“A filthy soggy dishcloth,” I said, trying to vent enough of my fury to think through the situation. It wasn’t the numbers: I can handle a thousand enemies as easily as seven, as long as by handle you mean “kill in a grisly fashion.” I hadn’t any idea what to do about them otherwise. I do have a top-notch spell to seize total control over the minds of a group of people, only there isn’t a constraint on the size of the crowd: you have to cast it on a defined physical space isolated by things like walls, and then it grabs everyone in it. In this case, we were inside the gym that was holding literally every kid in the school. Also, the spell was quite vague on the aftereffects on the minds in question.

I could just have waited until the other kid threw his spell, and then caught it and thrown it back at him. It’s hard to describe how that works, and in fact it doesn’t work for most people; the first-year incantations textbook informed us firmly that you’re much better off either doing a defensive spell or trying to get your own offensive spell out before the other wizard fires off theirs. But I’m brilliant at reflecting as long as the spell being thrown at me is malicious or destructive enough, and I had a strong presentiment that wasn’t going to be a problem in this case.

And then I would have the pleasure of watching up-close while his skin flew off his body, or his intestines exploded out of his mouth or his brains dribbled out his ears or whatever horrible thing he meant to do to us, and it would just be the purest self-defense; no one would even criticize me for it. Not to my face, at any rate.

I would really have liked to be angry at them right then. I often haven’t any difficulty in contemplating extreme violence and even murder when I’m angry, and I can get angry at an enclaver at the drop of a hat. But I couldn’t be angry at them, not that way, not with that helpful burning righteous rage, because I’m really very good at knowing the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, and picking a fight to the death with a wizard who’s capable of killing with a wave of her hand isn’t it. If I was dangerous enough to warrant killing, the smart selfish enclaver thing for them to do was to keep the bloody hell away from me, as far as possible. They ought to have kept their heads down, got out safely as they were all sure to do, and then gone home to tell their parents about me. They were teenagers; they had every right to let me be the grown-ups’ problem.

Instead here they were, all of them gambling with their safe, sheltered lives—they had to assume I’d take out at least one of them, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t even have loser allies along with them to take that mortal blow. The boy in front getting ready to cast was an enclaver: his face was vaguely familiar from the language lab, round and spotty with a mustache he’d valiantly been trying to grow for the last two years. We’d never studied any of the same languages; I didn’t know his name. But Liu might: her mum and dad had worked for the enclave a few times. Their parents might know each other.

And I did know the girl backing him up, Wang Yuyan, because everyone in languages track knew her: she was doing twelve languages, which no enclave kid needed to do. Either she was ambitious or she loved languages madly or maybe she was just a tremendous masochist, I had no idea. I didn’t really know her, we’d never had a conversation or anything. But we’d been in the same Sanskrit section sophomore year, and one time I’d had a dictionary she needed—when you’re trying to get the meaning of a more obscure word, you often need to chase it down through three or four dictionaries until you end up in a language you’re fluent in—and she’d asked me to look the word up for her in a perfectly civil way, and offered to look one up for me in return.

That might not sound like much, but for comparison’s sake, in freshman year an enclave kid from Sydney glanced down at the really good French–English dictionary I’d found that week in the library and said, “Let’s have that, there’s a good girl,” not even asking. And because I told him exactly where he could hop off, at the end of class he had two of his minion-friends trip me going out of the room while another grabbed my entire bag and ran down the corridor shaking all my things out, yelling, “Free supplies!” while everyone laughed and grabbed.

I got up in the doorway with my lip bleeding and my forehead bruised. He was standing right there with two more of his pals to enjoy the show, all of them grinning, and then I turned and looked him in the face and thought in a red haze of all the things I could have done to him, so he stopped grinning and they fled the other way. Ever since, he’s firmly ignored my existence. Ah, the advantages of being a monstrous dark sorceress in embryonic form.

But he wouldn’t have stopped on his own. That’s what enclavers are like, most of them. Like Magnus, who was the reason we were exposed and also the reason the Shanghai kids were putting themselves on the line to take me out. Because they could imagine what someone like that would do with the kind of power I had.

And probably, maybe, at least half of those enclaver kids closing in round us were like Magnus themselves, but Yuyan wasn’t. I knew that much about her, and I also knew what she was casting, because I’d overheard people talking about this fantastic spell she’d got in her languages seminar that allowed you to get behind someone else’s spell and push, meaning that whatever spotty mustache boy was about to throw at us, she’d double it. That meant that when I flung it back, she’d get hit with the reflection, too. And maybe she deserved it, but I didn’t want to give it to her, to any of those kids getting ready to kill us for no reason other than being absolutely terrified of me and what I might do. It felt like making them right to have come after me.

But I even less wanted to let them kill me and Chloe, so I was just steeling my gut to go ahead and reflect the spell back anyway, when Chloe pulled a tiny plastic spray bottle filled with blue sparkling stuff from her pocket and spritzed it in the air all round us. On the other side of the glimmering, the whole room slowed down like everyone but the two of us was moving through mud—which meant of course she’d sped the two of us up; much easier.

“Do you have enough for us to run for it?” I asked her, but she shook her head, holding it up for me to see: the reservoir was the size of an underfed caterpillar, and there was barely any of the blue stuff left in the bottom.

“I just couldn’t think of anything else to do that would be quick enough,” she said. “I’ve got a blinding spray on me, but if I use it on those two incanters, Hu Zixuan in the back is going to hit us, and I’m almost sure that thing he has is a reviser. We’ve heard rumors about him working on one since he got here, and he’ll have it powered up by the time they go down—”

She was pointing at a kid all the way in the back of the group on the other side. I hadn’t paid much attention to him, because he was so shrimpy he looked like a sophomore at best; I’d assumed he was just helping to provide mana. But as soon as Chloe pointed him out, I realized it was the other way round: the five people fanned out in front of him were screening him and feeding mana back to him. Zixuan had a small pale-green rod almost completely hidden in his hand, which was connected by a thin gold wire to what had to be the rest of the artifact in his pocket: I could see slowed-down light gleaming along the line.