“What?” Khamis said, but Liu wasn’t talking to him; she’d turned to Chloe. “What if we invited Magnus and his team to join up with us? Wouldn’t they say yes?”

Chloe stared at her. “Well—” She looked at me and then back. “I mean, yes, of course, but—” She stopped and looked at me again, and fair enough, I’d clearly conveyed to her on more than one occasion that I could think of many uses for Magnus, in the line of testing sharp objects and toxic chemicals, so she had a reasonable cause for doubting whether I’d be on board with signing him on. But I didn’t look up. I didn’t feel I had the right to object to any other ideas anyone had, given I’d rejected the one that involved all of them getting to live.

“That’s the only way this can work. Anyone who wants to run the course with El has to join us, really become allies,” Liu said. “It can’t just be El and Orion covering all of us. They won’t be able to do it. We all have to help cover each other so they can fight the worst mals, or save anyone about to go down.”

No one else was really participating in the conversation; almost certainly all just wondering what on earth they were going to do to save themselves while I was busy saving everyone else. But Yaakov had been listening, and apparently he was sincerely giving it a think, because he said, “But if this keeps happening, soon we will have everyone trying to run the course at the same time.” Ibrahim actually blinked over at him in surprise that he was taking the conversation seriously.

“Okay, so?” Aadhya said. “Most years, sure, we’re all trying to get private time on the course. But that’s not the problem we actually have. Did anyone here feel like the course wasn’t hard enough this morning? Even with fifty kids running?” Nobody had, very clearly; Aadhya didn’t even bother answering her own rhetorical question. “Let’s say El and Orion run the course twice a day. Everyone who wants to run with them gets to go once every other day, like we’re all supposed to. Even if literally everyone joins up, that’s fine; the gym can handle a few hundred kids at once, no problem. This isn’t rocket science or anything. We already know that we need allies. If we didn’t team up for graduation, if we all ran solo, practically everybody would die. This is just—the next level. We’re all going to be allies, because it’s worth it to help some rando kid if that means five minutes later, El’s going to be able to stop the volcano from falling on your head.”

“All of which is true right up until we all get to the gates at the same time, and Patience and Fortitude come for everybody at once,” Khamis said, the bastard, and Aadhya looked at me, asking the question I still wanted to run away from while screaming loudly. But it was only fair, after all: if I was making them jump through all these hoops, just so I could be a hero, I had to be a bloody proper one, didn’t I?

“I’ll take them out if I have to,” I said. I was just trying to get the words out without hysterics, but it came out like I was performing deadpan. Half the table thought I was making some sort of joke and gave it a polite laugh by way of telling Khamis to shut up and stop making things unnecessarily awkward, but Liu and Chloe both understood instantly that I wasn’t joking at all, and Khamis was still glaring daggers at me so hard that he presumably could tell that I was thirty seconds from projectile vomiting into his stupid face, and with all of them staring at me, the tittering died off and then everyone went through a round of looking at one another sideways to check Do we think El’s gone off her trolley for good, and then there was a round of uncertainty over whether I was just saying it or whether I had any actual reason to imagine that I could do anything of the sort.

I don’t think everyone had decided yet when Nkoyo said, “We should split up by language. You’ve got the big four, right?” she asked me, meaning English, Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish, and I managed a short nod. I suppose now I had to be grateful for my library seminar after all, and all Liu’s coaching.

Liu said, “We’ll write it up next to the gym doors,” and after a very abbreviated discussion, we broke up to start spreading the word.

Aadhya took me in tow—I think she felt I wasn’t to be trusted not to go skulking off again—but she didn’t move quick enough. As soon as I was plausibly but not actually out of hearing range, everyone else started whispering about it and I overheard Cora say, “Orion never found it, and she was so sick that day,” and I told Aadhya, very calmly in my opinion, “Sorry,” and ran ahead to the stairs and down to the nearest loo, outside the cafeteria, where I threw up what felt like most of my stomach lining, and then just sat crouched there over the toilet crying with my hands over my mouth. In here, by the end of freshman year you learn to cry with your eyes open, without making noise. Except of course nothing was going to come after me anyway, because I could kill maw-mouths as long as I had the mana, and there was a New York power-sharer on my wrist at the moment, apparently not to be removed no matter how ludicrous a swerve I took, so what mal would be stupid enough to come after me anymore?

Aadhya came in after a few minutes and waited for me outside the stall. I finally got hold of myself and crept out to wash my face. She kept watch for me until I had finished and then said, “Let’s get started.”

* * *

Orion gave me a poke in the back at lunchtime—the kids behind me in the queue let him ahead of them without his even asking—and said, “Hey Orion, I’ve got this great idea, how about you stop hunting actual mals that are eating actual people, and spend six days a week doing fake gym runs twice a day instead.”

I didn’t stop; I wasn’t going to miss out on the rice pud that for once was actually rice pud. There was a colony of the usual glutinous maggots growing rapidly through the big metal pan, but they’d only got halfway through so far, and I managed to get a bowlful. Ah, the privileges of being a senior. I also got three apples, despite the faint greenish shine you could see if you held them to the light at just the right angle: Chloe had a really brilliant spray that would take off the toxic coating. “Lake, I know you like your walkies, but fewer than twelve people have been eaten this year so far, and five hundred are due to be gobbled in the first ten minutes downstairs. Don’t be a twat. You can run around and play with the mals after the work’s done.” He scowled at me, but the numbers were too pointedly on my side, so he stopped arguing and sullenly took a scoop of the spaghetti Bolognese, and sprinkled it with a thick helping of shaved antidote in lieu of Parmesan.

We gave it an hour after lunch, to let the word spread a bit, before we went down for the first Hindi run. There were perhaps twenty kids waiting: two teams mostly made of friends and trading acquaintances of Aadhya’s, including one girl from Kolkata enclave who knew her cousins. My freshman Sunita had talked her older brother Rakesh into talking his team into coming, which included one wary enclaver from Jaipur.