Even in here, with no distractions, he spent at least ten minutes gazing woebegone at his lab instructions for every one minute he spent actually reading them. “What is wrong with you?” I asked, after another hour and several more heaved sighs. “You weren’t a complete incompetent before. Are you getting senioritis or something?” That’s a highly fatal condition in the Scholomance.

“I’m just tired,” he said. “The mals keep hiding from me, there aren’t enough of them, I’m low on mana all the time—no, I don’t want it!” he added with a snap, when I reached for the power-sharer on my wrist again. “If I could find any mals to use mana on, I wouldn’t need to suck it from the pool!”

“What you need to use mana on is your alchemy assignment, so stop being a numpty, take some, and get it done!” I said.

He ground his teeth and then said sulkily, “Fine, but just give me some, don’t give me the sharer.”

That made less than no sense, since you lose some mana in each transfer. Not loads or anything, but even a little bit was a pointless waste of someone else’s deeply annoying work. “Is this some sort of kinky thing you’ve got going?” I said suspiciously.

“No! You know I can’t have access to the pool.”

“Right, because you’ve got lousy mana discipline and you’ll pull gobs when you’re not paying attention,” I said. I wasn’t going to coddle him about it. “So what? Pay attention for five seconds.”

His alchemy assignment had suddenly developed a powerful fascination, judging by how hard he was staring down at it. “It’s not—it doesn’t work that way.”

“What, if you get access you’ll suck the whole thing dry involuntarily?” I said, sarcastically, except he flushed red as though that was really on the table. “Are you speaking from some kind of experience here, or—”

“I got a power-sharer to practice with six months before induction, like everybody else,” Orion said in totally flat tones. “I sucked the entire enclave’s active reservoir dry in half an hour. Even my mom couldn’t pull me off it.” I gawked at him in disbelief. He didn’t turn his head, just twitched his shoulders in a stiff, brief shrug. “She thinks it’s got something to do with me being able to pull from mals. That it’s the same kind of channel, and I can’t tell the difference.”

I was staring at him in fascination. “Why didn’t you just—pop?” It sounded like filling a water balloon from a firehose. I’ve got what anyone would call a reasonable mana capacity, namely a hundred times the average, and even that couldn’t be a noticeable fraction of the active mana reservoir of the entire New York enclave. He only shrugged impatiently, as if he’d never bothered to give it a thought.

“And what on earth did you use it all for? That much mana, you should still be coasting along for the next ten years even if you were doing major arcana every day.”

“I didn’t want to take the mana! I put it back! As soon as my dad made me the one-way sharer.” He held up his wrist with his narrow band around it. He sounded a little frayed, and it occurred to me: of course those wankers at his enclave had probably made him feel like a maleficer over it, or worse. One of the more common ways that enclaves get taken down is if one of their enemies gets a traitor on the inside to steal a batch of the enclave’s mana pool and hand it over, and then the enemy enclave can destroy them using their own power. It’s happened a handful of times, all of them a popular subject for wizard storytelling, at least among kids who don’t live in enclaves. It might well be how Bangkok had been taken down, in fact.

“How long did it take your dad to make it?” I asked, and Orion’s shoulders hunched.

“A week,” he muttered. I imagine all the grown wizards in New York had really enjoyed a thirteen-year-old walking around with the mana to wreck their entire enclave in his belly, and had made sure he enjoyed that week just as much as they did.

I wanted to go throw rocks at them, and also possibly to put my arms round Orion and hug him, but obviously those were equally impossible, so instead I just gave him a bracing thump on the shoulder and said heartily, “Let’s set you to rights, then.”

I pulled a substantial helping of mana through the power-sharer. I’d only ever been taking mana out of the pool for crisis situations; it felt odd doing it deliberately, without anything threatening me. It wasn’t like getting mana out of the crystals Mum gave me, the mana I stored myself; that mana had a different kind of feel to it, a bit rougher round the edges, like I could still feel the work and pain that I’d put into it. Or maybe it was just that when I did it, I was always thinking of the work and pain I’d have to go through to replace anything I took. It was easier and smoother to pull mana back out of the shared pool, the pool I didn’t have to fill up all by myself, and I was already hopelessly used to it. Orion wasn’t the only greedy one. I could’ve gladly drunk of it until I filled up every empty corner of myself.

But instead I took a carefully measured amount, the amount I usually put in on brewing an alchemy recipe myself, and I put my hand on his chest and nudged it at him. He gave a gasp and shut his eyes, covering my hand with his and pressing it there a moment, and I could feel his chest expanding and his heart beating thump and his skin warm through the thin worn fabric of his t-shirt—at least it was clean, I’d made him change it and shower this morning, but we’d climbed four flights of stairs and I could smell him a bit anyway, except it was a nice smell, and he opened his eyes and stared at me and kept his hand over mine, mana flowing between us, and I was almost certain something was going to happen and that I wasn’t going to stop it happening, and while I was also almost certain that it was a bad idea, it felt like the sort of bad idea that’s great fun at the time, and then Orion yanked his hand back squalling, “Ow!” His thumb was dripping blood. Precious had climbed out of her cup and down my arm without me even noticing and bit him.

I glared at her incredulously while Orion whimpered his way through digging out a plaster from his backpack and covering up the mark of her deeply planted incisors. She sat on the edge of the desk washing her face and whiskers with an air of enormous satisfaction. “I don’t need a chaperone, much less one who’s a mouse,” I hissed at her under my breath. “Aren’t you lot having babies when you’re a month old?” She only twitched her nose at me dismissively.

Orion avoided looking at me at all the rest of the morning, which was quite a trick when we were sitting next to each other. Of course, I managed it myself, too. I wasn’t at all tempted to do otherwise. Even in the moment, whatever we’d been about to do had seemed like a bad idea, and thankfully I wasn’t in the moment anymore. I’d never been in a moment with anyone before and I didn’t like it at all. What business did my brain have coming up with a patently stupid idea like kissing Orion Lake in the stacks instead of doing my classwork? It felt like nothing more than the symptoms of a mindworm infestation, per the description in the sophomore maleficaria textbook: mysterious and uncharacteristic foreign thoughts inserting themselves at unwanted and unpredictable times. If only I had a mindworm infestation. All I had was Orion sitting next to me in his too-small t-shirt from sophomore year that was the only clean one he had left this week and his arm about four inches away from mine.