So there had to be a monstrous catch somewhere, only I couldn’t begin to guess what it was. I got up and poked Zheng. “Keep an eye on my things,” I told him. “I’m going to do a full check on the room. If any of you want to know how, watch,” I added, and all their heads popped up to watch me go over the place. I started at the air vents and made sure all of them were screwed down tight, and made a sketch on a piece of scrap paper to show where they were in the room, in case something unusually clever decided to creep in and replace one of them at some point. I counted all the chairs and desks and looked under each one; I took out every single drawer in the cupboard along the back wall and opened all the cabinet doors and put a light inside the guts of it; I pulled it away from the wall and checked to make sure it and the wall were both solid. I shone a light along the entire perimeter of the floor to look for holes, I tapped over every wall as high as I could reach, I checked the doorframe to make sure the top and bottom were snug, and by the time I had finished, I was as sure as I could get that this was a perfectly ordinary classroom.

By which I mean, mals could get into it any number of ways: through the air vents, or under the door, or by gnawing through the walls. At least in this one, they couldn’t get in by dropping down from the ceiling, because there was no ceiling. The Scholomance doesn’t have a roof; you don’t need one when you build your magic school jutting off from the world into a mystical void of non-literal space. The library walls just sort of keep going straight up until they’re lost in the dark. In theory, they do eventually stop somewhere far up there. I’m not climbing up to prove it to myself. But anyway, the room wasn’t infested to start with, and there weren’t any obvious gaping vulnerabilities. So what could the school possibly mean, giving me the massive gift of an entire afternoon off in here?

I went back to my seat and stared at the schedule. Of course I understood that the afternoon off was the bait in the trap, but it was really good bait, and also a really good trap. I couldn’t actually ensure a single good change in my schedule, since I didn’t know when any other senior classes were being held. If I put down, say, that senior course in Sanskrit that I’d been expecting, to try and knock out that horrible Advanced Readings seminar, then even if the Scholomance actually did drop the seminar, it would have an excuse to shove me into an Arabic course on Wednesday afternoons. If I even tried to get something as minor as the matching shop class on Thursday afternoons, I’d undoubtedly be given alchemy lab on Wednesdays, and something else on Fridays. Anything I did would lose me the one really great thing about this schedule, with no guaranteed improvements.

“Let me see all of yours,” I said to Zheng, without any real hope. One thing about being jammed in with freshmen, they all handed their sheets over meekly without even asking for a favor back, and I combed through the entire sheaf looking for any courses that I could take. But it was useless. I’ve never heard of freshmen being assigned to any class that a senior could possibly request, and they hadn’t been. All of them had the standard Intro to Shop, Intro to Lab—enclave girl had wisely encouraged all of them to move those right before lunch Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, which are the best slots freshmen can get, since upperclassmen bagsie the afternoons—along with freshman-year Maleficaria Studies, wouldn’t they have fun in there, and all the rest of their classes were literature and maths and history on the third and fourth floor. Except for one: outrageously, all of them also had the same Wednesday work session right up here with me, the lucky little snotnoses. None of them even appreciated how amazing it was.

I gave up and fatalistically signed my name at the bottom of my schedule without even trying to make any changes, then I went up to the big ancient secretary desk at the front of the room, cautiously lifted the roll-top—nothing there today, but just wait—and put my schedule inside. Most classrooms have a more formal place for submitting work, a slot that pretends to be shooting our papers through a network of pneumatic tubes to some central repository, but those broke early in the last century and were just patched up with transport spells, so really all you need to do is put your work out of sight in some common spot and it’ll be taken up. I stared down at my sheet one last time, then took a deep breath and shut the roll-top again.

I was sure I’d find out just how big a mistake I’d made right after breakfast, when I headed down to my first seminar, but I was wrong about that. I found out not a quarter of an hour later, without ever leaving the room. I was bent with gritted teeth over a snarled mess of crochet, getting as much mana into my crystal as I could before breakfast, and already mentally strategizing what hideously boring calisthenics I could do in this room once I’d healed up a bit more—I hate exercise violently, so forcing myself to do it is wonderful for building mana. There wasn’t much space, and never mind moving the desks. I’d probably have to do crunches lying across the top of two desks. But who cared: I’d be able to fill a crystal every two weeks, I thought.

Meanwhile the freshmen were all hanging about in the front of the classroom as if they didn’t have a care in the world, chattering to one another. Just to improve things, all of them were speaking in Chinese, including the Indian boy, and the Russian boy and girl—I was fairly certain that was Russian they’d spoken to each other, but they’d dived into the general conversation without a hitch. They were undoubtedly all doing Chinese-track general classes—in here, your choices for things like maths and history are that or English.

I was doing my best to let the conversation just be background noise, but it wasn’t working very well. One of the hazards of studying a ridiculous number of languages is that my brain has got the idea that if I don’t understand something I’m hearing, it’s because I’m not paying enough attention, and if I just listen hard enough I’ll somehow be able to divine the meaning. I should have been safe from being hit with another new language for at least a quarter, since the Scholomance had started me on Arabic not three weeks ago, but sitting in a classroom for two hours every Wednesday with a pack of freshmen all speaking Chinese would undoubtedly mean I’d start getting spells in Chinese, too.

Unless they all helpfully got themselves killed before the month was out, which wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Usually the first week of term is all right, and then just as the freshmen have been lulled into a state of false calm, the first mals creep out of their hidey-holes, not to mention the first wave of newly hatched ones from the ground floor start to find ways to squirm up here.

Of course, there’s always the occasional overachiever. Like the baby vipersac that quietly worked its way up through the air vent just then. Probably it had stretched itself out skinny and long to get through the wards on the ventilation system, making itself look like a harmless little liquid dribble, and it snaked through the physical grating and coiled itself up on the floor behind one of the bookbags to form back into shape. It would have made some squelching noises in the process, but the freshmen were talking loudly enough to cover for it, and I wasn’t paying very close attention myself, because for once in my life, I was the single worst target in the room by a thousand miles; no mal would pick me out of this crowd. I was already starting to think of the place as some kind of refuge.