“I’ve got more things to throw over here,” Aadhya said, waving another deadly book—this one had some actual suspicious splotches on its cover—threateningly.

“Maybe we could build a honeypot, like they do for construction sites?” Chloe said.

“Like who does for what?” Aadhya said, and Chloe looked around like she expected me or Liu to be any less confused.

“A honeypot?” she said, more tentatively. “Is there another word for it? You know, when there’s a major project for a circle of wizards, and they’re going to be working for a long time, days, and you don’t want mals to be coming for them? So you have to lure all the nearby mals out and clean them up, like the week before? New York used one for the Tri-State Gateway expansion a couple of years back.”

It certainly sounded brilliant, but only in the sense that it was clearly too good to be true. “If you can lure them places, why wouldn’t you do it all the time?” I said. “Just stick one of these honeypots in the middle of a trap, and no more mals around ever.”

“You’ve still got to do something with them!” Chloe said. “What kind of trap is going to hold a thousand giant mals? We had to hire a team of three hundred guards just for the one week.” That was starting to sound a bit more plausible, and worth considering, and then she added, “Anyway, you can’t just keep a honeypot going all the time, it’s too expensive to run.”

We all stared at her. She stared back. “It’s too expensive,” I said pointedly. “For New York.” I’d seen Orion toss fistfuls of mana-infused diamond dust into his homework assignment potions like it was all-purpose flour. He didn’t even bother to sweep up the leavings from his lab bench afterwards.

Chloe bit her lip, but then Liu said, “But it can’t be that hard to lure mals. They want to come for us anyway, you’re just reinforcing their existing desire.”

“Oh, hey,” Aadhya said abruptly. “How far away did you lure mals from?”

“We covered all of Gramercy Park and one block out in each direction,” Chloe said, which meant nothing to me, but Aadhya was nodding.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Any artifice is going to be crazy expensive to run when you try to push the effect out over six city blocks. But we don’t want to lure all the mals in the school.” We very much didn’t; in fact we all cringed instinctively just because she’d said it out loud. “We just want a few of them for Orion.” She rummaged round in her bag and dug out a copy of the blueprints that she must have made at some point in her career: artificers often get assigned to do detailed studies of the school, since it helps reinforce the workings. “Here.” She pointed to a spot on the first floor. “There’s a major pipe junction here running through the workshop wall. If we build a honeypot and set it next to the nearest drain and run it from there, I bet we’ll catch him plenty of mals even if we only cover a two-foot radius.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “So how does one of these honeypots work?”

We all looked at Chloe. “Um, there’s a container—you need to put in some kind of bait, and then the artifice blows the scent out…” She trailed off unspecifically and shrugged. “I’m sorry, I only know about it because my mom had to do the presentation for the requisition process.”

“The requisition process,” I said even more pointedly, because anything that New York bothered to make you requisition had to be insanely complicated on top of expensive.

But Aadhya was waving it away. “That’s enough to go on. Liu’s right, it can’t be that hard. You just brew up some bait that smells like teenage wizard, and I’ll see what I can come up with to disperse it.”

Chloe was nodding. “How fast do you think you can do it?” she asked anxiously.

“No clue,” Aadhya said, with a shrug.

“And in the meantime, all of New York has to start building mana,” Liu said. “If Orion can’t put in mana anymore, and none of you are, you’re going to run out sooner or later anyway. You don’t want to find out that the honeypot doesn’t work in three months, just when it’s time to start doing obstacle-course runs.”

“But if I tell everyone that we have to start putting in mana because Orion can’t anymore, the first thing Magnus will want to do is run an audit on our power-sharers to see how much everyone is using,” Chloe said. “Then they’ll know why it’s going to be sooner.”

“I don’t think he’ll insist on an audit,” Liu said, with a glance towards me. “Not if you tell them the right way.”

“What’s the right way?” I said warily.

* * *

The right way was, Chloe whispered around to everyone in New York, that Orion’s girlfriend was keeping him from hunting mals because I didn’t want him getting hurt, and now I was getting suspicious about why the mana was suddenly running low.

The New York enclavers were all as eager for me to learn the truth about the source of their mana as Chloe had been, so they did start quietly contributing after all—which it turned out they could do by the bucketload without even getting anywhere close to their mana-building capacity. That of course didn’t keep them from being grumpy about the work they were doing. I confess I enjoyed catching a glimpse of Magnus stalking into the boy’s bathroom at the head of his entourage, soaked in sweat and red-faced from what I assume was a hearty session of building mana with annoying physical exercise.

But after a month of what I suppose they found unbearable suffering, they all began to interrogate each other in accusatory ways about mana use, and meanwhile the honeypot project ran into a serious snag. Aadhya had made up a special incense burner, a set of nested cylinders of different kinds of metal, with holes punched carefully in each one to control the path that smoke took through them. Chloe had mixed a dozen small batches of mana-infused incense and left them out around a drain in one of the alchemy labs during dinner. We came down afterwards—warily—and picked the one that showed the most signs of having been poked at with various appendages, including a snuffler’s face, which had left a distressing imprint roughly like a lotus seedpod.

“Great, let’s go,” Orion said promptly; he would have grabbed the cylinder off the table and headed straight for the door, but Aadhya put out a hand against his chest and stopped him.

“How about we don’t try it out for the first time next to a big junction going straight down to the graduation hall,” she said. The rest of us all agreed heartily. The diameter of the school’s plumbing is open to a determined interpretation, and if we were deliberately luring mals, our intent would actually be helping them squeeze themselves through.