I don’t know if I could have fixed the situation by telling them I was going to save them all. I don’t think they’d have believed me. But I can’t say for certain, because I didn’t even try. They were looking at my friends; they were looking at Aadhya and Liu and all the people who’d taken a chance on me; and they were losers looking at enclavers, except fifteen minutes ago they’d been the enclavers, the ones who were going to live. Alfie with Liesel and the brilliant team she’d built, Magnus and his wolf pack; they hadn’t spent four years being slowly taught over and over that another kid had the right to live and they hadn’t.

And I could see in their faces that if they could have taken me, if I’d been a piece of artifice they could wrestle away or steal, they would have: they’d have used every unfair advantage they had and gone after my friends, and at this very moment probably most of them were trying to think of some way to do it, just like Magnus with his Field Day stunt.

“Lots of us up for first run today,” Alfie said, in the bright sort of way that someone might say, Well, looks like rain, doesn’t it! when it’s sheeting down and you’ve taken shelter under an awning with five people who’ve all got knives drawn, and you’re quietly reaching into your pocket for a handgun.

So I didn’t say anything reassuring like, You can stop fretting already, Orion and I are going to get all of you useless gits out. I didn’t even say anything sensible about going with everyone in turn. Chloe glanced at me and I could see her getting ready to say something sensible for me, play peacemaker with the enclave boys, and before she could, I said, “No sense waiting for any more to show,” and I marched for the doors, flung them open, and sailed in. There was a confused scramble behind me, and then everyone reached the same conclusion at the same time: if they wanted to be sure of getting in a run with me, they had to go now. They all poured in after me together.

Doing the course with fifty people at once isn’t normally a good idea, because you make it through all right, but you don’t get enough practice. That wasn’t a problem when we were being deluged from all sides. I realized afterwards that actually it had been terrific practice for me, the closest I could get to the real thing, all of us being dumped into a sea of maleficaria at once. But right then in the moment, I didn’t have time to think about anything but fighting, casting desperately in every direction to take out attacks that were about to overwhelm someone’s defenses. It was like one of those horrible twitchy games where there are seventeen things to do on separate timers and you frantically dash from one to the next and you’re always on the verge of missing one. It was just like that, except I had forty-seven timers running, and if I missed even one of them, somebody was going to die. It was a massive relief when we got to the final attack and I could just cast the one nice relaxing hideously powerful spell and let everyone else run for the gates while I held the eldritch glacier down.

We limped out with skins more or less intact but utterly exhausted. Even I felt drained, my whole rib cage aching; my heart was banging around inside like it’d had an argument with my lungs and now it was in the kitchen putting pots and pans away angrily while they tried to find a way out through my breastbone. Which I suppose was good really, as it meant I’d got some proper exercise in, but I wasn’t for taking the long view at the moment. Some other teams had come down and were waiting, but after I staggered out, they took off without even trying to bribe me for a run, so I gather I looked the way I felt.

There wasn’t any conversation afterwards. Aadhya said, “I want a shower,” and I said, “Yeah,” and basically all twenty-seven girls of our group trudged off to the showers together. It was almost time for Orion to harvest the amphisbaena for Liesel; the juveniles had stopped coming through with the water a week ago or so and now were just hissing and banging impotently at us from inside the showerheads like the steam pipes had gone mad. There was one moment when the wall cracked around one of the showerheads and the amphisbaena inside started to thrash around wildly to try and finish breaking out, but it was just an amphisbaena, so the girl using the shower didn’t even stop rinsing her hair, she just grabbed a long enchanted stiletto-knife out of her bathroom bag and stabbed it into the opening. The showerhead stopped moving around. It would be unpleasant if the dead amphisbaena started rotting in there, but probably the others would eat it before that happened.

None of us talked. We took our turns washing in almost complete silence broken only by the occasional “has anyone got shampoo to trade for toothpaste” and the like. We got our clothes back on and straggled up to the library for our respective postmortems, and still no one said anything to me or to each other until I sat down at our group’s table. But the boys were there waiting for us—and stinking, which was a lot more noticeable since we’d got ourselves clean—and before I’d even quite got my arse in the chair, Khamis demanded peremptorily, “What was that?” like he’d been holding the words back on a tight leash until I got in range and he could let them loose.

I gawked at him. Yes, I’m perpetually complaining about everyone cringing away from me, but of all the people to think they could safely have a go at me without getting knocked back—and then I had a moment of even greater indignation as I realized he’d been biting his tongue for a month the same way I had, waiting until enough of the term was gone and we’d locked things down and I couldn’t shove him off anymore without crossing the line of what passes for common decency in here.

“What’s the matter, Mwinyi?” I snapped back. “Picked up a splinter today?”

“What’s the matter?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter! Six times today—six times—Fareeda went down.” He jerked a thumb at poor Fareeda, who was just sitting down herself, three chairs away from him. She was an artificer friend of Nkoyo’s I didn’t know very well, and she very clearly did not think she could safely have a go at me. She darted her eyes between us and slid the rest of the way into her chair while doing her best to convey that her entire being was on another plane of existence and it was just a mistake on our parts if we thought she was there. “On Monday, she only went down once. What do you say about that?”

There’s a lovely spell I know that makes your victim’s organs all desiccate while still inside them. The original was developed ages ago for perfectly respectable mummification purposes and fell out of fashion roughly along with that practice, but the version I’ve got is the really nasty nineteenth-century English one that everyone’s favorite Victorian maleficer, Ptolomey Ponsonby, worked up in translation out of his father’s collection of Egyptian artifacts. At the moment, I felt roughly as though someone were casting it on me.

“She didn’t stay down, did she?” I squeezed out of my shriveling entrails. Khamis wasn’t wrong to be concerned if Fareeda was going down a lot: she was in their team’s lead position. She’d spent all the fall semester building a massive forward shield, which would have been a bad strategy on an individual level except it had bought her a place in an enclaver’s alliance, even if it was an extremely dangerous place.