Of course, the enclaves didn’t really want to follow through on that threat. The wizard population has been growing steadily since the Scholomance opened, but as of right now, adding a second school and splitting the enclaver population across them would mean they’d have to compete with the Scholomance for indie kids. Both schools would have to sweeten the odds for us—at the cost of their own kids. And that’s apart from the massive cost of building the school itself.

What they really wanted was what they got: more Scholomance seats for their enclaves to hand out, and classes in an easier language for their kids. Not much to ask, but they’d had to make the threat to get it, and the allocation is still a far cry from fair. I’m in here myself thanks to a spot London really shouldn’t still have had to give out, and meanwhile indie kids all over Asia are still doing those grueling exams for the chance to be among the one in two kids who get a place.

But that can’t be fixed any more without starting to take places away from the very top international enclaves in the US and Europe, none of whom want to give up a single one. The next reallocation is coming soon—and there’s a real fight brewing over it. New York and Shanghai and their allies on both sides have been doing increasingly nasty things to one another for the last few years, jockeying for position. It would be a bit of a shocker to find out that a New York ally had gone after Bangkok and literally taken the enclave down, but we can all imagine it. Everyone knows it’s entirely possible that there’s a full-on enclave war happening right now.

Everyone including me, but the truth is, I’ve only known it in a vague background-noise way. All these years I’ve been a loser struggling in the soup; the geothaumaturgipolitical dancing among the top enclaves of the world didn’t matter to me anymore than pariah-loser me mattered to the top kids from Shanghai enclave. But it mattered now, and the more I thought about it, the more of a desperate mess it looked. Of course Yuyan and Zixuan wouldn’t trust me. They thought I was planning to graduate and head straight to New York, where presumably I’d be trying to help kill them and their families. Why wouldn’t I just do for them in here if I had the chance?

“But what’s their alternative?” I said in frustration, having gnawed it over in my head without finding a way through. “No matter what, they still can’t get through the obstacle course without me, and if they don’t get any practice in, they’ll die anyway. I’ll grant you it’s a bad chance, but it’s the only chance they’ve got. Why not give it a go? Or—why not at least send a few minions to give it a go, and make sure?”

Liu shook her head. “The course is in the gym.”

I groaned and lay myself out flat on the ground, staring at the ceiling. The gym, which I’d completely overhauled this past Field Day, in a bizarre and utterly nonsensical use of power which would suddenly make fantastic sense if what I’d been doing was, for instance, arranging some kind of mysterious sabotage of the obstacle course that would force people to put themselves in my power. Ideally in some way that would allow me to maintain power over them even after they left school and went home to their enclaves. That’s the whole idea behind the obstacle course to begin with—giving your consent is necessary to make it work. If some maleficer—some maleficer—managed to wriggle their way into it, that would be an excellent mechanism to use to force people to become their mindless zombie servants et cetera.

“I’m sorry,” Liu said softly. “I did already try asking a few indie kids to come, but…they don’t really trust me.” She put her hand up to run it back and forth over the short spiky fuzz of her head, an unconscious gesture she’d picked up ever since it had been cut. She hadn’t made that many more friends than I had, in her first three years in the Scholomance. Her family hadn’t needed her to network. They’d needed her to stay alive, and keep her kid cousins alive through their freshman year, and she’d been meant to do it with malia. And when you’re just a low-level maleficer, people pick up on that sort of thing and get nervous. “And they do trust the Shanghai kids. Most of them wouldn’t have spots in here at all if Shanghai hadn’t fought for them.”

I’d have debated the purity of the enclavers’ motives, but I’ll grant you that I didn’t have very good ground to stand on, me with my for-granted spot that Mum asked me if I wanted to take. “Do you suppose it would help things if we told them that I’ve actually got a mind control spell that works on masses of people at once?” I said aloud.

“No,” Liu said, positively. Then she said, “…do you?”

I grimaced, enough of an answer. She was right, of course; that’s not very confidence-inspiring.

But if we couldn’t find a way to change their minds—if Zixuan and Yuyan and the other kids from Shanghai didn’t come, if they all stayed away from our obstacle course runs, because they were afraid that it was a massive setup meant to take control of their brains and turn them all into trojan horses—and then graduation came, and they all died, in droves, because they hadn’t had any practice, while everyone who’d followed New York’s lead came sailing out home to their families—then it would in fact turn out to be a massive setup, in result if not intention, and I didn’t think their parents would be particularly interested in what my intentions had been.

* * *

As if to emphasize the problem, next morning there were more than a hundred kids for the English run. That many kids all in one place was so much temptation that a squad of extremely real, extremely hungry mals jumped us during the run, bursting out of snowdrifts and from behind jagged towers of ice. It wasn’t very wise of them; we could all tell they were the real thing, because they hadn’t been in the run earlier that week, so Orion made a beeline for each one. He took them all down without a worry, except for the massive manta-ray-sized digester that peeled itself off one face of the glaciers during their attack and tried to just flop itself completely over him. That one I just disintegrated whole.

I had the attention to spare, because everyone else had already got better. Thanks to Liesel, I was grudgingly forced to admit; she had been waiting right in front of the doors while everyone gathered, and as I got there, she preemptively announced in projecting tones, “We must approach the run differently. Stop thinking how you can help the people nearest to you. Think about what help you can give best, and look for the nearest person who needs that help.”

That was completely unintuitive, and very few people were willing to let go of their alliances quite that thoroughly yet. But by halfway through the run, it was so obviously the better approach that everyone was at least trying to do it. By the end I almost felt as if Orion and I were running it on our own—the same exhilaration except even better, though the run was still a thousand times harder—because the plan was working. Everyone was helping everyone else, saving everyone else, and all I had to do was jump in when anyone’s luck went a bit sour.