She and Nkoyo and Jowani were friends, and they’d been great help for one another for tables and walking to class, but the same reason they’d been great for that was why they weren’t a viable graduation team: all three of them were incantations-track, and doing all the same languages. And Nkoyo was going to get decent alliance offers. In fact, she probably had one already, since just that morning she’d carefully mentioned that she might sit with someone else tomorrow for breakfast. A lot of alliances happened after midterm marks cleared. But Jowani and Cora were going to be stuck until after the end of the semester, when the enclavers had got their alliances set and the leftovers sorted themselves out.

It’s not that they were loads worse as students, even. As far as I knew, they were all three somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as classwork went. But Nkoyo was a star, and they weren’t. She’d always been the one who made the friends and connections, and when you thought of the three of them, you always thought of her in the lead. They’d leaned on her social skills the whole time, and that had been good for them—right until now, when everyone thought Nkoyo, and not one of them.

Most years, that meant their odds were going to be somewhere in the 10 percent range. The rule is that 50 percent of the graduating class makes it out, but that doesn’t mean it’s even odds. The kids in enclaver alliances almost all get out, with maybe one or two members picked off each team—rarely the enclave kids themselves—and that’s roughly 40 percent of the class. So the ones who die almost all come out of the 60 percent who don’t have an enclaver on their side. Of course, even that leaves you with better odds than you get on the outside of the Scholomance, which is why kids keep coming.

If the cleansing machinery down in the graduation hall really had got fixed, if it stayed fixed this year, they might make it out after all. But it wouldn’t improve Cora’s odds any to be going into the second half of the semester with a bad arm that she’d got because she’d screwed up and misjudged the amount of effort to put into her shop assignment. No enclaver was going to look at that arm and ask her to join their team. She sat down carefully, doing her best not to jostle the wound, but once she was down she still had to shut her eyes for a few long minutes, taking deep breaths before she tried to fumble at her milk one-handed and shaky.

Nkoyo silently reached over and got it and opened it. Cora took it and drank without looking at her. Nkoyo hadn’t taken unfair advantage. She’d helped them make it this far; it wasn’t on her if she couldn’t take them the whole way, if they weren’t good enough and she had to jettison them to make it herself, like boosters of rocket fuel falling away spent while the orbital module went flying on past gravity. There wasn’t anything she could do to save them, and they’d made their own choices, getting here. But Cora still didn’t look her in the face, and Nkoyo still didn’t say anything to her, and all of us at the table pretended we weren’t looking at Cora’s blood-stained arm when of course we were.

I didn’t know I was going to say anything until I did. “I can patch the arm if everyone at the table will help,” I said, and everyone paused eating and stared at me, either sidelong or just straight-out gawking. I hadn’t thought it through, just blurting it out, but the only thing to do in the face of the stares was push onward. “It’s a circle working. No one has to put in any extra mana, it’ll work if we all just hold the circle, but everyone already here has to do it.”

That’s actually a simplification of how the spell in question operates. The underlying principle is that you have to get a group of people to willingly put aside their selves and offer their time and energy to help perform a working for someone else’s benefit that doesn’t help any of them directly. And the trick is, once you ask a particular group, if anybody in the group refuses or can’t make themselves do it, the spell fails. It’s one of Mum’s, if you couldn’t tell already.

Nobody said anything for a moment. It’s not even remotely how things work in here. You don’t do anything for anyone without some kind of return, and the return’s always got to be something solid, unless there’s some more substantial connection in place: an alliance, dating, something. But that’s why I knew the spell would work if everyone did agree. It means a lot more in here than outside to do something for nothing. Even Cora herself was just staring at me confused. We weren’t even friends; she was willing to sit at a table with me now, when Chloe Rasmussen from New York was my ally and Orion Lake himself would be here as soon as he came off the line with his tray, but she’d barely tolerated my company all those years when Nkoyo used to let me tag along behind them on the way to language lab in the mornings. She was standoffish in general, and had always been a bit jealous of Nkoyo’s company, but it was more than that: she was aces at spirit magic, her family had a really long tradition of it, and she had clearly thought—and probably still did—that I was carrying some kind of unpleasant baggage on mine.

Nkoyo didn’t say anything. She was staring at her own tray without looking up, her lips curled in between her teeth, her hands curled on either side, waiting, waiting for someone else to speak. I really wished Orion had made it to the table already, and then Chloe said, “Okay,” and held a hand out to Aadhya, who was sitting between us.

Aadhya was definitely in the sidelong-eye camp, less at the request than at me: I could all but hear her saying okay, El, are you trying to develop a martyr thing of your own now or what, but after one good hard look, she just sighed and said, “Yeah, sure,” and took Chloe’s hand and held her other out to me. I took it, and as soon as I did I felt the living line of the circle building. I turned and offered my other one to Nadia, Ibrahim’s friend. She glanced over at Ibrahim but then after a moment took it, and he took hers and reached out to Yaakov across the table.

I’d been in circles with Mum a handful of times. She hadn’t asked me very often, almost always only when it was magical harm, usually someone suffering from a spell a maleficer had put on them or a complication from some spell they’d cast themselves, or the attack of some maleficaria. Healing something like that is a lot easier if you have another wizard helping, even a kid, instead of just you and a bunch of enthusiastic mundanes who can’t actually hold mana. But she didn’t ask me a lot, because most wizards who came to her for help couldn’t keep from getting uneasy round me. They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf—a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash. I never really wanted to help them. They were sick and weak and cursed and poisoned and desperate, but they were still part of the pack that hated me, that left me alone and scared and desperate myself. So Mum only asked me when she badly needed the power that came from me agreeing to help anyway, because otherwise she knew I’d say no sometimes. And I’d done it, grudgingly, partly to make Mum happy, partly to try and prove to myself I wasn’t what they saw when they looked at me.