You could pick out the boundaries of the obstacle course with a good squint: there was a low wooden fence running down the halfway mark dividing the obstacle-course area off from the rest of the gym. But apart from that, the illusion artifice had integrated the obstacles fully into the environment: bristling thornbushes, trees with grabby-looking limbs, a steep hill covered with snow; a thin grey fog lying over a wide black slick of icy river ready to break into jagged shards and an ominous handful of ways to cross: a thin rickety board, a scattering of slippery rocks poking up above the ice, a healthier-looking narrow stone bridge that was undoubtedly the most dangerous option. If you looked up at the inside of the gym doors, they seemed to be two enormous iron gates set in the wall of a mysterious and alluring stone tower.

We’d already started wrong. The best way to use the obstacle course is to just throw yourself at it instantly, the first time you see it, without taking time to look it over. After you come out bruised and limping—assuming you do come out—that’s when you go over all the things you did wrong, and try new things the rest of the week, and then the new course comes out on Monday and you do it all over again. And if you’re lucky, every week you get better at doing it the first time, with no planning. You don’t get any planning time at graduation. But in our defense: What.

“Let’s get going before the next teams show up,” I said. Then I realized that everyone else was waiting for me, which was both obvious and terrifying. I stared out at the perfectly lovely expanse of winter-touched wilderness. Any mals out there were in hiding, except for the faint dancing lights visible on the other side of the river, glowing in colors through the fog, exactly as if will-o’-wisps had moved in to take up residence, only those are largely decorative constructs and not much use for the purposes of practice. They might have been some variety of soul-eater, but real soul-eaters that close to one another would have merged into one very hungry soul-eater, so a pack of them wasn’t much use for practice, either. But that would be useless in a more dangerous and unpleasant direction, and therefore more likely. The fake mals the course produces are very much like the ones that get put on display in Maleficaria Studies—just because they’re not real doesn’t mean they can’t kill you, and sometimes the real ones sneak in and pretend to be fake just long enough to get hold of you. But we weren’t doing ourselves any favors by waiting to find out which these were. I took a deep breath, nodded to Liu, who started playing the lute, and I sang out the mana-amplification spell in a slightly squeaky voice and ran straight in.

The snow burst open all around us before we were more than a stride away from the doors, jagged scything blades curving out with the tips lunging for our guts, and after that I couldn’t tell you what order any of it came in. We had to cross the river both ways, both going and coming, but I don’t remember whether I turned it to lava on the way out or the way back. We didn’t actually make contact with the wall, since the gym illusion was trying very hard to convince us there wasn’t one: when we got close, a sudden blizzard came howling into our faces with quavery ghost voices, telling us to turn back.

Actually the lava was definitely on the way in, because on our way back out, the obstacle course was still trying to reset around the lava spell, so instead the river fired geysers of superheated steam at us through cracks in the ice. One of them caught Yaakov’s leg. He fervently yelled out what I’m absolutely sure were wild curses with every step the rest of the way back to the doors: he was usually such a nice, proper boy, carefully polite; it would’ve been funny under any other circumstances. But not here: it meant he was in the kind of desperate pain where all you can do is drop where you are and howl, and he couldn’t do that, because he’d die. The instant he got out into the corridor, he did drop, and started trying to pull out a bandage to wrap around the blistering skin, still gasping curses under his breath with tears gathering in his eyes. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t unroll it.

“You can’t keep yelling!” Ibrahim snapped, even as he dropped to a knee next to him. He dragged his arm across his forehead—not very effective; each one smudged some streaks of blood on the other—and took the bandage out of Yaakov’s hands to put it on for him.

“No,” Liu said, panting; she was on her knees on the floor mostly draped around the long neck of the sirenspider lute. “No, it was all right. It went into the music. We should all yell, I think, or sing.” She was better off than most of us; she’d been playing the whole way from inside the sheltered place at the center of our alliance.

Chloe was shivering with her eyes wide enough to be on the edge of shock, and she was fumbling out some bandages of her own; Jowani was helping her. Her whole right side—the exposed side—had been perforated with one too-close swipe from one of those clawing tree branches, blood and skin showing through open gaps in her clothes from her shoulder down to her thigh, the frayed edges stained dark. Aadhya had been bringing up the rear; she was standing with her arms wrapped around herself, her hands still clenched tight on the fighting-sticks she’d made for the run. I didn’t see any wounds, but she looked pretty sick. I was just about to go to her when she pulled in a deep breath and then went to Liu to look at the lute and make sure it had stayed in tune.

Nkoyo’s team had been hit by a spray of razor-blade-sized slivers of sharpened ice and were all even bloodier than the rest of us, except for their resident enclaver, a boy named Khamis from Zanzibar, who’d been very firmly ensconced in the most protected spot in their team, at the center. He was an alchemist and armed only with a bandolier of spray bottles, one of which he was wielding right now on Nkoyo’s slashed arm: the wound underneath was disappearing along with the blood as she wiped tears from her face.

All of us were freaked out and shaking, from a dozen near-death experiences crammed into the span of five minutes and also from the even worse knowledge that this was nothing, absolutely nothing. It was the first obstacle course on the first day after New Year’s, it was warm-up material, and there was nowhere to go from here but a long steep road uphill all the way. Most of us were used to being jumped by mals, but there’s a substantial difference between one attack and an unending stream of them. About half of us were crying, and the other half wanted to cry.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

“Hey, that looked pretty good,” Orion said encouragingly, coming to join us with a bounce in his step and the mangled corpse of something spiky dangling from his hand: he’d somehow managed to sniff out the one real mal hiding amidst the fakes. Normally every word out of his mouth automatically produces a burst of adulation, but everyone in our group had spent enough time sitting at meals with him for the shine to wear off a bit, and under the circumstances, they all glared at him with pure hatred. I’m fairly certain I saved him from bodily harm when I interrupted his attempt to dig himself a deeper grave—“I mean, you all made it okay”—and said, “Lake, what is that dead thing and why are you carrying it around?”