“Huh,” Orion said, sounding vaguely dubious, like he wasn’t sure he believed me.

“It’s negative malia if it’s anything,” I said. Occasionally, a repentant maleficer comes to Mum for help, someone like Liu was on the way to being: not the gleefully monstrous ones but the ones who went partway down the road—usually to make it through puberty alive—and have now changed their minds and would like to go back. She won’t do spirit cleansing for them or anything like that, but if they ask sincerely, she’ll let them join her circle, and generally once they’ve spent as many years doing the circle work as they did being maleficers, they come right again, and she tells them to go and make a circle of their own somewhere.

“Maybe that’s why it feels weird to you,” Aadhya said to Orion. “Are you seeing an aura?”

“Nmgh,” Orion said with half a pound of spaghetti dangling out of his mouth. He heaved the rest of it in and swallowed. “It’s more like—for a minute, she had these really crisp edges. Like you do sometimes,” he added to me, and then he blushed and stared down at his plate.

I glared at him, completely unflattered. “And why exactly did that make you think it was using malia?”

“Uh” was the feeble response. “It’s—maybe it’s just power?” he tried, kind of desperately.

“Do mals have these crisp edges?” I demanded.

“No?” Under my continuing glare, he wilted. “Some of them? Sometimes?”

I stewed over it while shoving in the rest of my own dinner. Apparently I looked like a maleficaria to him occasionally? Although Orion didn’t see anything odd about human maleficers: he hadn’t noticed our life-eating neighbor Jack was one until after that charmer had tried to leave my intestines piled on the floor of my room. And all right, there’re so many wizards who use small bits of malia here and there, stolen from things like plants or bugs or filched from a piece of work that someone else left unattended, that Orion could plausibly have a hard time picking the hardcore maleficers out. Those of us who strictly use only mana that we’ve raised ourselves or that someone has given us freely are the minority. But still: apparently I’m visibly more of a monster than an evil wizard is. Hurrah.

And an even larger hurrah: Orion found that appealing. It sounded too much like Aadhya had been right about what Orion saw in me. I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself, and anyway one of the main reasons I’d been avoiding Orion’s room lately was the strong feeling that it would be for the best for all concerned if I didn’t see him with his shirt off again anytime soon, so that would be pot and kettle. But I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of being found attractive because I seem like a terrifying creation of dark sorcery instead of despite it.

I stewed enough over it that I completely missed the implication of the rest of what Orion had said until I was slogging upstairs to my Wednesday library session. Just short of the top stair—where my entire gaggle of freshmen were waiting for me to lead them to whatever potential doom I was scheduled to save them from today—I halted, and realized that if Orion hadn’t got his results from his senior seminar yet, it wasn’t because he was going to get an A+, since he’d been falling down on everything badly enough to forget changing his t-shirt. He was going to fail.

And when you fail alchemy, you don’t get attacked by mals. You just get to interact very intimately with your last brewing assignment, and being an invincible monster-killing machine does you absolutely no good against being doused in a vat of etching acid used to carve mystical runes into steel, which had been Orion’s midterm assignment.

I stared up the last few stairs at the eight freshmen, who were all peering anxiously back at me, and then I said, “Right, field trip today,” and turned round to lead them downstairs on a three-stairs-at-a-time rush barely short of sending them pell-mell the whole way to the bottom. I had to actually grab Zheng to stop him tumbling past the alchemy floor landing. Once I’d steadied him, I ran for it down the corridor with the pack of them behind me, as fast as their considerably shorter legs could carry them. I didn’t know what room Orion was in, so I just shoved open every lab door I saw and yelled in, “Lake?” until someone yelled back, “He’s in two ninety-three!” I turned and ran past the pack of freshmen still going the other way, all of them wheeling to follow me like a flock of confused geese. I passed the landing and went on the other way, threw open the door to 293, and without even breaking stride tackled Orion away from the lab bench, just as the bell for the start of class rang and all the complex brewing equipment at his station started to rattle and belch smoke.

The large copper vat foamed over so energetically that the whole lid got lifted off and clanged away onto the floor atop a massive and expanding column of violet foam that poured over the sides and then cascaded down from the surface of the table and over the floor, enormous black billows of smoke hissing up in its path. There was a lot of screaming and running from the rest of the students that only made things worse, other experiments going up as they were hastily abandoned. We fumbled up to our feet together, but we couldn’t see a thing; I kept a death grip on Orion’s wrist and would have walked us both the wrong way, only the freshmen all started yelling from the door, “El! El!” and Zheng and Jingxi and Sunita—I’d been trying really hard not to learn their names, but it wasn’t going very well—even made a line into the room and cast light spells to give us a path.

We were still coughing horribly by the time we managed to make it out into the corridor, and I couldn’t speak afterwards until Sudarat came round, giving us each a drink of water out of her charmed portable flask, but I could and did immediately smack Orion along the back of his unnecessarily thick skull and then waggled my hand with all five fingers spread out in his face, for emphasis. He gave me a halfhearted scowl and batted it away.

“Ishould do this in the lab,” Orion said.

“You don’t need the equipment in front of your face to copy out a clear recipe, Lake, and you needn’t think you’re being clever, either,” I said, because what he really meant was, he should get to wander around the corridors and poke his beaky nose into every room on the alchemy floor until he found some poor unsuspecting half-grown nightcrawler or striga and got to slaughter them. “How you’ve got through three and a quarter years in here without learning when you have to pay attention to your work is beyond me.”

He groaned deeply and put his head down on the desk, which was my old study carrel in the nook of the library. I’d taken great pleasure in using New York mana to clear out the still-waiting booby trap that Magnus had left for me last term; it was one of the first things I’d done when Chloe had given me the power-sharer. Hauling Orion up to the library and shoving him into a dark corner was my latest attempt to actually get him to do his remedial alchemy assignment, which was absolutely going to disintegrate him before the end of the month, along with several innocent bystanders and possibly me if he didn’t actually buckle down to it. I’d started making him show me his progress every evening at dinner, and since there hadn’t been any in the week and a half since the last time he’d nearly got me disintegrated, I’d dragged him out of bed at first bell this fine Saturday morning and marched him upstairs after breakfast.