won’t just start snacking on kids on its own—not to mention enrollment would drop substantially when that began happening—but of course it still wants enough mana to keep going; it’s meant to keep going. And I’ve put myself in the way, so the school is coming after me, and that means anyone round me is going to be in for it.

“The kids have got to start making mana for you,” Aadhya said.

“They’re just freshmen,” I said, dully. “All eight of them together make less mana in an hour than I can build in ten minutes.”

“They could reset your dead crystals, though,” Liu said. “You said you don’t need a lot of mana to wake those up, just a steady stream. They could each carry one around.”

Liu wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t actually going to solve the real problem. “I won’t need the dead crystals. I’m not going to have enough mana to fill my other empties, at this rate.”

“Then we can trade them,” Aadhya said. “They’re loads better than most storage. Or you know, I could try building them into the lute—”

“Do you want out?” I said, breaking in, harshly, because I really couldn’t handle sitting there while they worked through all the options I’d spent the last three weeks clawing through, trying to find a way out myself, until I’d realized there wasn’t going to be one for me. There was only the one for them.

Aadhya stopped talking. But Liu didn’t even pause; she just said, “No.”

I swallowed hard. “I don’t think you’ve thought—”

“No,” Liu said, strangely hard, and after a pause, she went on more quietly, “I used to take Zheng and Min around all day on a leading string when they were little. At school, if one of the other boys was hurting something like a frog or a stray kitten, they would stop it and bring the animal to me, even though they got teased for ‘being girls’ because of it.” She looked down at Xiao Xing in her hands, stroking her thumb over his head. “No,” she repeated, softly. “I don’t want out.”

I looked at Aadhya, my feelings in a confused knotted mess: I didn’t know what I wanted her to say. My practical friend, whose mum had told her it was a good idea to be decent to losers, and so had been decent to me, all the years while everyone else treated me like a piece of used kitchen roll no one wanted to pick up even long enough to put in the bin. I’d liked her because she was practical, and hard-nosed: she’d always driven a solid hard bargain, the kind you could believe in, without ever cheating me, even though she’d more often than not been the only person who would have traded with me. She hadn’t any reason to care about the freshmen in the library, and she had choices: she was one of the best practical artificers in our year, with a magical lute in the finishing stages that was going to be worth something outside, and not just among students. Any enclaver would’ve gladly snatched her up for a graduation alliance. That was the smart thing, the practical thing to do, and I almost wanted her to do it. She’d already taken half a dozen chances on me that anyone else would have called a bad bet. I didn’t want her to drop me, but—I couldn’t be the reason she didn’t make it out.