“I’ll ask him,” I said without lifting my head, pretending I could still see anything when actually I had my eyes shut to keep from dripping on Aadhya’s carefully written timetable. She put her hand on my shoulder, warm, and then she half put her arm around me, and I leaned into her a moment and then shook my head wildly and sucked in a big gulping breath, because I didn’t want to get started. What was the point? I couldn’t do anything about that, either.

I did ask him that night as we walked up to dinner, because I had to, just in case. He had the nerve to say, “El, you’re going to be fine,” in reassuring tones. “There’s plenty of mana in the pool, I’ll get more in now that there are more mals around, you’ve got Chloe and—”

“Shut up, you cartwheeling donkey,” I snarled at him, and he recoiled and wobbled between baffled and offended for a moment, then said, sounding confused, “Wait, are you worried about—?” and just stopped to gawk at me as though the shadow of the idea that any living being might at any point entertain a fraction of concern for his health and well-being had never crept across the windowsill of his molluscular brain, and I ran up the rest of the flight of stairs away from him because it was that or punch him in his beaky nose, which I’d caught myself idly thinking just that morning across the table at breakfast had a hint of young Marlon Brando, which might convey to you the depths to which I was sinking if your mum thinks, like mine does, that the height of appropriate children’s entertainment is antique movie musicals.

Aadhya and Liu and Chloe had gone on ahead, but I caught up to them before they actually went into the food line. “Thanks for holding a spot,” I said, grabbing a tray, without saying how it’d gone, and Chloe bit her lip and Liu looked sorry and thank goodness Aadhya just said, “What do you guys think of asking Jowani?” and got us discussing the merits.

I could list them out for you. He had a really top-notch perimeter-warning spell, the kind you cast once and then it lingers for half an hour; his was notable because it worked off intent rather than physical presence, which meant it would warn you about incorporeal mals. He’d give us a solid personal connection across our little trio of alliances, because Cora had teamed up with Ibrahim and Nadia and Yaakov. And boys are undeniably useful for heavy lifting; I was the closest thing to brawn on our team at the moment. The discrepancy hadn’t seemed as significant at the start of the year, but lately it felt like all the senior boys were expanding up and out when we weren’t looking, and they were suddenly doing things like toting an entire crate full of iron all the way across the shop under one arm.

You might think those all sound like minor advantages, and they were, relatively speaking. Everyone in the school could make themselves somewhat useful—that’s what all of us have been doing all four years of this, finding ways to make ourselves useful. And now that everyone knew I was very useful, we could have cherrypicked ourselves one of the top kids. In fact, I suspected that at least two of the near-miss valedictorian candidates had made overtures of their own to Aadhya: I’d seen them stopping by her room.

None of us raised those objections. We all agreed that Jowani would be helpful and a good strategic addition to round out our team. But we didn’t talk about why. We didn’t say that we didn’t want him to get left behind. Ever since Cora’s arm, we’d all been eating together as a group almost every day, and each day at the start of breakfast, he would bring out a tiny book full of incredibly thin pages—one for each day of four years, I realized after the first few times—and he’d softly recite out loud a short poem or an excerpt of one that his dad had copied out by hand into the book, in one of a dozen languages, each one a piece full of love and hope: have courage. His voice reading them smoothed out even my most snarling mornings.

Before then, I’d never heard him emit more than a monosyllable. I’d always assumed that was dislike on his part, but actually it hadn’t anything to do with me in the slightest. He had a stammer, which didn’t trip him up when he recited poetry, and luckily also not when he was casting spells, but made it almost impossible for him to get out a word in conversation unless he really knew you. And that was why he’d held on to Nkoyo’s social coattails past when that had stopped being a good idea, and why he was now having a lousy time of finding himself an alliance. And if he didn’t get an alliance, he wasn’t going to make it out.

We didn’t say any of that to one another. You didn’t, ever. Ibrahim and Yaakov and Nadia hadn’t taken Cora because they remembered making the circle around her, mana flowing through us all like a river to heal her arm, a gift that hadn’t cost anything but caring to give. They’d taken her because she and Nadia both knew how to dance spells—there’s quite a lot of spells that get more powerful if you dance them along with the incantation—and were now working out a magical sword-dancing routine using blades that Yaakov was making; Ibrahim had scored a major matter-phasing spell to put on them from one of his other enclaver friends, who’d traded it to him on the cheap after putting together his own alliance, as apology for not asking him. That was a good solid fighting team, and they’d got offers from at least two or three enclavers to join up. That was why. You couldn’t choose people because you liked them, or because you wanted them to live.

But we did scrape together good enough reasons to say yes to Jowani, and when we got to our table, Aadhya pulled him aside and asked him, and after that all three of our alliances were firmed up, and everyone agreed we’d go for the first run the very next morning. Even Orion. He was clearly not even bothering to think up any kind of plan for getting to the doors beyond Kill things until there aren’t any more, but he overheard us discussing the merits or lack thereof for going first thing, and how we’d have to keep a sharp eye out for any real maleficaria that had crept into the gym overnight and hidden in the course. At which he perked up and said, “Oh hey, do you mind if I come down with you?” It will shock you to hear that nobody minded.

So we all trooped down after breakfast the next morning. I hadn’t been back to the gym myself since Field Day. I was braced, but not enough. The place had got even worse. Some birdwitted freshmen—it could only have been freshmen—had replanted the big planters along the walls with seeds out of the alchemy supplies, and the spell machinery had worked them in, currently as hedges, so now you couldn’t even tell where the walls met the floor, and it was an even more perfect illusion of being outdoors. The big trees in the distance had let their leaves fall, and there was a feathery dusting of snow on their wet dark branches, broken by the occasional red huddle of a tiny bird, and every delicate blade of the grass underfoot was crisp with frost. Our breath fogged.

“What,” Jowani said, and stopped there, which actually did pretty well to encapsulate all our feelings, I think.

Well, not all our feelings. “It’s so nice, El,” Orion said to me, almost dreamily, arms outstretched and his face turned up to the artful flurry that the sky allowed to fall to greet us. “I can’t even tell we’re not outside.” I think he meant to be complimentary.