“Anyway, that’s how long I’ve known that I was probably going to die before I was old enough to vote,” Aadhya said. “And I don’t want to die, I want to get out of here, but I’m not going to put off being a person until I make it. So I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t know. I knew when I asked you to team up, I knew that I’d just gotten lucky. It wasn’t anything I did. I was just a loser girl like you and a desi girl like you, and I wasn’t a complete jerk to you, so you let me get close enough to figure out that you were a rocket and I could grab on.”

“Aad,” I said, but I didn’t have anywhere to go from there, and I don’t even know if she heard me. It came out as thin and crackly as broken glass, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was staring down at the desk and tracing back and forth over the graffiti on the edge with her thumb, LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT, and her mouth was turned down.

“Somebody always gets lucky, right?” she said. “Why not me? Why shouldn’t I be the one who wins the lottery? I told myself that, but I didn’t believe it, because it was too lucky. I knew I had to do something to deserve it. Like I knew you’d had to do something to deserve that book you got. And I hadn’t. So first I kept waiting for you to ditch me, and then I kept waiting to have to do something, but I didn’t. And I’m telling you about Udaya because, in my head, at some point, I think I decided, okay, it was like a trade. I didn’t get to have my sister, so I got you.”

I had a horrible gargled noise stuffed up in my throat, because I couldn’t ask her to stop. I couldn’t want her to stop, even if I had my hands pressed over my mouth, and there were tears building up along the ledge of my fingers.

Aadhya just kept talking. “I knew that was bullshit, but it made me feel better about not doing anything. So all these months, I’ve been letting that sit in my head, and that was stupid of me, because if you’re who I get instead of my sister—I can’t just leave you behind and still be a person.” She looked up then, and it turned out she was also crying, tears trickling down her face and just starting to drip off her chin, even though her voice didn’t sound any different. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

I really wanted to be blubbing like a child, but instead I had to pull myself together and stop her. “I don’t want that! I’m not asking you or anyone else to stay behind with me.”

“Right, obviously.” Aadhya swiped her sleeve across her face and sucked in a snuffle. “You’d rather run away and wallow in angst than ask for help or anything else extremely horrible like that.”

“If you want to help me, you’ll get out the gates as fast as you can. That’s the whole point! Whatever Khamis thinks, I’m going to get you there—”

“Not all on your own you’re not,” Aadhya said. “Khamis is a bag of wieners, but he’s not wrong. I don’t care if you get your biggest superhero cape on, you can’t just carry a thousand people out the door on your back.”

“So what are you going to do? If you turn round at the gates and make a stand with me, you’ll just be another target for me to cover. I’m not going to stand by and let people die, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to trade you for them. I’m not.”

“Uh, not telling you to?” Aadhya shook her head and pushed herself up out of the chair. “Come on. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know I can come up with something better than Book it out the gates without giving you a second thought or Die tragically and pointlessly at your side, neither of which sound genius to me. Since that’s all you’ve got so far, pull your head out of wherever you’ve shoved it and consider the crazy idea that maybe us pathetic little people could help you solve this problem. I know it’s against your most sacred principles to ask anyone for anything, and obviously we don’t have any reason to care about figuring out how you could save everybody’s lives, but maybe some of us are really bored and don’t have anything better to do.”

* * *

It still sucked. Maybe Aadhya didn’t want to leave me behind, but Khamis would’ve been just fine with it, and I was pretty sure that the difference between him and everyone else was, he had either the nerve or the guts to let it show. Of course they didn’t want me saving anyone else’s lives if it meant I didn’t have as much time to save their lives. That didn’t make them grotesquely selfish; it just made them people. It was even fair, when they were the ones I’d actually made a deal with, the ones who were planning to have my back. That deal meant I was supposed to have their backs, too. And yeah, Aadhya had given me an out, saying she hadn’t done anything to deserve me, but they’d all done more to deserve me than anyone else had, if I even did call for being deserved.

The only thing that helped was Aadhya had done more than any of the rest of them. If she wasn’t demanding that I put her first, nobody else had the right to demand it, either. But that didn’t give her or me the right to volunteer them to save everyone. I didn’t have the right, but I had the power, because their only alternative was to quit our alliance, or maybe open up one of the floor drains and jump in, which looked roughly as good a survival plan. And they all knew it, and I knew it, and that meant I was making them do it, just as much as Khamis taking the nice safe center position in his team.

But my only alternative was to tell them never mind, I wasn’t going to save everyone, I was just going to concentrate on getting our group to the gates, and after that I’d help whoever was left. Which wouldn’t be very many. No long tedious graduation ceremonies for us. Historically, according to the graduation handbook, about half the deaths happen before the first person reaches the gates, and the time between when that first lucky survivor gets out and when the last lucky survivor does is close to ten minutes, year after year. I’d be tenderly shepherding my own little flock to safety past a few hundred kids screaming as they were butchered. By the time we got to the gates and I turned back, most of them would already be dead.

I couldn’t stand it either way, which was too bad for me, since there wasn’t a third option as far as I could tell. The way I attempted to make one appear was sitting at the library table like a plank without looking anyone in the face, staring fixedly at the bread roll that Chloe had brought me without eating it. I pretended the stabbing pains in my stomach were hunger, and left it to Aadhya to say, “Okay, let’s figure this out,” to everyone else sitting round the table in the depths of awkward silence.

“What is there to figure out?” Khamis said coldly; he was sitting with his arms folded over his chest, glaring at me so hard that I could tell he was doing it even without looking anywhere near his face. “Are we supposed to be worrying about how to save Magnus, now, too? I don’t think he’s returning the favor.”

Everyone shifted awkwardly, and then Liu said, “Well, he should.”