It didn’t surprise me at all, except that I’d been taken by surprise. I ought to have known it was coming. But Orion just looked confused at first, as if he didn’t understand how they could possibly have made such a bizarre mistake. It took the grim disappointment on their faces as they watched their spells dissolving to drive home the idea that they’d meant it.

I imagine they were very sorry about that a moment later, and so was I, because that made him angry, and it turned out I’d never seen Orion angry before. Not really angry. And I realize I haven’t one metacarpal to stand on here, but I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t even the one he was angry at. For a horrible moment I had the vivid sensation that I wasn’t holding the dome up to protect him anymore: I was keeping him away from them.

“Lake!” I said, trying to make it sharp, but it came out with an awful wobble I didn’t like. I couldn’t help it. His face looked all wrong, his lips peeled back in a snarl and a faint glimmer of eldritch light coming through his eyes, so much mana gathered for casting that you could almost see it with the naked eye, like a fist clenching. I had a clear and terrible vision of him just mowing gracefully through them, the way he did with a horde of maleficaria, conscious thought going entirely out of it until everything—everyone—was dead.

But thankfully, he grated out, “They wanted to kill you,” and despite my visceral horror, I managed a spark of indignation over that, just enough to light up my ever-helpful reservoirs of irritation and anger.

“I don’t seem to have been in any danger!” I said. “What were you going to do, I’d like to know. Probably get your bones dissolved into goo, if you’d had it all to yourself. That’s up to eleven for me, by the way.”

It distracted him from the confrontation, just long enough to crack his own fury a bit. “Eleven!”

“I’ll write out the tally for you later,” I said, managing a decent façade of coolness. “Now let’s pack this up and go and have our picnic in the library, like normal people. What are you going to do otherwise?”

That was a wrong question to ask, because Orion looked back at them and still clearly felt that kill them all was a perfectly valid response—and when I say perfectly valid, I mean that he was an inch away from going at them, and I hadn’t any idea what to do, but the choice was abruptly not mine anymore, because people literally started appearing round me in bunches, starting with Liesel and her crew: Alfie with his face screwed up in strain, holding up his own casting of the evocation of refusal as they flew in through the doors.

It wasn’t just them, though; other teams were all shooting into the gym around us with the bungee quality of yanker spells going off, all of which I realized after an incredulous glance were keyed off the shield holder on my belt. Ibrahim and his team appeared; even Khamis had come, with Nkoyo.

And more to the point, Magnus and his team sailed in, along with Jermaine and his; then a team from Atlanta, another from Louisiana—and in minutes, what any outside observer would’ve said was going on was that the New York and Shanghai enclavers had squared off, with their various allies, all of us ready to tumble down into the open waiting jaws of Thucydides’s Trap together. It would be at least as effective at killing wizards off as a horde of maleficaria, especially once any survivors went home and told their parents that the war everyone was half expecting had started here on the inside.

I had no idea how to stop it. One look told me Orion wasn’t going to be any help: he was going to be the spearhead. Magnus had already led the New York kids to form up behind him. And the only people who weren’t there were Aadhya and Liu and Chloe, presumably because whoever had organized this protective scheme—three guesses, all Liesel—had known that they’d tell me about it in advance, thus denying her the satisfaction of getting to rescue me.

As if things weren’t bad enough, at that very moment the school jumped on the bandwagon, too: we all paused as we heard the grinding of the obstacle-course machinery disengaging—the way it did at the end of each week before the place reconstituted itself, only it was twice as loud when we were all inside at the time—and then the entire floor beneath our feet lurched and went pliable, open to reshaping.

We’re all on alert for anything like a potential advantage, so everyone started grabbing for it immediately. Like the opening rounds of some strategy game where everyone’s trying to establish their positions before they start lobbing bombs. The green hills swelled and heaved like rolling waves as everyone tried to re-form them into handy things like trenches and fortifications. It felt like trying to surf a continental plate over the ocean with nothing more to steer by than a horse bridle.

And as soon as I came up with that metaphor, I realized I only had one possibly useful working: the one and only spell I’ve ever successfully written by myself. It’s also the one and only spell I’ve ever tried to write, because what I produced in that shining burst of creativity was a spell for setting off a supervolcano. I burnt the parchment instantly afterwards, but the spell has remained firmly lodged in my mental catalog along with all the other most horrible spells I’ve ever seen.

I pulled mana in on one breath and spread my arms out on the exhale, chanting the opening incantation. Two glowing ley lines branched out over the floor to either side of me and began spiraling over the entire floor like the arms of a galaxy, and everywhere they touched was abruptly and vividly in my head, brought under the power of my incantation. Everyone else kept trying to hold on to the small chunks they’d managed to control, but the spell ruthlessly tore them away and gave them to me, until I’d got the entire gym seething and shuddering in my mental grip.

And round then, the better incanters all began to realize where my spell was very clearly going—namely straight for some kind of gigantic mass-extinction-level eruption that would take out everyone in the room and quite possibly all four floors directly overhead.

“What are you doing?” Magnus yelled at me in absolute panic—he was in fact quite a good incanter—and there was a perfectly clear tipping moment when everyone in the gym stopped worrying about the other side and started worrying about me.

As well they should have, since I’d hit the end of the opening incantation, and once I started into part two, there wouldn’t be any stopping it. I halted with my whole body clenched up around the gathered power and flattened the gym out with both my hands, so abruptly that half the kids fell over as hills vanished from beneath them and trenches popped them up into the air. Everyone still on their feet was backing away from me, eyes wide with horror, and I snarled at all of them universally, “Stop it. Just stop. If I wanted you dead, if I wanted any of you dead, you’d be dead! Rú guǒ wǒ xiăng nǐ sǐ, nǐ men sǐ dìng le!” I translated, in my flabby Chinese.

Which was so patently true under the circumstances—since I was having to work extremely hard to not kill them all—that it made a visible impression all round. Well, as much as it could while everyone was actively terrified that I was in fact about to kill them all. At least they had certainly stopped worrying about doing any killing of their own. Even Orion had got over being enraged and was just standing gawking at me—in an infuriatingly starry-eyed way, in his case, demonstrating his continuing total lack of judgment and sense.