“El, that was the right thing to do,” Liu said to me afterwards, intently. We’d made it to the far end and back without any serious bloodletting that time, which made that seem obvious, but she meant it more generally. “It was the right thing to do because it gave us choices. Having a choice is the most important thing.”

I’d heard that before. It’s a bullet-point line in the graduation handbook: As a general rule, regardless of the specific situation in which you find yourself, at every step you must take care to preserve or widen the number of your options. It hadn’t quite sunk in properly, but now it did. Having a choice meant being able to choose something that worked for you and whatever you were carrying and whatever you’d prepared. Having a choice meant you got to choose getting out.

Liu looked back at the doors. “Six months left.” I nodded. We went upstairs to get back to work.

I’d like to say Khamis improved on acquaintance, but he didn’t. The second week of the obstacle course, we did it properly: I sang the mana-amplification spell before the doors even fully opened and charged in without stopping to let myself look. I went straight into a knee-high snowdrift in a glacial mountain landscape, empty except for massive tall stone boulders jutting out of the ground like pillars, intermittent blasts of snowy wind coming into our faces almost as hard as the boundary blizzard from last time. It was still beautiful, but it was the kind of beautiful that normally you only get to see in person if you spend a week hauling yourself up a mountain with a backpack longer than your torso.

I floundered a few steps in, and then my foot just went out from under me and I headed over backwards. If it hadn’t been for Aadhya’s shield holder—after I’d told her about my little run-in with Liesel, she’d tweaked them to handle accidental falls along with deliberate impact—I’d probably have concussed myself properly that time. As it was, I went down hard, and the snowdrifts on either side of me fell in on top of my head and started actively trying to smother me. Jowani hauled me out of it and put me back on my feet—oh I was glad to have him along—just as the boulders all unfolded themselves into troll shapes like Transformers made out of rock and started flinging chunks at our heads.

We all came out with numb bodies and a lot of bruises, and Chloe had a broken collarbone and cracked shoulder and a bad limp: she’d been hit by one of the flying rocks. Our helpers patched her up a little, while inside the gym the boulders reassembled themselves out of the mass of crushed pebbles and dust that I’d left behind me, but she was going to need more healing than we could expect from the deal. “Let’s get you to your room. We can work in there instead,” Liu said, and Chloe just nodded without saying anything, her eyes lowered and her mouth thin, and Khamis came up and said to her, “You’re the one putting up the mana. Next time, you go in the middle.”

I’d spent the week congratulating myself repeatedly on my self-restraint, but it had run out, and I was about to tell him that actually Liu was bringing at least as much mana, by carrying the mana-amplification spell on the lute the entire time we were running, and also I was going to lay out exactly what I thought of him, and offer some detailed suggestions of where he could shove it, but before I could open my mouth, Aadhya said, “Seriously? A big boy like you, afraid of some scrapes and bruises?” He rounded on her; she just waved a finger back and forth across his chest in over-the-top disdain. “You want to take your first hit when it’s for real, son, you go ahead, keep hiding in the middle. Chloe’s going to be out the doors before you are, for sure.”

Chloe darted a look up at her out of shiny eyes. To be honest, I don’t think she’d thought of it that way any more than I had, but Aadhya was right. Enclavers didn’t get hit, not like the rest of us, not day-to-day. Once a month maybe they’d see a mal, with mana at their fingertips and lots of help and easier targets both close to hand. Enough for practice. Not enough to get hurt. I don’t know that Chloe had ever actually been tagged before. Definitely not the way I had, but not even the way Liu or Aadhya or Jowani or any average loser kid had, at least half a dozen times. It didn’t matter sometimes if you had all the mana in the world, all the equipment in the world. All it took was getting unlucky once. If you got hit hard enough, you went down, and if you didn’t get back on your feet fast enough, you stayed down forever. And you couldn’t learn how to get back on your feet until after you’d been knocked down.

Chloe swallowed and said to Khamis, “Thanks for looking out for me. I’m good with my team.”

He didn’t like it, especially since he probably couldn’t help seeing that Aadhya had an alarmingly good point that he was now going to have to worry about, but he took it, although he gave a snort and looked at Aadhya as if he’d have liked to have a minion push her over in a corridor sometime before he turned around and walked away back to his team.

That said, good point or not, I’d never seen Aadhya have a go at an enclaver before. She wasn’t a committed suck-up like Ibrahim, just too sensible to do anything that—well, that stupid. Unlike certain other people who will remain me. “Wow,” I said to her just under my breath as we went downstairs.

“Yeah, like I had a choice,” she said, with a huff, and gave me a pointed look. I would like to say I felt ashamed of myself for putting her in the position of having to snap someone back just so I wouldn’t try to disembowel them, but I was too unrepentantly happy that someone had told Khamis off. Aadhya sighed. “Just do me a favor, keep a lid on it until the end of the month.”

“Then what?” I said.

“Then he can’t walk away anymore with Nkoyo, hello.”

My turn to sigh. “Yeah, all right.” Sometimes when your friends are right, you’re pleased, and sometimes it’s unbearably annoying.

But she was right, so I bit my tongue repeatedly over the next weeks while the last alliances got locked down and we invested enough mana and time in our collaboration that he really couldn’t just flounce off and find himself another arrangement, dragging Nkoyo and her friends with him. The jerk even started taking a partially exposed position on our second runs, trying to arrange himself just the right amount of pain.

I was counting down the minutes until I’d get to slag him off properly when we started our fifth week. All the runs so far had been varied winter wonderlands of death: a thick forest, deep and hushed; a wide frozen lake stretching so far we couldn’t see the other bank. Today it was a wide snowy meadow scattered with placid ordinary shrubs and tiny blue flowers peeking out from the snow—and absolutely nothing came at us. We ran to the wall of trees at the far end and back like we were doing an ordinary sprint, and then just as I’d made it to the doors, there was a deep rumbling noise and the snowfield split open maybe ten meters behind us and what seemed like a thousand spiked thornbush vines burst lashing up out of it.