This was especially awkward because a lot of the Scholomance doesn’t exactly exist. It’s made of real material, but the laws of physics get quite flexible in the void, so most of that material has been stretched thinner than it should be, the engineering doesn’t meet the regs, and the number one thing keeping it up is that we’re all believing in it as hard as we can stare. And that’s what I took out: in one horrible moment, I made the four other kids in my seminar extremely aware that the only thing between them and howling nothingness was a tin can held together by happy thoughts and pixie dust. They all screamed and tried to get to safety, only they couldn’t, since they were carrying the lack of belief along with them, and the seminar room and then the entire corridor started to come apart around them.

The only thing that stopped us taking out a massive swath of the school was that I hadn’t stopped believing myself. Still half groggy with eldritch vision, I stumbled after them out of the room into a corridor which was starting to bend and warp like aluminium foil under the weight of the entire massive school above it, and in my confusion I thought it was just me being drugged, so I shut my eyes and told myself firmly that the corridor was not by any means wobbling and put out my hand to the wall with the expectation that the wall would be there and solid, and so it was again. I yelled after the other kids, “It’s fine! It’s just eldritch gas! Stop running!” and when they looked back and saw that the corridor was fine around me, they were able to persuade themselves I was right, and then they started believing in the school again.

A moment later, I realized that actually I’d been wrong, because as soon as the corridor stabilized, the Scholomance slammed the door of the room shut and sealed it away behind a permanent hazard wall, which are normally reserved for lab rooms on the second floor where there’s been an alchemical accident so horrible the deadly effects won’t resolve for a decade or more. As the hazard wall shot down from the ceiling beside me, almost taking off my thumb in the process, I startled and glanced over long enough to catch just half a glimpse of the excessively real wall of the seminar room beyond it, crumpled into accordion folds. That’s how I worked out what I’d done.

I didn’t really know any of the other kids in the seminar. They were all languages-track seniors like me, of course, and one of them, Ravi, was an enclaver from Jaipur, so the other three had sat round him, the better to offer him help on his papers and exams. None of them had ever spoken to me. I only knew Ravi’s name because one of the others was a blond German girl named Liesel who had a violently annoying habit of cooing “Ravi, this is extremely excellent,” every time he let her edit his papers. It made me want to hurl a dictionary at both their heads, and all the more so because I’d seen her submitting a paper once—that’s how I knew her name—and that one peek had been enough to tell me she was probably going for valedictorian and at least ten times smarter than him, since he wasn’t even smart enough to have figured out that she was the best in the class; he usually gave his papers to one of the other boys and wasted class time flirting with her and staring at her breasts.

Of course, brains aren’t everything in all circumstances. Ravi was able to convince himself everything was fine a lot quicker than anyone else; by the time I got over to them, he was recovered and saying with easy assurance, “We’ll go to the library. We can’t be marked down if the classroom’s been shut. You’re welcome to come,” he added to me, in a tone of lordly generosity, and had the gall to gesture to the corridor, indicating that I was to take point position in exchange for the condescension. What made it even worse was that just a few weeks ago, without Chloe’s power-sharer on my wrist, I’d have had to do it and be grateful for the lucky chance of company.

“If I’m taking point for a walk mid-period, I’ll go by myself,” I said, rude. “Especially since none of you thought of mentioning the eldritch shine.” They’d all been in class before me. Since none of them had been attacked handing in their own assignments, they’d clearly spotted the signs—there’s a sort of faint iridescent glitter to the air near an eldritch horror that I wouldn’t have missed ordinarily—and pushed their own papers in from a distance. None of them had said a word as I’d stepped up to the slot myself.

“You’ve got to have your own lookout,” one of the boys said to me, a little defiantly.

“That’s right,” I said. “And now you can have yours.”

“What was that?” Liesel said suddenly. She’d been looking at the stabilized walls and the hazard door with a lot more suspicion than the rest of them, which she’d now translated into staring at me. “That spell which you used. Was that—La Main de la Mort?”

It had, in fact, been La Main de la Mort. She’d obviously done French at some point, assuming she hadn’t grown up bilingual anyway, and it’s not a hard spell to recognize; there’re not that many three-word killing spells. The difficulty of casting it isn’t learning the words, it’s just got a really extreme amount of the je ne sais quoi that a lot of French spells have: you’ve got to be able to toss them off blithely, effortlessly. Since La Main de la Mort kills you instead of your target if you get it even the slightest bit wrong, very few people feel blithe about giving it a go, unless for instance they’re inside a maw-mouth where death would be a reasonably good outcome. Also you’ve got to be able to channel a truly outrageous amount of mana without displaying the slightest effort, which is tricky for most people who aren’t designed to be dark queens of sorcery et cetera.

“Look it up yourself if you want to know,” I said, taking refuge in more rudeness, and walked away from them as fast as I could towards the stairs, but even Ravi was gawking at me.

At that point it wasn’t exactly transmutation of matter to work out that I had something substantial and disturbing under the hood. When I came in at lunchtime, I saw Liesel stopping to talk to Magnus at the New York table, and he was waving a couple of his hangers-on over to open a spot for her to sit down next to him. “Well, I’m fucked,” I told Aadhya and Liu, succinctly, as soon as I reached our table and sat down with them. And how right I was.

Mum spent a lot of time in my formative years gently reminding me that people don’t think about us nearly as much as we think they do, because they’re all busy worrying what people are thinking about them. I thought that I’d listened to her, but it turned out I hadn’t. Privately I’d believed, on some deep level, that everyone was in fact thinking about me all the time, evaluating me, et cetera, when really they hadn’t been giving me much of a thought at all. I had the pleasure of uncovering this exciting truth about myself because all of a sudden, a substantial number of people did start thinking about me quite a lot, and the contrast was hard to miss.

In retrospect, everyone had quickly written off the weirdness of Orion Lake falling for the class loser. He was already weird by all our usual standards. Even Magnus and the other New York enclavers, offering me a guaranteed spot: they hadn’t really thought I was anything unusual; they thought Orion was choosing to be odd in yet another way. And as for my surviving the graduation hall escapade, everyone had assumed that was Orion saving me. But Liesel spreading it around that I could sling La Main de la Mort while high on eldritch vapors was one straw too many for the collective camel. And once the other New York kids did actually spend a few moments thinking about me, of course it took them less than a day to realize where all their mana was going.