I didn’t need to do any of that. There wasn’t an assignment I had to hand in, and I certainly didn’t need to do the work to cast the spell. In fact, I could’ve done that as soon as I’d worked out the pronunciation. Except, of course, that if I ever took the risk of casting a spell without knowing for sure what it was meant to do, it would definitely turn out to be meant to do a lot of murder.

I did all of that silly make-work because I didn’t want to start on a new section. More accurately, I didn’t want to have the time to start on a new section. Obviously I didn’t have any regrets about spending New York’s mana on wiping out a pack of leskits, saving my own skin in the process, but I wasn’t going to let myself feel happy about it. I wasn’t going to be grateful, and I very much wasn’t going to get used to it, only that was hopeless nonsense; I was already getting used to it. My shoulders wouldn’t stay tense, and I kept forgetting to check the vent behind me, as if it wasn’t the most important thing in the room.

And then at the bell, I went out into the corridor and the crowd of sophomore artificers came spilling out of the workshop, talking excitedly about what had happened to the leskits, and I overheard one of them saying, shrugging, “Comment il les a eus comme ça? J’en ai aucune idée. Putain, j’étais sûr qu’il allait crever,” and I went to my Myrddin seminar in a cloud of outrage as I realized Orion had been in there, and my leskit-clearing stunt had somehow saved his neck, so I did have to be happy I’d been able to do it, and also what had he even been doing down in the workshop with a bunch of sophomores?

“Were you lurking outside my classroom door or something?” I demanded at lunch, as we got in line.

“No!” he said, but he also didn’t offer a remotely convincing explanation. “I just…I had a feeling” was what he served up, and hunched away from me looking so sour and grouchy that I almost wanted to let him off the hook, except my wanting that was so horribly wrong that I didn’t let myself.

“A feeling like you needed to get your arse saved from a pack of leskits?” I said sweetly instead. “My count is up to four now, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t need to be saved! There were only eight of them, I could’ve taken them,” he snapped at me, and he had the nerve to sound actually annoyed, which annoyed me.

“That’s not what I heard about it,” I said, “and if you don’t like getting rescued in turn, you haven’t got a leg to stand on, have you?”

I took my tray and stalked away across the cafeteria to the table Liu was holding. Orion slunk after me and sat down next to me with both of us still mad—you don’t break up a table in here over anything as minor as a violent quarrel—and we both steamed away in silence for the entire meal. We cleared our trays and walked out of the cafeteria at what I thought was meant to be pointedly different times, since he seemed to be in a rush to get out ahead of me, so I slowed down, and when I came out, I spotted him talking to Magnus just outside the doors, and a moment later Magnus held out his hand and I realized Orion was asking him for mana.

“You bag of jumbled screws, you could’ve said you were running low,” I said, after giving him a swat across the back of the head when I caught him down the corridor, just before the stairs. “Also, going after mals when you’re low to try and make up for it is even more stupid than your usual line, which is saying something.”

“What? No! I wasn’t—” Orion started, and then he turned round and caught my hard glare and paused, and then looked awkward and said, “Oh,” like he’d just noticed that was in fact exactly what he’d been doing.

“Yes, oh,” I said. “You’re entitled to a fair share of the New York mana! You’ve probably put in loads more than your fair share just this past week.”

“I haven’t,” Orion said shortly. “I haven’t been putting anything in at all.”

“What?” I stared at him.

“I haven’t taken out any mals this whole month,” Orion said. “The only ones I’ve even seen are the ones I’ve seen you taking out.”

If you can believe it, there was even still a faint accusatory tone in there, but I ignored it in favor of gawping at him. “Are you telling me you haven’t saved anyone all term? Why haven’t I been hearing howls of death and dismay all round the place?”

“There aren’t any!” he said. “They’re all lying low. I think we wiped out too many of them down in the graduation hall,” as if the words too many had any business taking up room in that sentence, “and the ones left are still mostly in hiding. I’ve been asking people, but almost nobody’s been seeing mals at all.”

I can’t actually coherently describe the level of indignation I experienced. It was one thing for the school to be out to get me, which I think all of us secretly feel is the case from the moment we arrive, and another for the school to be out to get only me, to the exclusion of literally everyone else, including even Orion, even though the school’s hunger was really his fault in the first place. Although I suppose it was getting him by keeping mals away from him. “What do you have Wednesdays after work period?” I demanded, when I could get words out past the incoherent rage.

“My senior alchemy seminar,” he said: four levels down from the library. So he couldn’t come up and give me a hand even if he wanted to, as he apparently very much did.

“What are your first periods?”

“Chinese and maths.” As far away from the workshop level as a senior class could get.

“I hate everything,” I said passionately.

* * *

“The rest of New York is going to say something if this keeps going,” Chloe said unhappily, perched on Liu’s bed cross-legged with her own mouse cupped in her hands. She’d named him Mistoffeles because he had a single black spot at his throat like a bow tie, which had started looking much more like a bow tie just in the week she’d been holding him. He was also already doing things for her: just yesterday he’d hopped out of her hands and run scampering off into the drain and then come back a few minutes later and offered her a little scrap of only slightly gnawed-on ambergris he’d somehow found down there.

It irritated me: I’d been working on Precious for more than a month and a half now, giving her mana treats and trying to give her instructions, and she still wasn’t doing much but accepting the treats as her due and sitting there on my hand graciously permitting me to pet her. “Shouldn’t you at least be able to turn invisible or something by now?” I’d told her in a grumble under my breath before tipping her back into Liu’s cage. She just ignored me. Even Aadhya had been able to take her mouse Pinky permanently back to her room by now, where she’d built him a massive and elaborate enclosure full of wheels and tunnels that kept getting expanded up the wall. “It just takes time sometimes,” Liu told me, very tactfully, but even she was getting a faintly doubtful expression as the weeks crept on.