But she only said, “Yeah, no,” almost dismissively. “I’m not a ditcher. We just need to figure out a way to get you some more mana. Or better yet, get the school off your back. I don’t get why the Scholomance is pulling this whole complicated stunt on you. You’re not an enclaver, it’s not like you were going to have tons of mana anyway, so why is it so into making you spend the little you’ve got?”

“Unless,” Liu said, and then stopped. We looked over at her; her lips were pressed together, and she was staring at her hands in her lap, twisted up. “Unless it’s about—pushing you. The school—”

“Likes maleficers,” Aadhya finished for her.

Liu nodded a little without looking up. And she was absolutely right. That was surely why the Scholomance had given me that Wednesday session. It was trying to give me—an easier choice to make. The school wanted me to have to make the first selfish choice, to save my own mana, instead of saving a random freshman I didn’t care about. Because then it would be easier for me to make the second selfish choice after that, and the one after that.

“Yeah,” Aadhya agreed. “The school wants you to go maleficer. What could you do if you decided to start using malia?”

If you had me make a list of the top ten questions I go to great lengths to avoid asking myself, that one would have comprehensively covered items one through nine, and the only reason it wasn’t doing for item ten as well was that So how do you feel about Orion Lake had quietly crept onto the bottom of it. But it’s a long way down from the rest. “You don’t want to know,” I said, by which I meant I don’t want to know.

Aadhya didn’t even slow down. “Well, you’d have to get the malia somehow—” she was saying thoughtfully.

“That wouldn’t be a problem,” I said through my teeth. She wasn’t wrong to raise the question, since that’s the top roadblock facing most would-be maleficers, and the solutions generally involve spending a lot of time on intimate encounters with entrails and screaming. But my own main concern is how to avoid accidentally sucking the life force out of everyone around me if I ever get taken by surprise and instinctively fire off something really gargantuan. For instance, I’ve got this great spell for razing an entire city to the ground, which will certainly come in handy if I ever turn into one of those people who write furious letters to the editor about the architecture of Cardiff, and I suppose it would do to wipe out any mals on the same floor as me. Along with all the other people on the same floor as me, but they’d probably be dead by then, since I’d have drained their mana to cast the spell.

That did finally stop her; she and Liu both eyed me a little dubiously. “Well, that wasn’t creepy and ominous at all,” Aadhya said after a moment. “Okay, I vote for you not turning maleficer.”

Liu put up an emphatic hand to agree. I let a choked snort of laughter come out and put up my hand. “I vote no, too!”

“I’m even going to go out on a limb here and say that pretty much everyone else in the school will be right there with us,” Aadhya said. “We could ask people to chip in for you.”

I stared at her. “Hey, everybody, it turns out El is some kind of mana-sucking vampire queen, we should all give her some mana so she doesn’t drain us dry.”

Aadhya scrunched up her mouth. “Hmm.”

“We don’t need to ask everyone to chip in for you,” Liu said slowly. “We could just ask one person—if it’s Chloe.”

I hunched my shoulders forward and didn’t say anything. That wasn’t a terrible idea. It might even work. That was why I didn’t like it. It had been almost a month since we’d gone down to the graduation hall, and I still remembered what it had been like with a New York power-sharer on my wrist, all that mana right in front of me like getting to plunge my head into a bottomless well and drink cold water in careless gulps. I didn’t trust how much I’d liked it. How easy it had been to get used to it.

“You think she’ll say no?” Liu said, and I looked up: she was studying me.

“That’s not…” I trailed off and then blew out a sigh. “She offered me a spot.”

“In an alliance?” Aadhya said.

“In New York,” I said, which only means one thing in here: an enclave spot, a guaranteed enclave spot. For most people, if you’re lucky enough to get picked by an enclaver to join their alliance, it means their enclave will look at you, maybe give you a job. Usually four hundred kids graduate each year. Maybe forty enclave spots open up worldwide, and more than half of them will go to top adult wizards who’ve earned them with decades of work. A guarantee of one of those spots, fresh out of school, is a prize even if you weren’t talking about the single most powerful enclave in the world. Aadhya and Liu were both gawking at me. “They’re freaked out over Orion.”

“After you’ve only been dating two months?” Liu said.

“We’re not dating!”

Aadhya made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes heavenwards. “After you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing that is not dating but totally looks like dating to everyone else, for only two months.”

“Thanks ever so,” I said, dryly. “As far as I can tell, they’re shocked that he’s talking to another human being at all.”

“To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said.

I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve saved his life at least twice.”

“Catch up already, girl,” she said, unrepentantly.

* * *

It’s not that I’d rather have had Aadhya and Liu ditch me to face the rest of my school career alone and desperate instead of asking Chloe Rasmussen for help, but I had definitely managed not to see asking her as an option. I wasn’t actually sure what she’d say. I’d turned down her offer of a guaranteed place in New York, after all. I was still sullen about having to do it. I’d spent the better part of my life carefully planning out my campaign for an enclave spot. It had been a really comforting plan that ended in the fantasy of me having a nice happy long life in a safe and luxurious enclave with endless mana at my fingertips like all the other enclave kids, and by making sure the campaign was long and involved and never quite completed successfully, I’d neatly avoided having to think about how I didn’t really want to be an enclaver at all.

Even Chloe—she’s a decent sort, and better than that if I’m being fair. When the enclave kids started courting me last term—because of Orion—they all behaved as though they were doing me a generous favor by so much as talking to me. All it got them was my violent and unstrategic rudeness in their faces, so they stopped talking to me at all. But Chloe stuck it out. She’s already asked to sit with us ten times this year, and she hasn’t brought any tagalongs with her. I don’t know that I’d have bent my neck the way she did, apologizing to me and even asking to be friends after I bit her head off. I’m not sorry for doing the biting, I had more than enough cause, but I still don’t know that I’d have had the grace.