Of course, I still wouldn’t have given up a single minute of getting to cuddle Precious even if I could have had them all back a hundredfold in study time. She was so alive and real, her soft fur and her moving lungs and the tiny beat of her heart; she didn’t belong to the Scholomance. She was a part of the world outside, the world I sometimes found myself thinking maybe only existed in the dreams I had of it once in a while. We’d been in the Scholomance for three years, one month, two weeks, and five days.

And in that last one month, two weeks, and five days, nobody but me or the me-adjacent had been attacked by a single mal, as far as we could double-check without making people suspicious. People hadn’t realized yet only because some of the attacks had spilled over into the workshop, which was on the other side of my independent study room, and also it was still early enough in the year that everyone separately thought they were just getting lucky.

“But the other New York kids are going to notice the mana pool getting low,” Chloe said. “Magnus was already asking me the other day if I’d been doing any major workings. I’ve got a right to share power with my allies, but not to let them take it all.”

“We’re all putting as much as we can back,” Aadhya said. “And there’re seven seniors from New York. You have to be putting in loads yourselves. How low is the pool going to get?”

“Well,” Chloe said, in an odd, awkward way, darting a look at me, and then she said haltingly, “We don’t really—I mean—”

“You don’t build mana at all,” I said flatly, from the corner, as I instantly realized what she wasn’t saying. “None of you ever put any mana in the enclave pool, because Orion was putting in enough for all of you.”

Chloe bit her lip and avoided our eyes; Aadhya and Liu were both staring at her, shocked. Everyone’s got to build mana in here. Even enclave kids. Their big advantage is more time, better conditions, people watching their backs and doing homework for them and giving them little presents of mana and all the other things that the rest of us have to spend mana to get. They all have their own efficient mana stores and power-sharers. So by the time they get to senior year, they’re all way ahead. But never having to build mana at all—never having to do sit-ups or struggle through making some horrible doily, because all of them were just coasting on Orion’s back—

And he had to beg mana from them when he started to run out.

Chloe didn’t raise her head, and there was color in her cheeks. Mistoffeles made a little anxious chirping noise in her hands. She probably hadn’t even thought about it since freshman year. The way I already wasn’t thinking about it, day-to-day. And I’d sniped at Orion for needing help, after killing monsters with the mana he’d built up over three years of risking his life.

* * *

“So what?” Orion said, and sounded like he meant it.

I hadn’t been near his room since last term; I was doing my best to avoid being alone with him at all these days. But I’d put Precious down and walked out of Liu’s room and straight down the corridor to his, without saying another word to Chloe. Orion was there, busy failing to do his alchemy homework, judging by the total blankness of the lab worksheet on his desk. He let me in so nervously that I almost stopped being angry long enough to reconsider being there, but despite him and his mostly futile attempts at straightening up his piles of dirty laundry and books, anger won. It usually does, for me.

I might as well not have bothered, for all he cared when I did tell him. I stared at him, and he stared back. It wasn’t even just him being happy to help the useless wankers out; he sounded like he didn’t understand why I was bothering to mention this odd piece of irrelevant information.

“It’s your mana,” I said through my teeth. “It’s all your mana. Do you get it, Lake? The whole parasitic lot of them have been clinging on your back for three years and change, never putting in a minute’s worth of effort themselves—”

“I don’t care!” he said. “There’s always more. There’s always been more,” he added, and that did come with an emotion, only it was flat-out whinging.

“I’m sorry, are you bored?” I snarled at him. “Are you missing the good fun of saving people’s lives six times a day, the regular dose of adoration?”

“I miss the mana!” he yelled at me.

“So take it back!” I said, and yanked the power-sharer off my wrist and shoved it at him. “Take all of it back! You want more mana, it’s yours, it’s all yours, they haven’t a right to a single drop.”

He stared down at the power-sharer, a half-hungry expression flitting over his face, then he shook his head hard with a jerk. “No!” he said, and shoved his hands in his hair, which hadn’t grown back long enough yet to support the drama of the gesture, and muttered, “I don’t know what to do with myself,” plaintively.

“I know what to do with you,” I said, by which I meant kicking him into next week where maybe he’d have got over himself, only he actually had the nerve to say, “Yeah?” in a challenging, pretending-to-be-suave double-entendre sort of way that lasted only long enough for him to hear it coming out of his own mouth, at which point he went red and embarrassed and then darted a look around the room with nobody but us in it and turned even more red, and I went out of the place like a shot and ran straight back to Liu’s just to escape.

Where I came back in with all of them still sitting there and the power-sharer still in my hand. Chloe jerked her head up and looked at me anxiously. But as far as I was concerned, she could discuss it with Orion herself if she wanted to know what he thought about it. “So what now?” I said, holding it out to her instead. “You want out?”

“No!” Chloe said, and then Aadhya actually hauled a book out of her school bag, the thick kind we call larva-killers, and threw it at me with enough intent behind it that I had to jump aside or it would’ve nailed me in the bum.

“Stop it!” she said. “I think that’s like the third time you’ve asked to be ditched. You’re like one of those puffer fish, the second anyone touches you a little wrong you go all bwoomp,” she illustrated with her hands, “trying to make them let go. We’ll let you know, how’s that?”

I put the power-sharer back on more or less sullenly—let’s be honest, more—and sat back down on the floor with my arms wrapped round my knees. Liu said after a moment, “So the real problem isn’t that you’re using mana. The problem is that Orion’s not putting any in.”

“Yes, all we need to do is find a surefire way to lure him some mals,” I muttered. “If only we had a bunch of tasty adolescent wizards all in the same place. Oh, wait.”