“I’m not going to open the door,” Orion said sulkily.

“Shut up, you lunatic, you’d absolutely open the door,” I said. “What if the wall down by Aadhya’s had gone this time?”

“I’d just—have come back here,” Orion said, as if it were that simple to deal with being caught between two walls of mortal flame sweeping towards each other, each with a leading wave of frenzied mals, and no exit anywhere in between. Nobody would open the door in a cleansing, not even if they heard Orion Lake or for that matter their own mum calling on the other side. Anybody stupid enough to do that died during freshman year when they did open the door and got eaten by the myna grabber on the other side. “I wasn’t planning to go anywhere.”

I opened my eyes to glare at him. “That just means you didn’t have a plan, not that you weren’t going.”

He scowled at me and stomped off to his desk and pretended he was working on something in a notebook. Liesel made a faint snort and sat down on the bed in an open spot near my midsection. I eyed her. “What?”

She looked at me pointedly, but I still didn’t follow until she said, “And your room?” and I realized she thought Orion had actually been planning to creep down the corridor to spend the day with me. I was about to explain that Orion wasn’t enough of a moron to risk going out in a cleansing to spend the day sitting in my room getting yelled at for having gone out in a cleansing, he was in fact much more of a moron, only then it occurred to me that she was half right: if he had got caught between two walls of flame before reaching the main stairs, he would indeed have come and banged on my door for safety. And yes, I’m stupid enough that I would have opened it when he banged, even if I’d have kept a jar of leftover etching acid handy. Which meant spending the day with me had been his backup plan.

I even got confirmation: he was sitting with his back to us, but he’d got his hair buzzed lately at my insistence—let’s not talk about the state it had got into—and the tops of his ears were visible and bright red.

“Lake, if you’ve ever for a second entertained a lurid fantasy that you might possibly have it off on some occasion and that I might in any way be involved, I want you to erase even the memory of having the thought from your brain,” I said deeply and earnestly.

“El!” he squalled in protest, turning to dart a mortified look at Liesel. But it was nothing more than he deserved.

Anyway, so that was loads of fun, spending the day in Orion’s room with him and the girl who’d tried to kill me. Actually, Liesel was all right. She and I ended up playing card games; she had a deck of tarot cards she’d made herself that she carried around with her, and she taught me canasta using all the major arcana as jokers. She got a bit narrow-eyed when I kept getting the Tower and Death, but it wasn’t my fault; she was the one carrying them around and imbuing them with divinatory power.

Orion joined us a couple of times, but he kept getting distracted and going to the door to listen to the crackling as the wall rolled back and forth through the hall. On New Year’s they go several times, which in theory and not in practice makes up for the reduced number. We did hear the dying shrieks of mals a few times, and there was a scrabble at the drain at one point that made him jump up hopefully and scatter the cards all over, but it didn’t come through even when the mad muppet actually pulled off the drain cover and stuck his head close to peer inside it.

Liesel flinched away from him with her expression somewhere between horrified and just disgusted. I took the chance to scoop all the cards back into a facedown pile before she noticed that the Tower and Death had both landed faceup in my lap that time, along with the Eight of Swords, which in Liesel’s illustration was a woman sitting cross-legged and blindfolded half caught in a thicket of eight massive silver thorns in a circle pointing in at her. How encouraging.

“Why don’t you try putting out milk?” I said to Orion snidely. That technique did actually work in the olden days, when there were more minor mals that don’t need much mana to survive, and more mundanes who sincerely believed in them and were therefore vulnerable to them. If you deliberately put out a bowl of milk for the little people, or whatever equivalent gesture, they’d come and suck up the tiny bit of mana that came from your intent, and then they’d leave your house alone in order to preserve the regular supply. But most of those mals are gone now; they got eaten up by more powerful mals who consider a mundane person the equivalent of an already open packet left on the side of the road with suspicious stains and two stale crisps in it.

Orion didn’t bother looking abashed. He just sighed and put the drain cover back on and slunk back to the game, for lack of anything better to kill than time, but he didn’t even notice that I didn’t deal him in for the new round. Liesel and I played several more games, until the sixth time I turned over the Tower, and she grabbed it out of my hand and shook it in my face. “You are cheating!”

“Why would I?” I snapped at her. “Just take it out of play if you’re going to be so fussed about it.”

“I did!” she snapped back, and grabbed her case and opened it up in front of me to display its entirely empty innards to us both, and after staring into it for a moment, she collected up all the other cards and put them into the case and stashed it away in her pocket without saying another word.

After that it was awkward silence all round. I shoved aside enough of Orion’s dirty laundry to clear a rectangle of floor and did push-ups for mana, spiced up by the faint throbbing still going in my head. I was tired and sore and hungry enough that the exercise was highly productive as long as I could do it, but I ran out of steam sooner than I ran out of time and then I just flopped myself back onto Orion’s bed and lay there even more tired and sore and hungry and now sweaty, too. Liesel was sitting at Orion’s desk working on something, which I only realized was his work when he did and said, “Hey, you don’t have to…” in the most halfhearted way those words had been spoken ever.

“I have nothing else to do now,” Liesel said. “Later you can pay me back.”

“He’s guarding the room, isn’t he?” I said.

Liesel shrugged. “He’s here, too. It doesn’t count.” I rather thought it did, since he didn’t want to be in here and would have gone like a shot if we hadn’t been here, but I was the only one arguing his case. She added to him, “I will need amphisbaena scales.”

“Oh, sure, no problem,” Orion said, very enthusiastically. I scowled at him across the room, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on even metaphorically; that was a completely reasonable trade for someone doing your homework, and even if you thought it was in some way his duty to go hunt down amphisbaena for nothing, which I didn’t, that still wouldn’t mean he wasn’t entitled to get something back for taking the trouble to collect the scales.