It was horrible, and I couldn’t even howl at him, because it did matter, now, by the standard operating procedure of Scholomance losers. Aadhya had made a tactical deal for us with their alliance, but it’s always understood in those deals that either side has the right to jettison the other and trade up if the opportunity permits. And the opportunity did permit, now that I had become an extremely scarce and valuable resource. If we took the chance to, oh, upgrade to running with Liesel and Alfie, Ibrahim and his team would suddenly be just as stuck as everyone else who didn’t have me to run with.

And it wasn’t an accident that he and Yaakov hadn’t let on that they weren’t just friends, all those nights we were sitting together studying in Chloe’s room. We’re all fairly nose-to-grindstone in here, but one of the most reliable topics of conversation was nevertheless gossip about who was dating who or wanted to. It was second only to gossip about who was getting allied with who.

There wasn’t actually very much of the gossip to be had, because oddly enough constantly being on the verge of malnourishment, exhaustion, and mortal terror isn’t really conducive to romance, but we extracted all the entertainment we could from the couples that managed to have the energy—most of which involved at least one enclaver, unsurprisingly. We knew when Jamaal started coordinating his snack runs at the same time as a girl from Cairo—her with a group of girls, him with a group of boys, all very by the book. We knew that Jermaine from New York had spent the last year in a competitive love triangle with a boy from Atlanta over one of the top alchemists, and we all knew when in a perfect storm of gossipy delight it turned into a trio and an alliance, halfway through the first month of term. Everyone else also had the fun of pestering me about Orion while they were at it. Ibrahim and Yaakov had decided not to share the information. They’d decided it was a risk they couldn’t afford to take.

Lots of enclavers, especially from the most powerful Western enclaves, like to go on about how enlightened wizard society is, relative to the masses of the mundanes. From their rarefied perspective, I suppose it’s true. Spend decades recruiting the most brilliant wizards from all round the world, because they’re the ones who can best save your kids’ lives and make your enclave even richer and more powerful, then you can look round your diverse and tolerant international enclave and pat yourself on the back in a congratulatory way. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any bigots among us. It only means that we’ve got this one additional dividing line of our own that stops right at the enclave doors, and it’s sharp enough to cut your throat.

And Ibrahim wasn’t on the safe side of that line. He’s not an enclaver; he’s not one of the top students, who could count on getting an alliance with one. His primary gift, the one talent that he’d marshaled to get himself all the way through school and into his alliance with Jamaal—the boy from Dubai who was going with his team—was that he was a really determined and enthusiastic suck-up. If you liked a tidy bit of flattery and someone who’d cheer you on and comfort you when you were down, pat you on the back and tell you that you were brilliant and in the right even if you were really quite blatantly in the wrong, help you talk your way through any inconvenient fits of guilt or conscience, then he was your lad, and loads of enclavers did indeed like that.

Which is hardly a unique approach. Roughly half of the indie kids are at least partly on the minion track: some of them offer up labor or muscle; the more desperate ones offer themselves up more or less explicitly as human shields. They take the worst seats at the cafeteria tables and in the classrooms; they fetch supplies and drop off homework; they walk the enclaver kids to their dorm rooms at night and keep watch for them in the showers without even asking for turnabout. Because almost all enclavers except the very richest ones will end up with a few filler positions in their alliances, open to average kids who can do four or five decent castings in ten minutes and have built a modest sum of mana on top of their schoolwork, and have been lucky enough to stay able-bodied and in solid physical condition through years in the Scholomance.

That was the kind of opening Ibrahim was aiming for, his whole time here. He didn’t have other options. He was perfectly competent, but that didn’t make him anything special, not by the standards of the graduation hall. And if you’re on the minion track, you can’t afford to prioritize anything as unimportant as your most passionately held beliefs or your deepest emotional needs. You don’t even get to prioritize your own bloody life when you’re going down the stairs first with your heart in your throat, just so if there is something waiting, it’ll get you instead of the enclaver seven steps behind you, who you’re both pretending really hard is being such a good friend for letting you have the chance.

That was why he’d kept it quiet. He wanted to keep the option to glom on to an enclaver who was the kind of rusty hinge who cared about other people’s business, and now he was asking me if I was one of those—because his life depended on it.

I wanted to yell at him in a fury and stomp away, but I couldn’t. He looked ready to cry, the way you would if you had to desperately beg some girl you’d been rude to on the regular for your life and the life of someone you loved. He’d have been a complete nutter not to lie to me in any way I wanted him to, if that got me to keep running with his alliance. For that matter, if he were really clever, he’d know I didn’t care and have the conversation anyway, as an excuse to exhibit his commitment to servility.

But I knew Ibrahim wasn’t that kind of clever. He was so good at sucking up because he was sincere about it. I think he really liked people to begin with—a foreign concept to me—and he was earnestly starry-eyed. He’d kept on sucking up to Orion long after it’d become clear that Orion wasn’t in the market for minions. For that matter, Ibrahim had been stupid enough to fall in love inside school; and it really had to be love, because hooking up with Yaakov for an alliance was an obviously bad idea that had put them both in those more dangerous spots.

So instead I muttered, “I’m not a wanker, Haddad. Have your own fun. See you tomorrow morning,” ungraciously, and then stomped away.

That same day at lunchtime, Magnus had the bald-faced cheek to ask Chloe to pass along an invitation to join his team if I still wanted more practice, which I suppose in his mind was the equivalent of Ibrahim’s desperate begging. I gritted my teeth and did a run with them that afternoon. They were just as good as Liesel’s team, and they would have been just as dead without me.

When I went down with my own team again on Wednesday morning, there were roughly thirty people downstairs waiting even before we got there, and they were all angry—furiously angry. They still didn’t know I meant to help them. What they did know was, if they wanted any practice, they had to go to me hat-in-hand for help that they weren’t going to have on graduation day, because of course I wasn’t going to help them then, and when they saw thirty other kids lined up to ask, they knew that today was the day I’d start charging for my help, and I’d want things they couldn’t afford to give away.