Then one of the freshmen saw it and squealed in alarm. I didn’t even bother to look what they were squealing at; I was out of the chair with my bookbag over my shoulder and halfway to the door—the boy had been looking towards the back of the room—before I even spotted the vipersac, hovering already fully inflated over the fourth row of seats like a magenta balloon that someone had Jackson Pollocked with spatters of blue. The blowdart tubes were starting to puff out. The other kids were all screaming and clutching at one another or ducking behind the big desk, a classic mistake: how long were they planning to stay back there? The vipersac wouldn’t be going anywhere with a spread like this, and the instant they stuck their heads out for a peek, it would get them.

That was their problem, of course, and if they didn’t find a solution for it on their own, they weren’t going to make it out of homeroom on their first day of class, which probably meant they weren’t going to last long anyway. It wasn’t even the slightest bit my problem. My problem was that I’d been assigned four highly dangerous seminar classes, and I was already far behind on saving mana for graduation. I was going to need every last minute of my time in this room to build enough mana to make up for all that. I didn’t have so much as a single crochet stitch’s worth of energy to spare on a flock of random freshmen I didn’t care about in the slightest.

Except for one. After I kicked the classroom door open, I did turn back to yell, “Zheng! Out, now,” and he did a U-turn around from the big desk and ran towards me. The other kids might not all have understood me, but they were smart enough to follow him, and most of them were smart enough to abandon their bookbags while they were at it. Except for the enclave girl, of all people. She undoubtedly could have replaced every last thing she was carrying just by hitting up the older kids from her enclave, but she grabbed her bag before coming, so she was bringing up the very end of the pack when the vipersac got inflated enough that its three little eyestalks popped out and it started turning to track the last of the moving targets. As soon as it took her out, everyone else would get away. It was only a little bigger than a football; that newly hatched, it would probably stop to feed straightaway.

I was right at the doorway and about to go through and save my own neck, exactly as I should have done; exactly as I had done, any number of times before. It’s rule one: the only thing you worry about, in the moments when something goes pear-shaped in here, is how to get yourself out of the way with skin intact. It’s not even selfish. If you start trying to help other people, you get yourself killed and most likely foul whatever they’re doing to save themselves while you’re at it. If you’ve got allies or friends, you can help them beforehand. Share some mana, give them a spell, make them some bit of artifice, a potion they can use in a tight spot. But anyone who can’t survive an attack on their own isn’t going to survive. Everyone knows that, and the only person I’ve ever known to make an exception to the rule is Orion, who’s a complete numpty, which I’m not.

Except I didn’t go through the door. I stayed there next to it and let the entire pack of freshmen go galumphing through ahead of me instead. The vipersac went paler pink as it got ready to shoot Miss Enclave, and then it reoriented itself with a quick jerk towards the door as Orion, speaking of numpties, came bursting through it going the extremely wrong way. Two seconds later, he’d have been full of venom and most likely dead.

Except I was already casting.

The spell I used was a fairly obscure Old English curse. I’m possibly the only one in the world who has it. Early in my sophomore year, right after starting Old English, I stumbled over three seniors cornering a junior girl in the library stacks. Another loser girl, like me, except that boys never tried that sort of thing with me. Something about the aura of future monstrously dark sorceress must put them off. I put the three of them off the other girl just by turning up, even as a scrawny soph. They slunk away, the girl hurried off in the other direction, and I grabbed the first book off the shelf still seething with anger. So I didn’t get the book I’d been reaching for; instead I came away with a small crumbling sheaf of homemade paper full of handwritten curses some charming beldame had come up with a thousand years ago or so. It opened up in my hands to this particular curse and I looked down and saw it before I slammed it shut and put it back on the shelf.

Most people have to study a spell at length to get it into their head. I do, too, if it’s a useful spell. But if it’s a spell to destroy cities or slaughter armies or torture people horribly—or, for instance, to shrivel up significant parts of a boy’s anatomy into a single agonizingly painful lump—one glance and it’s in there for good.

I’d never used it before, but it worked really effectively in this scenario. The vipersac instantly compressed down to the size of a good healthy acorn. It dropped straight out of the air, rattled on the grating for a moment, and then went down through it like a prize marble vanishing down a sewer drain. And there went my entire morning’s mana with it.

Orion stopped in the doorway and watched it go, deflating himself. He’d been ready to launch some kind of fire blast, which would have taken out the vipersac—and also the three of us, along with any combustible contents of the classroom, since its internal gases were highly flammable. The enclave girl threw me and him a scared-rabbit look and darted out the door past him, even though there wasn’t any reason to run anymore. He looked after her for a moment, then back at me. I took a single depressing look at my dimmed mana crystal—yes, completely dull again—and let it drop. “What are you even doing here?” I said irritably, shoving past him out into the stacks and heading towards the stairs.

“You didn’t come to breakfast,” he said, falling in with me.

That’s how I learned that the bells weren’t audible in the library classroom. Which at the moment meant I could either skip breakfast or turn up late to the first session of my lousiest seminar class, where I would very likely not have the least chance of getting anyone to fill me in on my first assignments.

I ground my jaw and started stomping down the stairs. “Are you okay?” Orion asked after a moment, even though I’d just saved him. He hadn’t quite internalized the idea yet, I suppose.

“No,” I said bitterly. “I’m a numpty.”

That only got more clear to me over the next few weeks. I’m not an enclave girl. Unlike Orion, I don’t have a virtually limitless supply of mana to pull on for noble heroics. The exact opposite, because I’d just blown nearly half the mana stash I’d accumulated over the course of three years. For more than sufficient cause, since I used it to take out a maw-mouth, and if I never have to think about that experience again it’ll be soon enough, but it doesn’t matter how good my reasons were. What matters is I’d had a carefully planned timetable for building mana over my Scholomance career, and it was thoroughly wrecked.