Sudarat was the only freshman that Prasong could talk to without arousing suspicions. He didn’t even have to go out of his way—she was going as far out of hers as she could to maintain her connections to the older Bangkok ex-enclavers. Even if all that got her was a chance to sit with them in the cafeteria once in a while, or the last hand-me-downs they couldn’t sell as seniors, that would still be better than nothing. So all Prasong needed to do was agree to let her fill an empty seat at his table for a single meal. She must have told him enough about her weird library seminar to convince him it was the perfect meal: eight freshmen in an isolated room with no witnesses around. I assume she didn’t mention me.

A few days later, he snuck upstairs just before the end of lunch period and laid down a flaying hex circle on the floor under the desks.

It wasn’t very good. You can’t exactly look up malia-sucking hexes in the library; officially there aren’t any malicious texts available in here. That’s nonsense of course, I’ve stumbled across at least a hundred of them. But anyone who went looking for them would probably have harder luck getting one. Anyway, Prasong wasn’t as ambitious as dear Jack. His hex was good enough to rip off a substantial patch of skin on his victims, opening us up so he could pull a tidy bit of malia out of us through our pain and horror, and I imagine that was all he wanted. Actually killing eight wizards at once, even freshmen, is no joke for a budding maleficer; the psychic damage would’ve left him visibly marked in the ominous sorts of ways that make your fellow students—particularly your nearest neighbors—gather up a sufficient group to put you down before you get any more bright ideas that might involve extracting mana from them.

Unfortunately for him, I noticed the hex before I even crossed the threshold. I assumed a construct mal had done it; some of the more advanced kinds can draw spell inscriptions, although usually not very well. That didn’t rule out this example. I could’ve done better without half trying, and that’s exactly what I did: I grabbed a piece of chalk off the nearest board, rewrote half the sigils to turn the spell back on the original inscriber—correcting the various mistakes and adding a few improvements while I was at it—and invoked it with contemptuous ease and barely an ounce of mana. I was even a little smug that the first attack of the afternoon had been so easy to deal with.

I only found out who had cast it at dinnertime, when people were gossiping energetically about how Prasong’s skin just completely flew off him in the middle of the language lab and how he ran around in circles screaming wildly until he died of massive blood loss and shock.

I won’t say I was sorry. I won’t. I vomited after dinner, but it was probably something I’d eaten. Sudarat left the cafeteria looking moderately ghastly herself. She and all the kids in the library had known at once what had happened: I’d made a point—smug, smug, smug—of showing them the hex circle, what it was trying to do to us, and how I was cleverly turning it back on the creator. She’d been extra quiet in the couple of weeks since, which was saying something. This was the first peep she’d let out in my direction since.

“From Shanghai?” I said slowly.

Sudarat nodded, a small jerk of her head. “Some people from Bangkok heard,” she said. “About the attacks we’ve had. Some other people. When I told…” She trailed off, but I’d got the picture. When she’d told Prasong about the library attacks, other older Bangkok kids had been at the table, too. And now her former enclave mates were using her as the source of useful gossip to pass along, just to score a few points. Just like all of us loser kids do, because you can’t know which of those points is going to be the one that gets you through the graduation hall gates.

“What did you tell them?” I said.

Her head was bent down towards her desk, the short blunt edge of her hair hiding her eyes, but I could see her lips and throat work when she swallowed. “I said, I didn’t remember. Then I said no.”

She was learning, the way every loser freshman learns. She’d understood that they weren’t asking out of consideration for her: they were hunting for information that was valuable to them. She understood that they were sniffing around after me. But she hadn’t learned the full lesson yet, because she’d done the wrong thing. What she should have done, obviously, was find out how much the information was worth, and sell it to them. Instead, she’d lied to protect me, to someone who had hope to offer her: hope of help, hope of a new home.

Thoughtful of her, although I’d have been happier if someone from Shanghai hadn’t been suspicious enough to be asking her questions in the first place. That meant a raft of bad things. For one, the seniors in Shanghai enclave were actively trying to figure out what was going on with the mals—and they had nine students in our year alone, not to mention all their allies. For another, they already knew that our library session had been attacked by a mal at least once, which made us unusual this year. They were surely trying to put that information together with any other known mal attacks, which would be the handful that had spilled over into the workshop from my seminar room. As soon as someone found out that there was a single-person language seminar held next to the workshop that was getting attacked, and the single person happened to also be the only senior in the library room that was getting attacked, that wouldn’t be a difficult blank to fill in.

I had no idea what would happen when the information all came out. The other New York kids might decide to cut Chloe and us off from the pipe. If Orion wasn’t supplying them with fresh mana anyway, they didn’t have a lot to lose from ditching his “girlfriend.” And that could—would—be the least of it. If people worked out that the school was gunning for me in particular, they’d want to know why, and if they couldn’t turn up a reason, someone would probably decide to poke me with a sharp stick to find out. If they didn’t just decide that it was a good idea to give the school what it wanted.

So, my midterm study sessions were exceptionally cheery.

Except actually they were. The shine of studying with other people still hadn’t dulled for me. We’d cleaned up Chloe’s double-width room, and found new stuffing for the cushions—if you think we’d turn up our noses at reusing some perfectly good and comfortable cushions just because they’d previously been home to a pair of monsters and a half-digested fellow student, you haven’t been paying attention—and we gathered there almost every evening, with a little basket in the middle where our mice could snooze between getting petted and even occasionally fed a treat by anyone invited to join us.

It was almost never just the four of us. Whatever subject we wanted to cover, it was a sure bet we could get in more people for the asking. I had plenty of help for Arabic: Ibrahim and a couple of his friends were happy to come by and give me advice as the price of admission. Nkoyo came almost every night, too, and she was doing that general Sanskrit seminar I’d expected to get. Thanks to their help, I was making some real headway on the Golden Stone sutras: just that week I’d actually got to the first of the major workings.