I’d have had several things to say about her high-handed behavior, except I was lying flat on the floor with my eyes shut trying to convince my heart and lungs that really everything was fine and they should just calm down and keep working, and Orion was sunk over his own knees gulping for air, his entire shirt soaked completely through with sweat. We’d reached three hundred kids in the English run.

All of whom had in fact come out alive, and no one had even suffered a half-dissolved limb in the process, because launching behind a perimeter of the students with the best shielding was, in fact, extremely effective, and so were the new warning systems. By the time I had managed to haul myself up to the cafeteria and fork in my lunch and recovered enough energy to contemplate squabbling with Liesel, I had grimly realized that the only possible grounds on which I could squabble with her were that she was seizing authority that nobody wanted to give her. As grounds went, that had the solidity of a bog. At least she was doing it on the basis of terrifying competence and not just the random chance of affinity.

Anyway any spare energy I might have had for squabbling was soon to disappear. That afternoon we were up to 150 kids in the Hindi run: the Maharashtra kids all finally turned up. They were still keeping as far from me as they could, but they’d come. The next morning the Spanish run had more than a hundred as well. I was pathetically grateful that the Chinese run was still thin; running with forty kids felt like a relaxing stroll by comparison. It was all the more clear that without Liesel’s ruthlessly imposed improvements, we’d have been losing people left, right, and center.

Which didn’t actually reconcile me to her approach. “How exactly have you managed to spend your entire career until now pretending to be a nice person?” I demanded grouchily as I stomped down to the cafeteria on Monday the next week: in our library session after the English run that morning, she’d brought out a long checklist of the many, many things I’d done wrong or inefficiently that needed correcting, all of which she’d carefully observed while somehow managing to sail through the run completely undistressed herself. She was still demanding my attention for a few more of them on the stairs even after the lunch bell rang.

She sniffed disparagingly. “It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists. I must have looked aghast, because she scowled at me and said sharply, “Or instead you can spend years sulking around the school letting everyone believe you are an incompetent maleficer. Do you know how much simpler everything would be now if only you had given us any reasonable time to prepare? Not to mention we would not be having all these difficulties with the Shanghai enclavers! You had better be careful. They are waiting too long.” She flounced on from me to join Alfie and the London kids further ahead in the queue. They all moved back to make room for her right behind him, even Sarah and Brandon, although they were enclavers and she wasn’t.

“She’s a monster,” I said flatly to Aadhya and Liu as we queued. They were both quite shadowy under the eyes themselves: on top of all going in the English runs together, Liu was going with us in the Chinese runs, and trying to push the mana-amplification spell out to cover as many people as she could each time, and Aad was doing the Hindi runs, not to mention they were both actually suffering Liesel far more on a regular basis than I was, since they and Chloe had been doing all the managing. I was grateful to have to spend much more of my time running desperately for my life.

“She’s the valedictorian,” Aadhya said, which was in fact a good point: terrifying ruthlessness is close to a necessary criterion. “Stop picking fights with her. We need everything that’s coming out of her giant brain. We’re all getting wiped out as it is. Even the kids doing only one of the runs.”

I was tired enough myself that I hadn’t really been paying attention, but when she waved an arm round the cafeteria tables where people were already sitting, I could see instantly she was right: anyone who’d been doing the runs with us was more or less slumped over their tray in a way that would’ve been an invitation to be pounced on by at least three different mals in an ordinary Scholomance year. You could literally pick out the lingering objectors just by seeing who wasn’t falling into their vegetable soup. Loads of the kids who’d come out of the English run this morning were literally not eating yet; they were taking turns doing catnaps on the tables.

“Why are we getting so wiped out?” I said. “Do you think the school’s draining our mana somehow?”

But I looked back and Aadhya and Liu were both giving me the same kind of level, murderous looks I’d seen aimed at Orion in the past. “We’re all being attacked much more in every run than ever before,” Liu said. “It’s not just the extreme maleficaria. At this time last year, the obstacle course only had ten attack stations, all separate. The general melee runs aren’t supposed to start until June.”

“Oh, right,” I said awkwardly, as if I’d just needed to be reminded.

We went through the line and loaded up our trays with bowls of spaghetti—we had to pick out the red mana leeches hiding among them, but we were all used to that—and big helpings of sliced peaches in hallucinogenic yellow syrup that Chloe would probably be able to neutralize for us when we got it back to the table she was arranging. Annoyingly, the last helping of sponge cake they were meant to accompany went just in front of us, to a boy from Venice who had a tidy fishing tool he used to snag it from among the surrounding spikegrubs. Even more annoyingly, once he’d got it, he paused and turned and offered it to me, exactly the way people sucked up to enclaver kids all the time. And Aadhya gave me a jab with an elbow before I could erupt in the boy’s face like I wanted to, so instead I just had to say in as ungracious a tone as I could manage, “No. Thanks.”

“We need to think about it, though,” Aadhya said at the table, a while later. I was sullenly eating the peaches without even being able to enjoy them, and it wasn’t just because the neutralizer gave them a faintly metallic taste. “What if the school is making it harder on purpose? What if it’s trying to wipe you out so bad that it can hit you in a gym run, take you or Orion out?”

“Well,” I said, trying to think how to word it so I wouldn’t get more death glares from the entire table. I was tired, but to be perfectly honest, I’d mostly been whinging. You’re supposed to be tired during graduation training. If you aren’t, you aren’t working hard enough. I was working-a-full-day tired, not falling-into-my-soup tired.

Orion was, and I’d saved his bowl twice so far this meal, but that’s because he was sneaking out to go hunting real mals after curfew. I’d tried to persuade Precious to keep watch on him, but she wouldn’t; the only thing she’d do is insist on coming along anytime I went over to his room to force him to actually get into bed and shut his eyes and turn out the lights before the curfew bell rang. If he did, he instantly fell asleep and stayed down until morning; otherwise he’d be in the cafeteria at dawn, eating from a giant heaped tray before anyone else got there. In case you’re wondering, staying out past curfew is normally a death sentence and probably still was for any other student even in this strange year, but at this point mals were all fleeing Orion very energetically. Mostly he only ever got to kill them in the runs, when one of them got too distracted trying to eat another student and blew its cover.