They all felt at least twice as long as usual. Distances in the Scholomance are extremely flexible. They can be long, agonizingly long, or approaching the infinite, depending largely on how much you’d like them to be otherwise. It also didn’t help that I was so early. I didn’t even see another kid until I was panting my way up past the sophomore res hall, where the early risers had started trickling onto the stairs in small groups, mostly alchemy and artifice students hoping to nab better seats in the workshop and the labs. By the time I reached the freshman floor, the regular morning exodus was in full swing, but since they were all freshmen on their first day with no real idea where they were going, that didn’t speed the stairs up at all.

The only saving grace of the whole painful trip was that I kept my storing crystal tightly clenched in my fist the whole time, concentrating on pushing mana into it. By the end of the final flight, where my gut was throbbing and my thighs were burning in counterpoint, every single deliberate step made a noticeable increase in the glow coming from between my fingers, and I had filled a good quarter of it by the time I came up into the completely empty reading room.

I badly needed to catch my breath, but as soon as I stopped moving, the five-minute warning bell rang from below. Stumbling around through the stacks looking for a classroom I had never even glimpsed before was a recipe for arriving late, not a good idea, so I grudgingly spent a bit of my hard-won mana on a finding spell. It cheerfully pointed me straight into a completely dark section of the stacks. I looked back without much hope at the stairs, but no one else was showing up to join me.

The reason for that became clear when I finally got to the classroom, which was behind a single dark wooden door almost invisible between two big cabinets full of ancient yellowing maps. I opened the door expecting to find something really horrible inside, and I did: eight freshmen, all of whom turned and stared at me like a herd of small and especially pitiful deer about to be mown down by a massive lorry. There wasn’t so much as a sophomore among the lot. “You’ve got to be joking,” I said with revulsion, and then I stalked to the front row and sat down in the best seat in the place, fourth from the near end. Which I could get without even a nudge, because they’d left the front row nearly wide open like they were still in primary school and worried about looking like teacher’s pets. The only teachers in here are the maleficaria, and they don’t have pets, they have lunch.

The desks were charming Edwardian originals, by which I mean ancient, too small for five-foot-ten me, and incredibly uncomfortable. They were made of wrought iron and would be hard to move in an emergency; the attached desk on mine, slightly too small to hold a sheet of normal-sized writing paper, had been very nicely polished and smooth roughly 120 years ago. It had since been scarified so thoroughly that kids had started writing on top of other kids’ graffiti just to have room for their messages of despair. One had written LET ME OUT over and over in a neat red ink border all around the entire L-shaped surface, and another had done a highlighter pass over it in yellow.

There was only one other kid in the front row, and she’d taken what would have been the best seat, sixth from the far end—smarter to get a bit more distance from the door—except for the air vent in the floor just two seats behind it. Which was currently covered by a stupider kid’s bookbag, so you couldn’t know it was there unless you spotted that the other three air vents in the floor were laid out in a square pattern that needed a fourth one there. She watched me coming in as if she expected me to kick her out of her seat: age hath its prerogatives, and seniors are rarely shy about taking them. When I took the real best seat, she looked behind herself, realized her mistake, then hurriedly collected up her bag and moved down the row and said, “Is this seat taken?” gesturing to the one next to me, with a sort of anxious air.

“No,” I said back to her irritably. I was annoyed because it made sense for me to let her sit next to me, since that only improved my odds by upping the nearby targets, and yet I didn’t particularly want to. She was an enclave kid, no question. That was a shield holder of some kind on her wrist, the deceptively dull-looking ring on her finger was almost certainly a power-sharer, and she’d come in actively drilled on Scholomance strategy, such as how to identify the best seats in a room, even on the first day of class when you’re too dazed to remember all the advice your parents gave you and instead just huddle with the other little kids like a zebra trying to hide in the herd. Also, the maths textbook in her bag was in Chinese, but she had good old Introductory Alchemy in English, and her notebooks were labeled in Thai script, meaning she was fluent enough to take magic coursework in not one but two foreign languages. Given the consequences of making even minor mistakes, that’s a tall order for a fourteen year old. Likely she’d been in the most expensive language classes enclave wealth could buy from the age of two. She’d probably been planning to turn round in a moment and tell the other kids they were sitting in bad and dangerous seats, so they’d understand where they all stood in the pecking order: beneath her. I was only surprised she hadn’t already made it clear.

Then one of the other kids behind us said tentatively, “Hello, El?” and I realized he was one of Liu’s cousins. “It’s Guo Yi Zheng,” he added, which was helpful, as I’d gone out of induction day in perfect confidence that I wouldn’t be seeing any of the freshmen I’d met ever again except by pure accident, and I hadn’t tried to remember their names. There’s not a lot of cross-year mingling in here. Our schedules make sure of that. Seniors spend almost all of our time on the lower levels, and freshmen get the safer classrooms higher up. If you’re a freshman who regularly spends time hanging round the places where seniors are, you’re asking to get eaten, and some maleficaria will grant your request.

But on the other hand, if you are somewhere with an upperclassman in range, you’d rather be closer to them than not. Zheng was already collecting up his bag and hustling over, which was just as well, because he’d been nearest the door until then. “May I sit with you?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said. I didn’t mind him. Liu being my ally didn’t give her freshman cousin a claim on me, but he didn’t need it to. She was my friend. “Watch out for air vents, even on the library level,” I added. “And you were too close to the door.”

“Oh. Yes, of course, I was just—” he said, looking over at the other kids, but I cut him off.

“I’m not your mum,” I said, deliberately rude: you do freshmen no favors by letting them imagine there are heroes in here, Orion Lake notwithstanding. I couldn’t be his savior; I had enough to do saving myself. “I don’t need an excuse. I’ve just told you. Listen or don’t.” He shut it and sat down, a bit abashed.

Of course, he was right to stick close to the other kids: there’s a reason zebras hang out in herds. But it isn’t worth letting the other zebras put you in a really bad position. If you were unlucky, you learned that lesson when the lion ate you instead of them. If you were me, you learned it when you saw the lion eat someone else, one of the loser kids who wasn’t quite as much a loser as you were, and who therefore had been allowed to sit on the end of the row, between the door and the kids who mattered.