Nobody died, but seven people came out with exposed bone, a dozen with severe burns, and two people had lost eyes. A couple of enclaver alchemists grudgingly shared drops of restorative tinctures, which were good enough to heal the damage once they emerged from the gym, and nobody complained if they made it out of graduation alive at the cost of an eye, but it had been a sharp lesson in our limitations. There were plenty of small, quick mals. In fact they were excellent candidates to have survived the cleansing, down below.

In the library afterwards, Magnus pulled Orion aside into a corner of the reading room for a deep heartfelt chat, out of earshot of where I’d been before I got up and quietly snuck after to eavesdrop. “Look, bro, I’m sorry to have to be saying this, I know you’re trying to move mountains here, but—we’ve got to have a plan for when you can’t,” by which he meant, a plan for leaving people behind. That was what every enclaver had.

“If that happens, I guess we’ll have to let the best-prepared fend for themselves, Tebow,” I said, sweet as a poisoned apple, from behind his back. He flinched and glared at me before he could help himself.

But the truth was everyone had that plan: how to recognize when one of your allies had gone down too hard, and it was time to cut them loose and keep going. I’d lived with that plan in my own head for years and years, and just declaring that I was giving it up wasn’t actually a solution to the underlying problem. We needed a plan to save everyone instead, and we demonstrably still didn’t have one. Magnus wasn’t wrong about that.

But we still had a better option than any of the other available ones. More kids kept joining the runs all week long, except in the still-almost-empty Chinese section. One of the former Bangkok enclavers did show, warily, and later in the week, Hideo—calming-waters did beautifully to stop his tics, for half an hour at least, which was plenty of time to do the run—brought a group of three other kids with him, a loser-alliance that he’d had an agreement to follow after in the graduation hall, with no other benefits: even the worst stragglers can get that kind of lousy deal. I think he’d asked them to come and watch him perform with the tics medicated, in hopes they’d agree to let him properly join up, and the prospect of a real fourth brought them—that, or they liked him, and wanted to be convinced.

Apparently they were convinced, and it was contagious, because the following Monday—after the gym debuted yet another completely unsurvivable course—all of the Japanese enclavers turned up for the Chinese section en masse, bringing their allies with them, which made it suddenly a substantial crowd. The biggest Japanese enclaves all have each of their kids make their own team, with no more than one or two carefully picked potential enclave recruits from among the independent Japanese kids, and the rest of the kids are foreign wizards whom they’ll aggressively sponsor into foreign enclaves after graduation, the idea being to create relationships all over the world. Loads of kids take Japanese and compete for the slots as a result, since it’s substantial help to get into the enclave you actually most want to live in. Mostly people consider themselves lucky to take whatever enclave they can get, even if it means moving halfway round the world from your family.

Some of them had been coming to the English runs before now, since most of them knew both English and Chinese, but it obviously made more sense to come to the less crowded run. They just hadn’t wanted to pick a fight with Shanghai enclave, and who could blame them. Turning up like this was the equivalent of them saying publicly they were convinced that they weren’t getting out alive otherwise, a vote of no confidence in whatever the Shanghai kids were trying to organize.

What they certainly weren’t organizing was runs of the obstacle course, since as far as I knew, no one in the school but me could mind-prison a castigator, which was this week’s special guest star. It took me a full ten minutes of wrangling the thing while it bellowed and roared and thrashed hideous slimy limbs dripping with acid all over the gym, eating enormous holes in the wide spring meadow buzzing with seventeen different swarms of mana-eating insects that everyone else desperately had to keep off. Orion literally had to go across the gym and back thirty-two times in the single run with a net spell, which kept coming apart every time one tiny drop from the castigator’s arms hit it.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Liu offered wearily, that afternoon in the library, as we sat slumped round the table. Orion had put his head down in his arms and was snoring faintly from inside them. The rest of us were trying to think of ways to talk the Shanghai enclavers round. “Nobody will turn down help on graduation day, and the really desperate ones who will need the most help are coming to the run. Maybe we’ll be able to just include them.”

“Yeah, it’s not like they’re going to be useless,” Aadhya said. “They’re doing something. They’re in the workshop all the time; I’ve seen Zixuan in there working with at least a dozen kids every time I go in for supplies.”

“This is nonsense. They are not going to be prepared,” Liesel said. If you’re wondering how Liesel came into our discussions, so were the rest of us, but she was both impervious to hints that she wasn’t wanted, and also hideously smart, so we hadn’t actually been able to chase her from the planning; in fact she had edged her way further up the table at every session. “There are more than three hundred of them and they are not coming to a single run. We cannot yet manage a group even of two hundred properly. Are we useless? Have we not trained? But it is only lucky that no one died this week. And it is still only the beginning! If they don’t start practicing before the end, there will be no hope for them. Put that out of your heads.”

“I suppose you’d like me to just abandon three hundred people, then,” I said sharply.

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, the great heroine is angry. If they want your help they will come. Until then you should worry less how you will save them and worry more how they will get in your way. Now is it possible we can talk about the order of entry? We cannot keep running in without any organization. This is not a good strategy when we are all collaborating.”

She then hauled out four separate diagrams with multiple color-coded alternatives and spread them out on the table. “We must systematically try each of these options over the next six runs. First we will begin with the students with the strongest shielding, and attempt to create a defensive perimeter which can be monitored closely—”

I’ll draw a merciful veil over the rest. Liesel was clearly right, so we couldn’t stop her marching us off firmly in the proper direction, but for my part, I did feel very much like I’d just been put against the wall by the most dragonish dinner lady at primary school.

That week, without bothering to mention it to anyone, Liesel also marshaled every creative-writing-track kid out of our runs and gave them marching orders to invent minor cantrips that would do things like highlight anyone in trouble with an aura that would shade from amber to bright red as their situation worsened—not something that anyone in the graduation hall would ever previously have wanted, since it was more or less like putting out a beacon for mals—and automatically mark the ground where a person last saw a mal, to warn off the people behind them. Again, not something anyone would’ve spent mana on in the past. The first I knew about this clever program was when people started glowing all over the place on Friday, and Liesel lectured me and Orion sternly after the run not to even bother looking at anyone who wasn’t bright red.