When I was satisfied that everyone had stopped, I let my control over our alarmingly malleable surroundings slide slowly out of my hands, hills and valleys lurching themselves back into place, trees unfolding up from the ground in an unnatural fashion as they crept back into the illusion. Untangling from the spell took me nearly fifteen minutes, but absolutely no one did anything to interrupt or distract me; a few kids even went to the gym doors to stop anyone else coming in. I was shaking when I’d finished, nauseated. I’d have liked to go lie down in a dark room for a significant amount of time, but I gulped air and grated out, “What I want is to get you out. To get all of us out. Do you think you could pull your heads out of your collective arses and help?”

On Thursday, four hundred kids showed up for the Chinese run. Afterwards Orion and I dragged ourselves into the library and each crawled onto one of the couches and lay there letting everyone else do the postmortem over our heads. I felt like a sheet of kitchen roll that had been used more than once and wrung out thoroughly in between.

It wasn’t just the larger number: most of the new kids hadn’t learned any of our completely unfamiliar strategies, and apart from that, the obstacle course bloody works. So skipping it for seven weeks had put them substantially behind the rest of us. The only reason there hadn’t been a metric shedload of deaths today was because I had cheated in pure desperation by using Alfie’s evocation to toss bunches of students and mals together out of the obstacle course into the other half of the gym. The mals had then dissolved, as they were just fake constructs. The mals in the graduation hall were not going to dissolve conveniently of their own accord, so it wasn’t going to be a helpful maneuver in the actual event. But I’d had to do something just to get everyone out of practice alive.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the discussion, since everyone agreed the main point was that the new cohort all had to catch up, which was fairly obvious. Yuyan—she’d joined the planning team—suggested letting them run every day for the next two weeks and giving everyone else—except for me and Orion, obviously—more time off. Everyone agreed on this, and then Aadhya said thoughtfully, “Actually, we probably want to have everyone from the Spanish and Hindi runs join up with either English or Chinese anyway pretty soon. We want to start doing five-hundred-person runs—in a month!” she added, when she noticed I’d craned my head up from the couch in outrage.

I put my head down again, briefly mollified, but Liesel gave a loud exasperated sigh, too pointed to miss. I glared at the patched threadbare upholstery just past my nose and gritted out, “Next week for English. The week after that for Chinese.” Orion groaned faintly on the couch perpendicular to mine, but he didn’t argue. We were already looking April in the face. Less than three months left.

I’m not going to claim that I enjoyed the next week, but by Wednesday, the Chinese run was in spitting distance of survivable, and after Friday’s run, Zixuan approached Liu and Aadhya and offered to use his reviser to improve the sirenspider lute. They spent the whole evening in the workshop together, and on Saturday, when Liu struck the first chords and I sang the spell, the mana-amplification wave rolled out over the entire mass of kids and gonged against the gym walls and came back for a second pass that quadrupled the power of everyone’s workings. I didn’t have to cheat once; I wasn’t even exhausted at the end.

“He didn’t make you give it to him?” I muttered to Liu afterwards: everyone was clustered round Zixuan gushing congratulations. I’d just incinerated an entire anima-locust swarm so large that it had blotted out all of the hideously blue sky: they just kept spawning afresh so I had to literally keep a hurricane-sized psychic storm burning over everyone’s heads the entire fifteen minutes of the run, but I was old hat at that by now. Or possibly the storm had been so disturbing that everyone was blocking it aggressively out of their memories; one or the other.

Liu and Aad had already talked over the lute and agreed that Liu’s family would pay Aadhya for it, assuming Liu and it got out. The deal would establish Aadhya’s going rate as an artificer and give her a big chunk of seed resources to start a workshop with, and Liu’s extended clan would have a lot more use for the lute than just Aad and her family. But usually the cost for revising some piece of artifice is three-quarters the value of the result. Zixuan had every right to consider himself majority owner at this point, and since he was a Shanghai enclaver, he could probably buy Liu out a lot easier than she could buy him out.

I was just asking, I didn’t mean anything by it, except to wonder if there were some angle involved. Of course the upgrade was clearly in everyone’s interest, but someone was going to get the lute after, so it would have struck me as odd if there hadn’t been any negotiation on the subject. But Liu turned very red and then compounded the effect by putting her hands over her cheeks as if trying to squish the red out of them, which certainly wasn’t effective if her goal was to stop me gawking at her.

“He asked to come meet my family after we get out,” she said, in a choked, stifled voice. I didn’t gawk any less; that was quite the declaration. It’s not that enclavers—or people as close to becoming enclavers as Liu’s family—all officially arrange dating and marriages or anything, but there’s often some family involvement. All of the wizards in her parents’ generation and the two before had been working themselves to the bone to get the resources to buy the enclave-building spells. And not for a poky old-fashioned little Golden Enclave like the ones out of my sutras, either: they were getting ready to put up towers in the void, another modern star in the Chinese constellation. Once they put together a package with the last of the core spells, they’d take bids from the independent wizards in various Chinese cities. They’d pick the city whose wizards put together the biggest offer, and the mana and resources they provided would get the new enclave put up. The wizards who’d contributed the most would get to move in straightaway; the rest would get in over the next decade or two as the foundations settled and the place expanded.

Liu had been born into that project, and she was expected and expecting to contribute. And anyone she so much as dated was absolutely going to be evaluated as a potential part of it, too. Her family might not be planning to get actively involved with the process, but they’d certainly be pleased if she brought home an impressive candidate. Which an artificer from Shanghai who was already good enough to whip up a reviser in school certainly would be.

“So is that…good?” I prompted.

Liu stared at me with a half-bewildered expression, as if she didn’t know what it was, then looked over at him and then back. “He’s—he’s nice? And he’s very cute?” as if she were asking me. She’d never had a crush that I knew of; I suspect she’d considered it as much a long-shot as I had, all those years she was on the maleficer track. Maleficer relationships tend to go Bonnie-and-Clyde or Frankenstein-and-Igor: not very appealing. So now she was opening a newly delivered box and peeking under the lid for the first time.