Of course, the most likely option was that Mum didn’t know herself. She’d just had a bad feeling about Orion, for no reason she could’ve told me even if she’d written me a ten-page letter on both sides. A feeling so bad that she’d hitchhiked all the way to Cardiff to find the nearest incoming freshman, and she’d asked his parents to send me her one-gram note. I reached out and poked Aaron in his tiny skinny shoulder. “Hey, what did Mum give your parents for bringing the message?”

He turned round and said uncertainly, “I don’t think she did? She said she didn’t have anything to pay with, but she asked to talk to them in private, and then she gave it to me and my mam squeezed a bit of my toothpaste out to make room.”

That might sound like nothing, but nobody wastes any of their inadequate four-year weight allowance on ordinary toothpaste; I brush with baking soda out of the alchemy lab supply cabinets myself. If Aaron had brought any at all, it was enchanted in some way: useful when you aren’t going to see a dentist for the next four years. He could have traded that one squeeze of it to someone with a bad toothache for a week of extra dinners, easily. And his parents had taken that away from their own kid—Mum had asked his parents to take that away from their own kid—just to get me the warning. “Great,” I said bitterly. “Here, have a bite.” I gave him one of the pieces of the note, too. He probably needed it as much as ever in his life, after just being sucked into the Scholomance. It’s better than the almost inevitable death waiting for wizard kids outside, but not by much.

The food line opened up just then, and the ensuing stampede interfered with my brooding, but Liu asked me quietly, “Everything okay?” as we lined up.

I just stared at her blankly. It wasn’t mindreading or anything—she had an eye for small details, putting things together, and she indicated my pocket, where I’d put the last scrap of the note—the note whose actual contents I hadn’t shared, even while I’d passed out pieces with an enchantment that should have precluded all brooding. My confusion was because—she’d asked. I wasn’t used to anyone inquiring after me, or for that matter even noticing when I’m upset. Unless I’m sufficiently upset that I start conveying the impression that I’m about to set everyone around me on fire, which does in fact happen on a not infrequent basis.

I had to think about it to decide that I didn’t, actually, want to talk about the note. I’d never had the option. And having it meant—that I was telling Liu the truth when I nodded to say yes, everything’s okay, and smiled at her, the expression feeling a bit odd and stretchy round my mouth, unfamiliar. Liu smiled back, and then we were in the line, and we all focused on the job of filling our trays.

We’d lost our freshmen in the shuffle: they go last, obviously, and we now had the dubious privilege of going first. But nothing stops you taking extra for their benefit, if you can afford it, and at least for today we could. The walls of the school were still a bit warm from the end-of-term cleansing cycle. Any of the maleficaria that hadn’t been crisped to fine ash were all just starting to creep out of the various dark corners they’d hidden in, and the food was as unlikely to be contaminated as it ever was. So Liu took extra milk cartons for her cousins, and I took seconds of pasta for Aaron, a bit grudgingly. Technically he wasn’t owed anything for bringing the note, not by me; by Scholomance etiquette, that’s all settled outside. But he hadn’t got anything for it outside, after all.

It was odd being almost first out of the queue into the nearly empty cafeteria, with the enormously long tail of kids still snaking along the walls, tripled up, the sophomores poking the freshmen and pointing them at the ceiling tiles and the floor drains and the air vents on the walls, which they’d want to keep an eye on in the future. The last of the folded-up tables were scuttling back into the open space that had been left for the freshman rush, and unfolding back into place with squeals and thumps. My friend Nkoyo—could I think of her as a friend, too? I thought perhaps I could, but I hadn’t been handed a formal engraved notice yet, so I’d be doubtful a while longer—had got out in front with her best mates; she was at a prime table, positioned in the ring that’s exactly between the walls and the line, under only two ceiling tiles, with the nearest floor drain four tables away. She was standing up tall and waving us over, easy to spot: she was wearing a brand-new top and baggy trousers, each in a beautiful print of mixed wavy lines that I was fairly sure had enchantments woven in. This is the day of the year when everyone breaks out the one new outfit per year most of us brought in—my own extended wardrobe sadly got incinerated freshman year—and she had clearly been saving this one for senior year. Jowani was bringing over two big jugs of water while Cora did the perimeter wards.

It was odd, walking through the cafeteria over to join them. Even if we hadn’t been offered an actual invitation, there were loads of good tables still open, and all the bad ones. I’ve occasionally ended up with my pick of tables before, but that’s always been a bad and risky move born of getting to the cafeteria too early, usually as an act of desperation when I’d had too many days of bad luck with my meals. Now it was just the ordinary course of things. Everyone else going to the tables around me was a junior, too, or rather a senior; I knew most of them by face if not by name. Our numbers had been whittled down to roughly a thousand at this point, from a start of sixteen hundred. Which sounds horrifying, except there’re normally fewer than eight hundred kids left by the start of senior year. And normally, less than half of those make it out of graduation.

But our year had thrown a substantial wrench into the works, and he was sitting down at the table next to me. Nkoyo barely waited for me and Orion to take our seats before she burst out, “Did it work? Did you get the machinery fixed?”

“How many mals were down there?” Cora blurted over her at the same time, sliding into her own seat out of breath, still capping the small clay jug she’d used to drip a perimeter spell round the table.

They weren’t being rude, by Scholomance standards of etiquette: they were entitled to ask us, since they’d got the table; that’s more than a fair trade for first-hand information. Other seniors were busily occupying all the neighboring tables—giving us a solid perimeter of security—the better to listen in; the further ones were shamelessly leaning over and cupping their ears while friends watched their backs for them.

Everyone in the school already knew one very significant bit of information, namely that Orion and I had improbably made it back alive from our delightful excursion to the graduation hall this morning. But I’d spent the rest of the day holed up in my room, and Orion mostly avoided human beings unless they were being eaten by mals at the time, so anything else they’d heard had come to them filtered through the school gossip chain, and that’s not a confidence-inspiring source of information when you’re relying on it to stay alive.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about reliving the recent experience, but I knew they had a right to what I could give them. And it was indisputably me who had it to give, because before the food line had opened, I’d already overheard one of the other New York seniors asking Orion a similar question, and he’d said, “I think it went okay? I didn’t really see much. I just kept the mals off until they were done, and then we yanked back up.” It wasn’t even bravado; that was literally what he thought of the enterprise. Slaughtering a thousand mals in the middle of the graduation hall, just another day’s work. I could almost have felt sorry for Jermaine, who’d worn the expression of a person trying to have an important conversation with a brick wall.