When she got there, I said, “I have a bunch of storage crystals. I’ll just fill them up and then give this back to you.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment; she was still looking at the ingredients on the floor, and then she said, slowly, “You’re strict mana. Is that—because—” She didn’t go on, but that was because she didn’t have to. Like I said, she’s not dim. Then she looked at me and raised her chin a bit and said in a high voice, like she was declaring it to the world and not just me, “Keep it. You might need more.” I was already fighting down the violent urge to scowl at her like a monster of ingratitude when she added tentatively, “Would you—do Aadhya and Liu need them?”

Which made it a request to join our alliance.

I couldn’t even just blurt out a flat unthinking no, because I couldn’t give her an answer to that question without talking to Aadhya and Liu. That meant that I’d have too much time to recognize that the obvious and sensible and even fair answer was yes.

I didn’t want to be allied with Chloe Rasmussen. I didn’t want to be one of the lucky ones whose alliance gets scooped up with enormous condescension by some enclaver with mana and friends and a chestful of useful things to spare, which is of course the goal that most people are actively aiming for when they put together a team without an enclaver already in it. Even if that wasn’t what Chloe meant or what we meant, that’s what everyone would think it was. And after all, they’d be right; we’d get Chloe out, and Chloe’s mana would get us out, and we’d be leaving other people behind who didn’t stand a chance.

But she had a right to ask, when I was here asking for her help to start with, and she’d had the guts to ask, when instead she could just have got clear after paying me back for saving her from the attack that only happened because she’d been willing to help me in return for nothing at all. She was offering more than fair value, even if it wasn’t fair that she had it to offer, and if I still wanted to say no to her despite all of that, Aadhya and Liu had the right to tell me I was being a colossal twat.

“I’ll talk to them,” I muttered ungraciously, and as you would expect, the end result was that three days later I had to add Chloe’s name on the wall near the girls’ bathroom, where we had written up our alliances. Liu also put her name on the Chinese translation next to me, the power-sharer on her wrist gleaming and shiny, and then we all went to breakfast together and I had to hear at least twenty bazillion people congratulating us, where by “us” I mean me, Aadhya, and Liu, for having scored Chloe. We hadn’t got nearly as many congratulations when we’d written ourselves up near the end of last term, even though we’d been one of the first alliances to go on the wall.

To cap it off, Orion didn’t congratulate me exactly, but he said, “I’m glad you and Chloe have become friends,” in an alarmingly hopeful way that was very clearly only one unfortunate literature assignment away from turning into come live with me and be my love, optionally etched onto metal with little hearts around it.

“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, and escaped to the comparative safety of my independent study down in the bowels of the school, where the worst thing that was going to leap at me with devouring attention was a flesh-eating monster.

In a month of school, I’d so far translated a grand total of four additional pages out of the Golden Stone sutras. They contained a single three-line spell in Vedic Sanskrit whose purpose I couldn’t even guess at from the start. It had seven words I’d never seen before which all had multiple translation options. The rest of the four pages was a commentary in medieval Arabic explaining at length why it was just fine to use the Sanskrit spell even though it might seem haram because of the wine used in the casting process. The commentary mostly avoided anything useful like explaining what the spell did that was so great and how the alcohol was meant to be used. Except it didn’t completely avoid anything useful, so I had to dig through the whole frothing thing for the handful of nuggets.

That morning I finally figured out which of the ninety-seven possible meanings went together, and reached the conclusion that the spell was for tapping into a distant source of water and purifying it—something of extremely great interest to people living in a desert and much less so to someone living in an enchanted school equipped with functional if antiquated plumbing. I was just glaring at my finished and useless three-line translation when the furnace vent rattled at my back and a whirling mass of fur and claws and teeth leapt out onto me, exactly as anticipated.

And then it promptly bounced off the shield that I didn’t even have to cast, because Aadhya’s shield holder on my chest had automatically pulled mana from the power-sharer to block the physical contact. Even as I whirled round, the leskit went skidding over the floor into the corner and twisted itself up on its twelve feet. It was odds-on which of us was more surprised, but it recovered quicker; it came at me again and stopped just short to give the shield an experimental swipe, striking a cloud of bright orangey sparks off it.

My normal strategy in a situation like this would have been to distract and run. But by then I could hear screams and more hissing coming from the ventilation: there was a pack of them in the workshop. Leskits don’t usually hunt individually. Mine opened its toothy maw and emitted a loud krrk krrk krrk noise like an angry ostrich—I’ve never heard an angry ostrich but it’s the noise I’d imagine coming from one—and there was some scrabbling in the vent and another one’s head came poking out. It dropped down and the two of them discussed in skrrks for a moment and then charged me together, clawing, scraping more deep flaring gouges in the shield.

I stared at them from behind it, and then I slowly said, “Exstirpem has pestes ex oculis, ex auribus, e facie mea funditus,” which was a slight variation on an imperial Roman spell meant to eradicate a host of annoyances that are trying to get at you but are temporarily held back—such as, for instance, a mob of angry locals besieging your evil tower of wizardry and torture. I waved my arm in a broad sweeping-away-vermin gesture at the leskits, who promptly disintegrated, along I presume with all their pals inside the workshop, since the screaming I could hear filtering in through the vent died off into a vaguely confused silence.

For another moment I went on staring at what were now two little piles of ash on the floor, then for lack of anything else to do I slowly sat back down at my desk and went back to work. There wasn’t any reason for me to go running out into the corridor, and still twenty minutes left before the bell. After a few minutes, the door—which had done its slamming routine again just a few minutes before the leskits made their appearance—slid back open in what I possibly imagined was a disappointed way. It didn’t even bang all that loudly.

I spent the rest of the period making a clean copy of the original Sanskrit spell, along with a formal spell commentary of my own, including word-for-word translations of the spell into modern Sanskrit and English to help convey meaning, with several possible variations in connotation, an analysis of the Arabic commentary, and notes on the potential usage. It was the kind of stupid flashy work that you only do if you are trying for valedictorian, or eventual journal publication, which is a less violently competitive approach to getting post-graduation enclave interest.