“Or maybe it wants to kill some of us now in practice, in case most of us do get out,” Liu put in, a perfectly reasonable concern which helpfully relieved me of having to make a bright and cheery point of explaining that it wasn’t that bad really, at least for me.

“What should we do?” Ibrahim said, anxiously.

“Why don’t we just take a break?” Chloe said, which I suppose was the obvious solution if you were someone who had ever had the luxury of being able to take a break. “We could take the rest of the day, skip tomorrow, and Wednesday morning. Nobody would miss more than one run. That’s not much.”

Almost everyone endorsed the idea as soon as it percolated outwards. Even Orion perked up dramatically as soon as he woke up enough to hear it. I assumed he was planning an all-day hunting extravaganza. I personally slept in to the glorious hour of eight, just early enough to still make it upstairs for breakfast dregs if I rushed, and was up and stuffing my hair into a short ponytail when someone knocked. I’d got much more cautious about that sort of thing since my delightful encounter with Jack last year, but with a vat of mana available, that now just meant I kept a nice murder spell on the tip of my tongue and opened the door at arm’s length.

Orion was standing there looking a bit nervous, carrying a large mug of tea and an alchemy lab supply box heaped with three buns, a small glass full of apricot jam and butter pats that were starting to permanently intermingle, a bowl full of congee with a whole egg on it, and a half-green clementine. I stared at him and he blurted, “Would—would you—have breakfast with me?” and then realized as the words left his mouth that he hadn’t made the situation horrible enough and added, “On a date?” in a squawky warble.

I slammed my hand down on the door of Precious’s enclosure, where I’d tucked her in with some sunflower seeds, and latched it shut just in time. I ignored the furious chittering and squeaks from inside and blurted back, “Yes,” before anything resembling good sense could assert itself.

I had to work extremely hard not to think better of what I was doing, even as I followed Orion through the corridors. I couldn’t even distract myself by watching for attacks or traps; nothing with a mind, right or otherwise, was attacking Orion lately. He’d grown three inches so far this year, at least, and his shoulders and arms were straining every seam of his t-shirt, and he’d showered and his silver hair was dark and curling round his neck, and I was having to devote really enormous effort to ignoring that I was being a truly colossal wanker, when I suddenly realized where we were, and stopped, everything forgotten in appalled outrage, on the threshold of the gym.

Orion didn’t even break stride. He sailed onwards through the doors and into the half of the gym that was left over from the obstacle course. The famed cherry trees had appeared this week and were just getting ready to make a proper scene, tiny pink and white buds dotting the dark limbs.

I almost couldn’t believe he’d done it. I went after him blankly, waiting for him to explain this was some sort of joke, which would itself be in poor taste. He just stopped under one particularly laden tree and earnestly began spreading out a ragged blanket for our picnic, while I stood staring down at him, trying to decide if he was literally insane, and whether I liked him enough to pretend he wasn’t. I had already liked him enough to drink the horrible tea-stained hot water he’d brought me, so the answer to that was almost certainly yes, but I wasn’t sure I liked him enough to picnic in the gym with him.

It’s just as well that I was too appalled to move, I suppose, because that’s why I was still on my feet when Orion looked up and saw something coming. I had no idea in that first moment what it was he’d seen; his face didn’t actually reach any kind of positive or negative expression, he only focused on something behind me. But I knew that something was coming at my back, and that I hadn’t heard it or picked up on it. That was warning enough.

Even as I turned round to find out what it was, my hands were already moving in the shielding spell that Alfie had given me, two weeks ago. I’d bitterly made myself ask him for it, knowing he’d say exactly what he said, “Of course, El, delighted.” Bollocks. It had to be one of the best spells even his London enclave family had, worth loads in trade. In here it would probably have brought more than my sutras, since a decently skilled senior could cast it during graduation, and the sutras wouldn’t do anyone any good until they got out alive.

It wasn’t a shield spell, really. It was an evocation of refusal—not to be too boringly technical, an evocation is more or less taking something intangible and bringing it into material reality. What the evocation of refusal produced—in Alfie’s hands—was a neat translucent dome roughly seven feet across. As long as he could hold it up—casting alone he could manage as long as three minutes, which is an eternity in the graduation hall—he could refuse anything he didn’t want inside, including mals, hostile magic, flying debris, loud farts, et cetera. And while there’re plenty of spells that will let you seal out the world, the extremely special quality of this one was that it let in all the things you did want, such as oxygen untainted by any poison gas in the vicinity, or healing spells from your allies. I’d seen Alfie use it for the first time back during our run against the evil ice mountains. He’d brought it out several times since then to save random other kids’ lives. He wasn’t one of the enclavers who whinged about helping other kids; his grace went both ways, or maybe he’d secretly internalized the fantasy of noblesse oblige, because he’d dived wholeheartedly into the project of rescuing everyone in his path.

But when I cast the evocation, I got a globe nearly twelve feet across, which showed every sign of staying up for as long as I bothered to keep it going, and after I put it round something, I could move the globe and all its desirable contents, meaning I could scoop up a double handful of kids and deposit them in a different spot on the field, no mals included. That was a game-changing move. I could claim that was why I’d asked for the spell, for everyone’s sake, but that would be bollocks, too. I hadn’t known for sure what I could do with it when I asked him to give it to me. I’d just known it was a really top spell, and I could see that it had room to grow—the kind of room that I could fill up.

I had the smooth dome of it up over me and Orion before I finished turning round, which was good, because we very much didn’t want any of the literally twenty-seven different killing spells and deadly artifices that came flying at our heads, five of them backed by a true circle working. I don’t think I could have blocked or turned them all any other way. But none of them could make it through the impenetrable no thanks very much of the globe. Most of them just dissolved. The more elaborate workings slid down to where the globe intersected with the floor, and dissolved into a frustrated cloud of churning smoke in a dozen different colors that ringed us, bubbling and seething, until one after another they finally dissipated.

By then Orion was standing up next to me, staring out of the shimmering wall into the faces of the thirty-two kids who’d just had a really good go at murdering us. I recognized Yuyan at the front, and Zixuan was standing with the circle—all of the Shanghai seniors, in fact, along with their allies, and a dozen other kids I was pretty sure were from Beijing and Hong Kong and Guangzhou.