My freshmen were still coming up here for their session every Wednesday, but Zheng had told Liu that the attacks had stopped completely. This ought to have been the safest place in the school to begin with, and now it was. There wasn’t any point shunting mals over here anymore. The school had tried, and it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t learned my lesson; I hadn’t turned my back.

“So this is nice,” Aadhya said, from the doorway, looking around the room and seeing it the way I’d seen it my first morning, a promise of safety and shelter and quiet, before I unwisely signed my name on the schedule and picked up the gauntlet the school had hurled at my feet. She came in and dragged around the desk in front of me, sitting down to face me. “The others went down to lunch. Liu and Chloe are going to get us something. Everyone’s still on board, if you were wondering.”

“Not really,” I said, and laughed a little, jangly and helpless, and put my hands over my face so I didn’t have to look at her, my friend, the first friend I’d ever had, besides Orion, who didn’t count; the first normal sane person in the world who’d looked at me and decided she was going to give me a chance to not hurt her.

Then Aadhya said, “I had a sister,” so I picked my head back up to stare at her. She talked about her family all the time. She’d given me a letter for them, the way she and Liu and Chloe had letters for Mum, just in case, but even without looking at the envelope, I already knew the address of the big house in the New Jersey suburbs with the swimming pool in the backyard. I’d heard endless painfully appetizing descriptions of the ongoing and deeply vicious cooking competition between her grandmothers, Nani Aryahi and Daadi Chaitali, and a whole line of bad jokes acquired in her grandfather’s garage workshop, where he’d taught her how to solder and how to use a saw. I knew all about her sharp and sharp-dressed mum who wove enchanted fabric by hand, fabric that went to the enclaves of New York and Oakland and Atlanta. I knew about her quiet dad who went out six days a week to do technomancer work at whichever enclave had hired him for that month. I knew their names, their favorite colors, which Monopoly tokens they liked to play. She’d never once mentioned a sister.

“Her name was Udaya. I wasn’t even three when she died, so I don’t really remember her,” Aadhya said. “Nobody in my family ever talked about her. For a while I thought that I made her up, until when I was ten I found a box of photos of her in the attic.” She gave a snort. “I freaked out.”

I knew what she was doing, and what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to ask what happened, and then I was supposed to let Aadhya tell me about her sister who’d died in here, maybe during graduation, and then Aadhya was going to tell me she understood I had to try and save as many people as I could, and then I was supposed to come downstairs and if I couldn’t get my head out of my arse long enough to make everyone a nice cup of tea, Chloe would probably do it for me, and we’d all go back to work on our strategy this afternoon as if nothing had changed. And I knew why: because that was the only sensible, practical thing for her to do, even if what she really wanted was to yell at me twice as loud as ever Khamis had.

“I can’t do this,” I said, my voice as quavery as if I’d been crying, even though I hadn’t been, I’d just been sitting there alone. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

I fumbled for the power-sharer, and Aadhya reached out and grabbed it down around my wrist, pinning it to the desk. “Again? All I actually need is for you to put aside the drama in your own head and shut up and sit there and listen to me for like five minutes. I think you can do that much.”

I couldn’t exactly say no. Anyway, she’d have been in her rights to smack me into next week, because what good would it do her for me to pull out? Liesel had Alfie’s buckets of mana, and brains and ruthlessness and a team totally dedicated to getting the hell out, and it hadn’t been worth two shits when the Himalayas attacked. Everyone else was still on board for exactly the same reason everyone was ever on board with anything in here, which was exactly the same reason everyone ever put themselves into this hellpit of a school, and that’s because it was better than the alternatives. That was all I could be: the lesser evil.

Aadhya gave it a few narrow-eyed moments, until she was sure I’d been cowed, before she took her hand off and sat back. “Okay, so, let’s pretend after I told you about Udaya, you said, What happened to her? like a normal person.”

“She died in here,” I said, dully.

“This is not a guessing game, and no,” Aadhya said. “My parents were really young when Udaya was born. They were living with my dad’s parents, and his dad was incredibly old-school. He insisted that my mom homeschool, and we were never allowed to go anywhere, not even the playground down the block. We couldn’t even play in the yard without a grown-up right there. I actually do remember that; he put a ward on the back door that zapped us if we tried to go through it alone. Udaya got sick of it. When she was eight, she climbed out the window and headed to the playground. A clothworm got her before she made it halfway down the block. They would come around our house sometimes to lay eggs, so their babies could sneak in through the wards and chew on my mom’s weaving. It just got lucky.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it.

Aadhya just shrugged back. “Mom asked her parents to stay in the States after the funeral. My aunt had married into Kolkata by then, so they could. She took me to live with them in a one-bedroom and put me in a mundie preschool next door. Dad joined us after a month. A couple of years later, they took everything they’d been saving to buy into an enclave, turned it into cash, and got our house across the street from a good school, and they made sure it was always full of tons of food and toys so all my school friends would want to come over to my place, even though it meant they couldn’t do magic when my friends were around. Daadi came to live with us when I was in kindergarten. Daduji was dead by then. Nobody’s ever told me for sure, but I’m pretty sure it was suicide.”

I was, too; there aren’t that many causes of death for wizards between the ages of eighteen and a hundred. Cancer and dementia eventually get too aggressive to stave off with magic, and if you live outside an enclave, sooner or later you become the slow-moving wildebeest and a mal picks you off the end of the pack, but not until then.

“I yelled at my mom for hiding it from me,” Aadhya said. “She told me she didn’t want me to be afraid. Daduji loved us, he wanted so bad to protect us, that’s all he was trying to do, but he couldn’t. And Mom wanted to protect me, too, but she also wanted me to live as much as I could while I had the chance, because Udaya never got to live at all.”

Really, it wasn’t a shocker or anything. It was just maths. Have two wizard kids, odds are you’re not going to see them both grow up. Possibly not either. Udaya had only got a little more unlucky than the average. Or a lot more unlucky, if you considered she’d spent every scarce minute of her entire life shut up in a nicer version of the Scholomance itself.