But the sunlamps still work, and at least there’s wide-open room to run around and move, with an enormously high ceiling that lets you see mals dropping on you with plenty of warning. Most kids love the gym. I’ve avoided the place for virtually my entire Scholomance career. Mals come to the gym all the time; it’s on the lowest floor, so it’s the first stop for any of them who have managed to squirm past the wards from below. It’s a bad place to be a solitary zebra. And if I ever tried to join anything as casual as a game of tag, within a few minutes everyone else in the group had mysteriously decided they were moving on to something else that involved picking teams, and I’d always be odd one out. I did try to go running on my own instead, but that made me just a bit of an appealing target, and the other kids would make things worse. They’d deliberately move their game or some piece of equipment they’d cobbled together so that I’d have to run through a narrow lane near the walls, or cross some convoluted bit of greyish landscaping just right for mals to hide in. It wasn’t simply out of pure dislike. Not that they didn’t dislike me, but anything that got me would be something that didn’t get them.

So I don’t go to the gym. Instead I exercise alone in my room to build mana, and it’s always good for a boost if I first dwell on why I’ve got to do it alone in my room, and being rejected and outcast. That’s the kind of thing that makes you really not want to exercise and just lie on your bed and eat ice cream, except there’s no ice cream to be had in the Scholomance, which makes you feel worse, and if you can force yourself to exercise anyway despite being miserable and not wanting to, voilà, extra mana.

But I’ve gone to every Field Day. I could never afford to miss a day of eating, much less one of the best days of eating we get each year. At least on Field Day, the activities are set and you just queue up to do each one, so I couldn’t be left out comprehensively. And because of all that exercise I do alone in my room, I usually come out with a fair haul of tokens. And an even larger haul of resentment, since I’m clearly a good choice for teams and still never get picked.

Even this year, going into the gym I was ready, automatically, for Aadhya and Liu to ditch me. I don’t mean I expected that to happen—it would’ve been a horrid surprise—but some part of my brain was planning for it anyway, working out the kind of strategy I’ve always needed to have for Field Day. First I’d go for the rope climb, because everyone avoids it early on, when there still might be some mals hiding in the ceiling panels or camouflaged against the dingy mottled grey that was once the sky. So the queue is short and you can get the tickets quick, and while you’re up there, you take a look round and see which other activities have the short queues, because if you don’t have allies watching your back, overall your best odds are to take a few risks up front and get enough tickets to spend the rest of the day eating and performing perfunctory cheers until people start to head back to their rooms.

So I was primed and ready to be abandoned and left on the sidelines. What I wasn’t ready for was Magnus. Oh, I’d have reacted at speed if he’d tried to slip me some kind of contact poison or if he’d sent some minor gnawing construct to chew through a rope while I was on it. I was, however, completely unprepared for what he actually did.

A shoving match started while I was queued up with Aadhya and Liu and Chloe for the relay race, and a bunch of big senior boys went tumbling across the queue, cutting me and Chloe off. It turned into everyone shoving angrily, trying to keep their places or get better ones in the confusion, and we ended up pushed out of the queue and staring at Aadhya and Liu across a messy knot of people. We’d already been queuing for twenty minutes, and the line had grown a lot longer in that time. If Aadhya and Liu gave up the spot and came back to us, we’d all end up losing the time for a full activity or two. But everyone in the queue was keyed up, and no one was going to let us get back to our original places without a fight.

“Chloe!” Magnus yelled from the nearest queue, where he was about to go into the tug-of-war. “That’s Jaclyn and Sung behind your allies, let them have your spots and come over here!” Aadhya was already waving a thumbs-up at us from over the sea of heads, and Chloe grabbed my hand and ran with me over to where Magnus and Jermaine had stiff-armed a couple of juniors in the queue behind them, who weren’t brave enough to start arguing when they let us in.

I was so completely bewildered by Magnus going out of his way to be helpful that I had my hands on the big rope before I worked out that the whole thing had been a setup: his ally Sung had definitely been one of the kids in the shoving match, and I was sure a couple of the others had also been New York hangers-on. I craned over for a look at the other queue: Aadhya and Liu were still another five minutes back from the start of the relay races, which meant that when we had finished here, in order to hook back up with them, Chloe and I would have to waste that time just standing around like target mannequins. It would make much more obvious sense for them to stick with Jaclyn and Sung and for us to go on to something else—with Magnus, who apparently now wanted my company. Or rather wanted to cut me away from Aadhya and Liu, and make sure I was firmly embedded in the New York crowd.

“Tebow, if no one’s ever told you, you’re a soggy dishcloth,” I told Magnus when we got off the tug-of-war—our side had won; I’d yanked with a lot of vengeful fury involved. He stopped open-mouthed in the start of whatever hurrah-go-team speech he’d been about to deliver, so likely no one ever had, even though the resemblance was uncanny in my opinion: cold, useless, clings when all you want is to shake it off. “Sorry, Rasmussen, I’m not spending all day with this wanker,” I told Chloe, and marched off towards the long line for the egg-and-spoon races. Those are always popular, despite being possibly the stupidest activity a human being could engage in, since even if a spoon turns out to be a mimic or an egg hatches something unpleasant halfway through the race, they usually can’t be very terrible if they’re only the size of a spoon.

Chloe joined me on the line a moment later, with a beleaguered expression that annoyed me by reminding me of the similar look Mum occasionally gets when she’s been trying to make peace between me and the most recently irritated commune-dweller. At least Chloe didn’t try to persuade me that I ought to try and see things from Magnus’s side, and call forth his understanding by offering my own, et cetera. She was still trying to think of what she did want to say—I don’t know why Americans won’t just talk about the weather like reasonable people—when Mistoffeles suddenly put his head out of the little cup on her chest and emitted a few alarmed squeaks, at which point I noticed that eight kids from Shanghai enclave had casually been drifting off the lines on either side of ours and were now very-not-casually closing in around us. And one of them was already muttering away at an incantation for something unpleasant that he was about to throw in our faces.

Chloe darted a scared look over towards Aadhya and Liu—deep in the relay race and not even glancing our way—and then looked around for anyone else from New York, except Orion wasn’t anywhere to be seen, I presume too busy hunting the mals in the stairways and corridors, and of course Magnus the Magnificent had flounced off with the rest of his pals to huddle on the other side of the gym and discuss what to do about my refusal to accept their wide-armed welcome.