That became just as clear to the kids in the Hindi run as it had to the ones in the morning, and word kept spreading. On Saturday morning there were almost eighty kids for the Spanish run, and that afternoon, the first five kids did finally turn up for the Chinese run. They were all stragglers.

There’s no single thing that marks someone out as a straggler. Sometimes it’s just bad luck—you’ve been jumped too often, blew all your mana fighting off mals, and now you haven’t anything to contribute to a shared pool. Sometimes it’s even worse luck—you’ve got an affinity for something truly useless, like water-weaving. That’s tidy on the outside, you’d make a fortune helping enclaves with their sewer lines, but you won’t have the chance, since it doesn’t do yourself or anyone else any good in here. Sometimes you’re just not very good at magic and not very good at people—you can get by with one or the other, but if you haven’t either, you’re in trouble.

I’ve tried not to think about what it would be like—the idea of having to wade into the graduation hall all alone, the mass of the crowd breaking for the gates ahead of you, a sea of people with plans and friends and weapons, warding spells and healing potions, and the maleficaria all around already beginning to rip kids out of the mass, shredding them into bones and blood—running because your only hope was to run, knowing that actually you hadn’t any hope, and you’d die watching other people going out the gates. I spent three years trying not to think about it, because I thought that was going to be me.

In this case, one of the poor bastards had developed shakes that occasionally interrupted his spellcasting, probably aftereffects of a poisoning, or perhaps just trauma. There’s no shortage of that in here. Another one of them had Chinese about as good as mine, which was a bad sign given that it was presumably the language she’d been taking classes in for all four years. It’s not actually worth it, statistically speaking, to send your kids in here if they aren’t properly fluent in English or Chinese to begin with, which generally also is a sign they’re no good at languages. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a wizard they are otherwise: they’ll be at too much of a disadvantage when they can’t keep up with their general subjects. You’re better off keeping them at home, guarded as best you can, teaching them in the vernacular they do know. But some families try it anyway.

And in fact none of the five were any good during the run. The wisdom of our crowd is vicious, but it’s rarely wrong. The boy with the shakes, Hideo, would’ve been a quite good incanter, except that he’d have died twice during the single run when he interrupted his own invocations. But it didn’t matter; with only five kids in the run with me and Orion, we still all sailed through.

Afterwards I made myself tell Hideo, “I’ll get you a potion that will hold you for the run.” My mum’s got a recipe for something she calls calming-waters. She makes a monthly batch to give to wizards who’ve got muscle spasms brought on by overcasting—when you try to cast a spell you haven’t quite got enough mana for, you can make up the difference out of your own body, but it often has side effects that are brutal to get rid of. I was reasonably certain it would work for his shakes, too.

The sticking point was, I couldn’t actually brew it myself. I had to ask Chloe to do it for me. I gave myself the reward of a silver lining: I asked Orion to come down to the labs, too. He got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic, and then gave me a look of wounded disappointment when he discovered that Chloe was coming, which was exactly why I had asked him. The next time I asked, he’d be sure to ask if there was going to be any company, and then I’d have to say yes or admit I was asking him on a date, which I absolutely wasn’t going to do. It was the best protection against myself that I could come up with.

He was even more annoyed when it took us three hours to get the bloody thing concocted. Chloe kept asking excellent questions like, “Do you grind the scallop shells fine or just pound them to coarse bits?” and “Do you stir clockwise or counter?” none of which I could answer except by pantomiming Mum doing it, trying to remember with my body, and then guessing as best I could. I’m rubbish at alchemy in general, and I’m rubbish at healing in general, too, so the combination is almost always a disaster. The last time Mum tried to teach me, the test drop disintegrated a chunk the size of my fist out of the floor of our yurt.

“That can’t be right,” Chloe said, looking into the seething angry yellow boil in the pot, which indeed did not look anything like calming-waters.

“It’s not,” I said grimly. “I think I got the timing of the salt and the sulfur wrong.”

She sighed. “We’ll have to start over.”

“Oh, come on,” Orion moaned outright. In justice, which he wasn’t going to get from me, it was take four.

“Stop complaining,” I said. “Pretend you’re staking us out as bait. The two of us alone in this lab are as likely as anyone in the entire school to get jumped.” Judging by her sidelong look, I’m not sure Chloe really appreciated my argument.

The fifth attempt actually came out vaguely resembling the cool green-blue it was meant to be, only with a thick streak of muddy yellow-brown winding through it. I had absolutely no idea what we’d done wrong at that point, but Chloe very cautiously dipped in a lock of her own hair, rubbed it between her fingers, then sniffed it, and finally just barely touched it with her tongue. She made a face and spit into the sink and said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it,” then cleared the decks with a brisk cleaning spell and dived in once more. She went much quicker this time, and I couldn’t even spot what she did differently, but when she was done, at the end the yellowy mud streak got swallowed up smoothly and vanished away, and a single drop on my tongue was enough to tell me she had got it.

The drop wasn’t enough to keep away the burst of sour jealousy: I couldn’t brew calming-waters, my own mother’s recipe, and Chloe could. I’d have had to drink a triple dose to clear that taste out of my mouth.

But she made a big batch and we bottled it into thirty vials. It would take care of Hideo for the rest of the term, and leave enough over for anyone who panicked on graduation day: there were usually a reasonable number of unexpected freakouts. Orion lugged the crate downstairs to Chloe’s room for us and threw me one last reproachful look before flouncing off to go hunting, since I very firmly parked myself into one of the beanbags and made clear I wasn’t going anywhere alone with him.

Chloe bit her lip and didn’t say anything, but she continued not to say anything even after he left, which wasn’t usual for her. It was clear she could have happily used a dose of calming-waters herself to stop worrying: Is El going to take Orion away from us. I didn’t want to think about that myself, as letting the idea into my head was likely to lead me in the direction of many terrible decisions. “Were you always planning to do alchemy?” I said instead, by way of distracting us both. “Aren’t your parents both artificers?”