“Oh, it’s—I don’t know, actually,” he said, lifting it up: it had a vaguely Doberman-sized body with dachshund legs and was covered with narrow cone-like spikes that had tiny holes at the tips. I had no idea what it was myself. Mals are always mutating, or being mutated, or new ones get made, et cetera. “The spikes put out some kind of gas. I didn’t want to leave it out there; it was covered with snow and the gas blended into the fog. I thought somebody might step on it.” Very thoughtful of him.

Other seniors were beginning to cautiously trickle down from breakfast by then. As we dragged ourselves off to lick our wounds both metaphorical and literal, I overheard someone asking Aadhya, “Hey, you’re taking first run?” and she shrugged and said, “We’re thinking about it,” meaning that we were open to offers: at least one or two teams would be glad to bribe us to be the very first ones through the doors, so they could come down bright and early themselves and still know that someone else had already cleared the way. If we were going to do it anyway, we might as well get paid for it.

She negotiated the arrangement at lunchtime, with three alliances who wanted to share the time slot after us, and got us a promise of cleanup help from them, meaning we wouldn’t have to waste our own healing and mending supplies. That was a good deal for us: helping us right after we slogged out meant they had to wait instead of starting their own runs before anyone else showed. They agreed because they had to wait anyway: the obstacle course took a good long while to finish resetting itself after we’d gone through.

Normally that process takes place in the time it takes for the doors to close on your heels and open up again. The runs aren’t actually real. A thousand wizards all hurling their most powerful spells around three times a week would wreck the place almost instantly, and also if we were actually casting our most powerful spells, we wouldn’t have enough mana for graduation, our works of artifice would get worn out, our potions would get used up, et cetera. So instead the obstacle-course magic fades everything out: when you cast spells inside, it feels the same, but you’re only casting half of one percent of a spell, and the course fakes the reaction so it’s as if you’ve cast the full thing. You think you’re taking a big swallow of potion, but it’s being diluted down; you think you’re using a piece of artifice, but it’s wrapped in a traveling-protection spell. And when you come out, swish, everything goes back to normal—except for any injuries you’ve picked up, those are entirely persistent, the better to encourage rapid improvement—and the next round of eager seniors gets to go in.

And all of that works because we voluntarily enter the course: consent is the only way for someone else’s magic to get at your mana and your brain on that level. Well, except for violence. There’s always violence.

However, apparently there was still substantial effort required to clean up even one half of one percent of a giant river full of lava. The particular spell I’d used on the river this morning had come from an overambitious maleficer from the Avanti kingdom who decided his evil fortress would be much more impressive if only it was surrounded by a moat of lava. How right he’d been. The teams behind us had been forced to twiddle their thumbs on the threshold for ten minutes until the doors opened up again on the charming wintry landscape of murder.

We spent the rest of the day the way we’d be spending all our days from now on: gathered around a table in the library, going over every move we’d made and trying to decide what we’d done wrong. As noted, I had almost no idea what moves I’d made, and no one else did, either, which made our first postmortem difficult. Everyone did very clearly remember the river boiling up into lava, points to me, so we frittered away quite a lot of time discussing whether we should make that the centerpiece of our strategy: just have me bang a molten river of magma down the middle of the graduation hall, throw a cooling spell on our feet, and all run along it to the doors. It did sound good, nice and simple, but there are plenty of mals who are just fine with even boiling-lava amounts of heat, and anyway every single kid would get on the highway to heaven right behind us, which would concentrate mal attention too much. Mals would force each other into the lava by sheer pressure of numbers, and the second wave would climb over the charred bodies to get at us. Also, not only would the maw-mouths not mind the heat, they’d just flop parts of themselves over onto the path and make it their serving tray as soon as we started running towards them. It’s not like we could just stop. There aren’t a lot of cooling spells that will last long if you keep standing on lava for any length of time.

“What if you throw it across the room the other way, right behind us?” Khamis said. “You could keep the mals off our backs.”

I said levelly, “I’d also block any other kids behind us.”

He clearly considered that their lookout and not ours, but he was a smart guy; he didn’t say so to my face. I’m fairly sure he did say so to Nkoyo’s face, though, in the vein of Can’t you reason with your silly friend? I saw him pull her back to talk to her as we went downstairs for dinner, and she was all controlled resignation when she got to the queue, her usual sparkle dimmed.

There was a man who came to the commune once with his girlfriend and patronized everyone, asking overly polite questions with a sneer in the smile that he always tacked on, and you all really believe in this sort of thing? It was a familiar sneer: the exact one that filled my own heart every time someone tried to tell me earnestly about how I would really clear my chakras if only I would wear this set of beads or that magnetic copper bracelet. They’d always get wound up when I told them that putting on a thing churned out of a machine from ore that had been strip-mined by underpaid laborers wasn’t likely to improve my mana balance any. But I still hated this wanker the instant he turned up. He’d only come, as far as I could tell, to make his girlfriend feel bad about having a nice weekend doing yoga in the woods with people kind enough to ask her how she was feeling, even if they did it with a bunch of blather about her chakras.

The tired way she had looked, that was how Nkoyo looked, and it made me just as cross to see, cross enough that back at the commune I’d actually gone up to the guy and told him that he should get out and stay away. He laughed and smiled at me and I just stood there looking at him, because that usually did the trick even though I was only eleven years old at the time, and fifteen minutes later he did indeed leave. But he made his girlfriend go with him.

So I didn’t go tell Khamis to get out. I just made sure to bus my tray with Nkoyo and told her, “Feel free to tell that prick that I kicked off at you when you even tried to suggest the idea,” and she glanced at me and her mouth quirked, a little of the sparkle coming back. I should have felt proud of myself; I’m sure Mum would have told me I’d grown. I’m afraid all I felt was an even more passionate desire to drop Khamis down a maintenance shaft.

When we ran the course again two days later—we each get to go every other day; anyone who tries to hog the course more than that starts to have unpleasant experiences, like for example their spells not working at all at a critical juncture—I didn’t turn the whole river to lava. Instead I summoned just enough lava at the bottom of it to boil the whole thing up while simultaneously cooling the lava down. The variety of traps and simulated mals lurking in the river almost all got encased in the new stone, or at least became completely visible, and we could just walk across at any point we liked.