Anyway he probably wouldn’t hunt amphisbaena for nothing; they’re only slightly more dangerous to us than the agglos, which they eat. Their worst quality is every decade or so enough of their predators get wiped out in a cleansing, and then the amphisbaena lay a bumper crop of tiny rubbery eggs in nice warm damp spots like for instance around the hot-water pipes, and when they hatch shortly after New Year’s, the babies pour out of the taps and the showerheads in droves, both heads hissing and biting. Which you’d justifiably say is in fact nightmarishly bad, but the poison isn’t strong enough to do more than sting at that stage, and it doesn’t get stronger until they’re big enough that they don’t fit through anymore. You just hear them stuck in there and hissing as you wash and hope very hard that the showerhead doesn’t break off today.

There almost certainly would be an infestation this year, now I thought about it. I’d have to pass the word, and also spend some of my crochet time making mesh bags to put on the showerheads. Liesel must have seen it coming a while ago and worked up a strategy using what was about to become an abundant resource; clever of her. Even more clever to take advantage of a golden opportunity to have Orion do the harvesting, in exchange for her doing the remedial homework she would probably knock off in the next two hours.

I sulked on the bed in completely unjustified resentment while she motored through the entire stack of worksheets with about as much effort as it was taking me to lie there. The only thing that slowed her down even a little were the places where Orion had dripped food and/or maleficaria innards on some of the questions, and she had to get him to help her reconstruct what the unspattered words had been. Actually I overestimated vastly: it took her thirty-eight minutes, and that includes the time she spent sorting it neatly into deadline order and putting it into a pair of folders for him and also tidying up absolutely everywhere.

I veered from being annoyed at her to being annoyed at Orion when he received the folders and just perfunctorily put them on the side of his desk and said, “Great, thanks. How many scales do you need?” It wasn’t effusive enough for me, much less by American standards.

“What Lake means is, he’s pathetically grateful that he doesn’t have to spend the last six months of term dodging vats of strong acid because he couldn’t be arsed to do his own homework,” I said peevishly.

Liesel just shrugged with all the weariness of a veteran of the wars—I suppose she’d worked her way through the entire time doing homework for enclavers—and said to Orion, “Can you get thirty hides? I need them at least two weeks old.”

“Sure,” Orion said blithely, and I didn’t literally gnash my teeth because no one does, do they, but I felt as if I were gnashing my teeth. With no justification in the slightest. Liesel had made a good deal for her, and so had Orion, and for that matter it was good for me, too, because I wouldn’t have to keep saving his thick plank self all the time. I didn’t even need to be worried that he was neglecting something important that would come back to bite him the way neglected assignments usually did. He didn’t need to practice his alchemy, either to graduate or for any other reason; he didn’t have any special affinity for it as far as I’d ever seen. I didn’t even know why he’d done alchemy track in the first place. New York surely had all its lab space packed with geniuses; he wasn’t going to graduate and go be a modestly competent alchemist the rest of his life.

It annoyed me more and not less because I didn’t have a good reason for being annoyed. I couldn’t even come up with anything to say about it. If I’d tried to put into words what I was feeling, it would have been something unpleasant and envious and whinging like Why should you get to make easy deals that suit you perfectly to get out of the things you don’t like with the strong implication of when I never do, which wasn’t even true anymore since I had a New York power-sharer on my wrist.

So I didn’t put it into words; I just lay curled on his bed in an unpleasant stew of cooled sweat and resentment while they discussed their happy arrangement. Orion even stopped being so distracted: even if the mals did get purged back, Liesel had just cleared his slate completely of anything but hunting and eating and sleep, with the last two as optional as he wanted them to be. She even offered to help him brew up some amphisbaena bait.

The one thing I wasn’t, at all, was jealous. I was so far from it actually that I didn’t even think about being jealous until Liesel shot me an exasperated look and I realized that she’d very much have liked to make me jealous, and would have had a strong go at it if the field had been the least bit open. I couldn’t blame her. She wanted that guaranteed spot in New York enough to have seriously contemplated both Magnus Tebow and murder for it; I certainly ranked Orion higher than those alternatives. If he had so much as taken a first glance at her cleavage, she’d have been a plonker not to make sure he got a second.

But he hadn’t, and when I realized he hadn’t, I started to feel more than a bit panicky, because he hadn’t any excuse not to be taking a first glance. I’m only mildly motivated in that direction myself and I absolutely had taken both a first and a second glance at the cleavage and the bouncy golden curls and shiny pink lips. I think anyone who wasn’t really impervious would have. If you haven’t eaten anything but tasteless slop in years and suddenly someone offers you a slice of chocolate cake, so what if you don’t especially like chocolate cake; if you were interested in food at all, you’d at least think it over before you said no thanks.

Orion had no business saying no thanks. I was fairly confident he did like cake, or at least was quite ready to give it a try, and he wasn’t getting a bite off my plate if I had anything to say about it, which I did. He ought to have at least licked his chops, even if he didn’t want to dive in, and instead he didn’t so much as drop his eyes for a peek. He wasn’t a good enough actor to have been faking it, either.

Which irritated Liesel, understandably. It was like the homework; that much bloody effort deserved a smidge of appreciation. So when the all-clear bell rang, she said stiffly, “I will be going to my room now,” and cleared out before I had a chance to jump on the bandwagon and leave with her.

“I’ll be going too,” I said in a hurry, swinging my legs over the side of the bed, and Orion came over and said, “Are you sure you’re okay?” a little wistfully and then had the unmitigated nerve to have a quick peek at my breasts, which were currently under a second-day top marred with alchemy stains and soot, with the sawn-off ends of my hair obscuring the view.

“I’m fine,” I said sharply.

“I’ll walk you back to your room,” he said.

I should just have let him; Precious was in my room. Instead I said, “I don’t need help going nine doors down, Lake,” and then my stomach growled and he said, “And you threw up your whole breakfast, you need to eat something,” and jumped to grab me a sealed muesli bar only eight years past its best that he must have been gifted by some adoring fan. It wasn’t cake maybe, but by Scholomance standards it still qualified as haute cuisine. I stupidly took it and stupidly sat there on the bed eating it—so stupidly that I have the bad feeling I did it on purpose—and obviously he sat down on the bed next to me. He tentatively crept his arm round my shoulders when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, and I pretended I wasn’t paying attention, and then he said in a faintly hopeful voice, “El,” and I told myself to shove him off the bed.