I stood there stupid for a minute or two and then a bird called from somewhere and I started blubbing myself, too. It was horrible. It was almost the most horrible thing that had happened to me in here; it wasn’t exactly as bad as the maw-mouth, but it was hard to compare because it was horrible in such a completely different way. I have no idea what they were thinking when they’d made it, except of course I do. They wanted to make a room that would look charming on tours and impress other wizards, and make them all say how lovely it would be for the kids to have such a nice place to come to for exercise, how lovely to have this to make up for being trapped inside the school for four years without ever seeing the sun or feeling the wind or seeing a single green leaf, all the water you drink tasting faintly of sour metal, all the food the regurgitated slop of massive kettles filled with different vitamins and barely there enchantments to fool you into believing it’s something else, knowing the whole time you’re probably never coming out again, and it didn’t make up for any of that at all.

People started running out of the gym in droves. The only ones who didn’t were the stupid freshmen, who were all wandering around burbling out nonsense like, “Wow,” and “Look, there’s a nest!” and “It’s so pretty!” and making everyone who’d been in here for more than five minutes during the safest year on record want to stab them with knives. I would have gone running out myself, only my legs were as mushy as if I’d just been born, and so I just sat down on one of the picturesque rocks sobbing until Orion was there grabbing me by the shoulders saying, “El! El, what happened, what’s wrong?” I waved my hand frantically and he looked around with his face only confused, and then he said, “I don’t get it, you fixed the gym? But why are you crying over that? I gave up hunting a quattria to come back here!” in a faintly accusatory voice.

It did help. I got a breath and told him flatly through my snot and tears, “Lake, I’ve just saved your life again.”

“Oh for—I can take a quattria!” he snapped.

“You can’t take me,” I spat at him, and I heaved myself up onto my feet and stormed out on the energy of pure fury, which at least carried me out the doors and away from the grotesque lie of the grove.

I lurched away down the corridor, wiping my streaming nose on the hem of my t-shirt—his t-shirt actually, the New York one he’d given me, which I’d stupidly worn today, like a declaration; maybe that had been part of why the Shanghai kids had come at me. Because they were afraid of what I would help New York do to their enclave, their families, and why wouldn’t they be afraid? I could do anything.

There were kids crying in huddles scattered around the corridors. I went into the labyrinth and all the way to my seminar classroom, where at least I could be alone except for any maleficaria that wanted to try to jump me, which I’d have really appreciated at that moment. I went down the narrow corridor into the room and shut the door and put my head down on the ugly massive desk, and through the vent a faint breath of autumn leaves came into the room, and I cried for another two hours without anything at all trying to kill me.

Nobody bothered me the last few weeks of the semester, except by sort of sidling around me warily like I was a bomb that might go off unexpectedly. Faint wafts of fresh air scented with crisp leaves and early frost were now coming through the vents at occasional moments that emphasized how awful the air was all the rest of the time. My delightful classroom up in the library got them quite often. My freshmen all took deep breaths of it while I did my best not to vomit. I saw kids occasionally burst into tears in the cafeteria when one blew into their face. Every time, people would glance at me sideways, and then pretend really hard that they hadn’t.

The Shanghai kids had all backed a mile off, and for that matter so had the New York kids. During the previous month, people had briefly started doing things like asking me to trade books or passing me a jar in lab or loaning me a hammer in the shop. I’d been irritated at the time, since I’d understood very well it was because they’d decided I was an important person worth courting. But now they didn’t ask me for anything, and if I did say, “Can I have the psyllium husks,” four kids would jump at the same time to shove whatever thing I needed at me, more often than not knocking it over and spilling it all over the floor, at which point they would collectively go into a frantic routine of apologies and babbling while cleaning it up.

I did try saying things like, “I won’t bite,” only I said it while seething, so the message that actually got conveyed was that biting would be mild by comparison with whatever I would do instead. And of course they believed me. I’d already done something horrible beyond imagining: I’d made the Scholomance worse. Top marks for inflicting mass trauma. It was even getting the freshmen, too: three of them had died in the gym during the last couple of weeks. I made clear to mine that none of them were to go near the place, but other, less-well-advised ones, kept making excuses to go down there to play fun games of keep-away-from-the-surprise-mal or get-eaten-in-the-doorway. The death toll would’ve been higher except Orion had begun patrolling the place on a routine basis to hunt for the mals that were using it as a hunting ground. I wasn’t clear on whether it counted as him using the freshmen as bait if they were the ones staking themselves out.

We’re all wary of one another in here as a general rule. Budding maleficers are at the top of everyone’s list of potential threats, followed by enclavers, older kids, the better students, the more popular ones. Any other kid could become a mortal enemy without so much as a moment’s notice if the right conditions—usually a mal planning to eat at least one of us—came along. But we knew how to be afraid of one another; what we might do to one another had sensible limits. No one would ever in ten thousand years have imagined that if someone tried to kill me in the gym, I’d respond by rebuilding the gym fantasia and creating a fresh torment for everyone in the school, including myself. I certainly wouldn’t have imagined it.

So now I wasn’t just a dangerously powerful fellow student, to be flattered and watched and strategized over. I was an unpredictable and terrible force of nature that might do anything at all, and they were all shut up in here with me. Like I’d become part of the school myself.

As if to confirm it, the mals all suddenly stopped coming after me. I didn’t know why. I spent a few weeks panicking until Aadhya worked it out. “Right, here’s what’s going on,” she said, sketching it out on paper for us to understand, on a stick-figure diagram of the school’s screw-top shape. “It takes mana to run all the wards. Early in the year, when there’s not a lot of mals, the school does this neat trick: it opens a few of the wards, aimed right at you, and uses that mana to reinforce the other wards. The mals take the path of least resistance, and voilà, you’re target number one. But by now there’s too many of them and they’re squeezing through on their own as usual.”