That night when I left the library to go down to bed, I glanced back and saw Magnus and three friends closing in on Chloe around a couch in the reading room, the dismay on her face clear to read even from between their backs. I thought about going back, but what was the use? Was I going to ask Chloe to lie to her enclave friends, the people she’d spend the rest of her life with, just so I could keep sucking down mana from them? Was I going to beg them to keep letting me cling on? Obviously not. Was I going to threaten them? Tempting but no. There wasn’t anything else to say or do. So I just turned my back and went down, in the firm certainty that they’d insist on Chloe cutting me off first thing the next morning. Actually, that was my optimistic scenario. Really I expected Magnus to appear at my door leading a school-wide mob with not-necessarily-metaphorical pitchforks.

The thing is, I’m not actually unique in the history of wizard society; not even Orion is, really. We’re both once-in-a-generation talents, but those happen, as you might have guessed, once in a generation. It is a bit of a coincidence that we’re in school at the same time, and that we’re both fairly extreme examples. But I’m reasonably sure that’s because there’s some violation of balance being redressed on our backs. Dad nobly walks into a maw-mouth for an eternity of pain to save me and Mum; she gives out too much healing for free; I end up with an affinity for violence and mass destruction. The year before that, twelve maleficers murdered the entire senior class, so a hero who would save hundreds of kids in school got conceived. The moral physics of the principle of balance: equal and opposite reactions totting up on both sides.

The point is, wizards like us do come along every so often: a single individual powerful enough to shift the balance of power among the enclaves depending on where they land. Roughly forty years ago, a hugely powerful artificer with an affinity for large-scale construction came through the school. Every major enclave made him offers. He turned them all down and went home to Shanghai, where his family’s ancient former enclave had been occupied by a maw-mouth. He organized a circle of independent wizards to help him, personally spearheaded the effort to take out the maw-mouth, and as you might imagine was immediately acclaimed as the new Dominus, not three years out of school. It still looked like a bad deal for him: the enclave he rescued was ancient and had soaked up magic for centuries, but it was small and poky by modern standards, and at the time most of the really talented Chinese wizards headed straight to New York, to London, to the California enclaves. Even Guangzhou and Beijing had to recruit from the second string.

Well, after four decades of Li Shan Feng’s rule, Shanghai’s got six towers and a monorail inside the enclave, they just opened their seventh gateway, and lately they’ve been signaling that they’re thinking of splitting off the Asian enclaves and building a new school themselves. And that’s part of what makes Orion so important, so important that New York was willing to throw a priceless guaranteed enclave spot at some loser girl just because Orion liked her. Everyone knows there’s a power struggle coming, and Orion’s not just a top student inside the Scholomance; he’s a game-changer on the outside. No one’s going to go to outright war with an enclave that has an invincible fighter, and that’s not even touching on the resource he represents if he can convert mals into mana. And he belongs really securely to New York: son of the very likely future Domina, no less, and I’m sure he’s at least partly responsible for her being in that position. All the kids from Shanghai in here probably came in with instructions to keep a close eye on him, and gather as much information as they could. They haven’t got any less anxious about him over the last three years, while he’s been busy building a substantial fan club of all the kids he’s saved.

What I hadn’t realized, as I went down to bed, was that I was about to be promoted to game-changer status alongside him.

Chloe didn’t try to lie to Magnus—she’s a terrible liar anyway. She fell back on desperately arguing that they had to keep giving me mana or else, and went into a lot of detail about the grisly potential else, with a vivid description of my dismemberment of her cushion mals. A normal person would have been terrified to find out about nuclear bomb me waiting to go off. Magnus decided that he quite fancied bringing a tidy nuclear bomb home to his parents.

By breakfast the next morning, I’d gladly have faced any number of pitchforks instead of having to see his smug rubbish dump of a face smirking at the Shanghai kids across the cafeteria, like he’d done something clever or recruited me by hand, instead of having done his level best just last term to kill me. The Shanghai kids all looked grim and worried back, for that matter. By that afternoon, I knew for a fact that they were offering stuff to people for details about me, because they had another go at questioning Sudarat: one of them had actually offered her a power-sharer for the rest of the year, which was almost guaranteed to keep her alive that long. “Take it,” I told her bitterly. “Someone ought to do well out of this.”

I suppose I didn’t have the right to complain: New York wasn’t cutting me off after all, so I still had lovely torrents of mana coming. If anything, the other New York kids had all got more enthusiastic about building mana now that they knew where it was going. Because of course they expected to get a handsome return on investment, namely me, a massive gun tucked neatly in their enclave’s back pocket, ready for use in case of emergencies. They were all delightedly hoping to give me exactly the post-Scholomance life I’d dreamed of for years. The bastards.

Two days later, Orion said to me, of all things, “Hey, after graduation, what do you think of taking a road trip?”

I stared at him. “What?”

“The guys were talking about our doing a group road trip,” he said earnestly. “The enclave has this really great customized RV, they’d let us take it, we were thinking…” He trailed off, possibly alerted by my expression of total incredulity that there was something odd about this conversation. It wasn’t just that he had actually out-loud attempted to make concrete plans set in the future that required making the assumption that we’d all survive to appear for these plans—horribly taboo among all but the richest enclavers, and even they have the tact to avoid the topic in mixed company—but he was trying to suggest that I voluntarily spend time with the rest of the New York enclavers.

I knew he hadn’t come up with the idea on his own. Chloe had once told me with a perfectly straight face that Orion didn’t want anything except to kill mals, which was absolute bollocks, but it was the kind of absolute bollocks that I’m certain everyone around him his entire life had so strongly encouraged that it had got lodged in his own head. And the power-sharer he wore only went one way, so he had to go round killing them if he wanted mana, which all of us do. They’d programmed him really thoroughly to spend all his time thinking about hunting. The only other thing I’d ever heard him actually express wanting was me, which I choose to believe meant anyone at all who’d treat him like a person instead of a mal-killing automaton.