“Yeah,” Chloe said. “But my grandma’s an alchemist. She started by teaching me to cook, when I was about ten. She was really happy that I wanted to learn; my mom and my uncle never did. She got in for working on the cafeteria overhaul,” she added.

For all that the food in here is mostly awful and regularly contaminated, we’re lucky to have it. Originally the Scholomance cafeteria dispensed a nutritious slurry three times a day—thin and watery enough to pass through the very narrow warded pipes—and if you wanted it to be something else, you had to transmute it yourself, which no one could afford to do.

Actually making a particular food out of something else with magic is almost impossible, because you aren’t just interested in how you experience it in your mouth: you want the food to work as nutrition for your body once you send it down into your stomach and forget about it. If you turn a box of nails into a sandwich, you might think you’ve eaten afterwards, but you’ll be wrong. And for that matter, if you turn gruel into bread, you’ll generally be wrong then, too, because gruel and bread aren’t actually that similar as far as your digestive enzymes are concerned. It has been done, but only in alchemy labs funded by enclaves, by the kind of wizard who will finish their Scholomance training and then go off to spend ten years in a mundane university getting advanced degrees in chemistry and food science.

You can start with something that technically qualifies as nourishment and then just put a sensory illusion on it, but the illusion will break down as soon as you start chewing. The result is generally more unpleasant than just choking down whatever you started with. The only practical solution is to selectively transmute whatever parts come into significant contact with your senses: you lose the nutrients out of the bits that were transmuted, but that sends the rest successfully down.

However, that’s loads more complicated and expensive mana-wise than just waving a hand and turning, say, a stick into a pen, where you don’t care in the slightest what’s happening on the molecular level as long as you can write with it. Not even enclavers could afford to do it on a regular basis. Most kids came out more or less malnourished, and everyone spent most of their weight allowance bringing in food. It was enough of a factor in deaths that after ten years or so, the decision was made to open up a hole in the wards for transporting in small amounts of actual food, enough to give everyone our thrice-weekly snack bar visit.

But shortly after World War II, New York and a consortium of the US enclaves swooped in and very cheerfully took over the school—London wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight—and they hired a batch of those chemist-wizards who went into their labs and developed a food-transmutation process to run on the slurry that was an order of magnitude cheaper than the best solutions before then.

Evidently Chloe’s granny had been one of the alchemists who had made it possible—good enough to get a place in New York enclave for the work. I already knew her dad had been allies with her uncle, during graduation, and he’d got in by marrying her mum. So her dad and her granny had been indie wizards who’d made it in by clawing and scratching and working themselves to the bone; her family weren’t high up in the council or anything, they were relatively new. No wonder she was so anxious about not losing the Domina’s son.

But I couldn’t say anything to reassure her. I wasn’t coming to New York. I wasn’t making her grandmother’s bargain, not even the better version of it that I could have struck. So if Orion wanted me more than he wanted New York, I suppose I was going to take him away, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it, either. Not after the way they’d treated him, raised him to be their hero instead of just another kid. I’d spent most of my childhood yelling at Mum for not taking me into an enclave. It hadn’t occurred to me what any enclave would do with someone like me, what they’d want of me, what they’d tell a kid too young to resist them, just to get what they wanted.

I wasn’t going to give in to them. I wasn’t going to give in to anyone: not Magnus, not Khamis, not Chloe, not even Orion, if he asked me himself. I wasn’t going to give in to New York, to any of the enclaves, and most of all, I wasn’t going to give in to the Scholomance.

After I left Chloe in her room, I walked alone to the gym. The doors were closed today: there were no runs on Sunday. On the other side, the low grinding and clanking noises were going steadily as the obstacle course went on rearranging itself to try to kill us, all in the name of making us stronger. I stood in front of them listening for a long time. I could; nothing tried to jump me. “That’s right,” I said, aloud, defiantly. “Don’t even try. You’re not going to win. We’re going to get everyone out. I’m going to get everyone out.”

Dramatic pronouncements are all very well and good, but on Monday, two hundred kids turned up expectantly for the next English run, and Orion and I started to hit our limits.

The new course itself was absolutely awful. The gym was full of plum trees on the cusp of blooming, with a soft gurgling brook winding among their roots, the last traces of ice clinging to the banks and a pale edge of frost limning the grass. Sunlight dappled down through the leaves and small birds darted around in the distance, chirps coming from amid the branches, lovely and inviting, at least until we got close enough for the trees to start savagely clubbing us with thorny limbs that shredded most shielding spells, and the tiny birds bunched up into a flock that came at us en masse and turned out to be shrikes.

I tried to hit the whole swarm with a killing spell, but it didn’t work. Just before the spell landed, the cloud of shrikes all burst apart and started attacking us separately. Orion spent the whole run weaving back and forth through the crowd, shooting them down one at a time, but I couldn’t do that: throwing one of my killing spells at a single shrike while it was flying rapidly around a person pecking at them was an excellent way for me to miss the shrike entirely, and kill the person and their three closest neighbors at the same time.

The only thing that saved it from disaster was that everyone did keep helping one another—throwing fresh shields over people who had been clubbed, picking the shrikes out of the sky one at a time if they came close enough, neutralizing the poison clouds that occasionally spurted out of the plum blossoms. I wasn’t useless, either; halfway through, the trees got inventive. A dozen of them pulled up their roots and wove themselves together into a living wicker man. It went crashing about, grabbing enormous handfuls of people and shoving them inside the basket of its own chest, and then erupted into flames with them imprisoned and screaming just as a second batch of trees followed the first.

The shields that everyone had to keep up against the shrikes were totally useless against the tree-basket-men, and even Orion couldn’t make a dent in the things. They weren’t consumed by their own fire, which was presumably psychic instead of corporeal. They just kept merrily burning on, right until I tore them all apart with a handy spell I have for constructing a ritual dark tower. It uses whatever construction materials are in the area. The people inside got dumped out, and the trees got shredded apart and reassembled into a tidy hexagonal tower of solid walls bristling with upcurved sharpened stakes placed at intervals that looked exactly as though the structure was designed to have people impaled all over the surface. Even dodging shrikes, everyone gave it a very wide berth.