“I see,” I said, solemnly, so obviously I stuck round until the very end. I felt it was my job as her friend to observe closely and also my chance to revenge a lot of giggling at my expense.

Liu might not have been sure about Zixuan, but she was definitely sure that I should go away and stop making her squirm and kept whispering that I could leave. I kept pretending not to understand her while the crowd very slowly ebbed away from round Zixuan, until he managed to politely detach from the last few hangers-on, at which point I casually edged back from Liu but not so far away I couldn’t hear as he came over and asked her to walk to the library with him.

Liu did turn to me and ask, “El, are you coming?”

“You go ahead,” I told her, and beamed at her as obnoxiously as I could. She turned red again and made a quick face at me, then smoothed herself down to calm dignity before she turned back to him. I was smiling the whole time as I watched them walk away; it was just—so normal, an ordinary fumbling towards a future outside this horrible place.

I suppose you could say the same of my own complicated dating situation, but it felt a lot more uncertain and dramatic and fraught when I was the one inside it, not to mention more impractical, seeing as me dragging Orion off to join a quixotic project of building tiny enclaves round the world was a lot less likely to be acceptable to his family. This was a happy ordinary human thing I could actually enjoy, and it felt like the perfect period to that magical run.

For the first time, I almost felt that I could even let myself believe in the plan—so much that when they’d gone out of sight, I gave a huff of laughter out loud and turned back to the gym doors and said exultantly, “Still think you’re going to stop me? You’re not. I am getting them out. I’m getting them all out, and nothing you do is going to make me leave any of them behind. You’re not going to get a single one of them. I’m going to beat you, I’m going to win, do you hear me?”

“Who are you talking to?” Sudarat asked.

She gave me a bad start, which I entirely deserved since I’d been so enthusiastic about my stupid ranting that I hadn’t noticed her, and when I’d calmed down my racing heart and shoved down the sixteen different killing spells that had instantly leapt to mind, I said with an attempt at being cool and collected, “Nothing, I was only thinking out loud. What are you doing down here?”

Then I looked at the little bundle she was carrying with the end of a loaf of bread poking out of it, and realized, appalled, that she was of Orion’s mindset about picnics in the gym. “You’ve got to be joking,” I said, revolted. “Didn’t I yell enough? You’re only going to mess your own head about, if you don’t get yourself killed. You’ve been in here long enough by now, you must’ve started to understand. It’s not the real thing.”

She just stood there and took the lecture, small with her shoulders hunched forward, gripping the handle of her little carrysack with both hands, and then she said softly, “My mother used to tell me for a graduation present she would take me to see the cherry blossom festival in Kyoto. But I will never see it now.”

I stopped talking, stopped breathing more or less. She paused, but when I didn’t say anything else, she said, “In my school—in the enclave—they taught us how to pick out the smart kids, the good ones, the best ones to help us. So I know what the good ones are like. And I’m not very good. And nobody wants to be my friend. The enclave kids are all afraid. They don’t know what happened in Bangkok. And I don’t know, either. Everyone thinks I’m lying, but I don’t. I took my grandmother’s dog out for a walk and then we came back and the door—the door to the enclave didn’t work anymore. It was just a door to an empty apartment. And everyone was gone.” She swallowed visibly. “My auntie was working in Shanghai, she came home and took care of me. She gave me everything she could spare. But it isn’t enough to save someone who isn’t very good, that nobody likes. I know it’s not.”

She stopped. I still couldn’t manage a word. After a moment I suppose she got tired of hanging about in the corridor with a mute statue, and she went politely past me and pushed the doors open. She went a decent way in: not so far that she didn’t have several good escape routes, but far enough that she was clear of the area round the doors. She settled herself at the base of a tree putting on an immense display, dark boughs sagging with bloom, and took a small box of strawberries out of her bag, which she must have wasted gobs of mana enchanting out of some dingy fruit from the cafeteria. She sat there eating them and reading a book, making a picture straight out of the freshman orientation handbook, with tiny petals drifting across the scene like pink snow. Living as much as she could, because she wasn’t going to get much more of a chance.

The doors swung shut over the scene, wafting a sweet fragrance into my face as they banged shut, and I said to them stupidly, “No,” which obviously helped loads, and then I just laughed out loud at myself, high-pitched and jeering. “God, I’m stupid, I’m so stupid, I can’t believe,” and I couldn’t go on. I put my hands over my face and sobbed a couple of times, and then I lifted my face and screamed at the doors, at the school, “Why did you even try to stop me? Why bother? There’s no use. There’s never been any use at all.”

Like an answer, there was an immense crash of glass and cracking wood behind me. I whipped round instantly. I’d been training for my Olympic-class event in uselessness so hard, so earnestly, that it wasn’t a voluntary reaction; I’d programmed my muscles so they could skip past my brain and just get on with it, with saving all those lives, all one thousand of those fantastically insignificant lives, so I whirled and my hands came up in casting position and the adrenaline was already flowing like a smooth-running river in my bloodstream before I even saw that the crash was just one of the heavy framed blueprints off the corridor wall that had come down behind me, a glitter of shards sprayed all round and the frame broken into kindling sticks, pale where the dusty gilt-slathered wood had splintered apart.

I dropped my hands as soon as conscious thought was involved in keeping them up, gulping for breath between the sobs and the instinctive alarm. “So why shouldn’t I just give up after all—is that what you’re trying to say?” I said, just a girl talking to myself in the hallway, a stupid girl pretending she was a hero because she was going to save a thousand kids before she then went skipping merrily through the gates, leaving behind—what were the numbers? Twelve hundred kids dead out of every year, and it’s been 140 years, which worked out to a number I couldn’t fix even if I stayed behind to guard the gates for my entire life. However many ticking minutes I had left, I’d still only ever be a girl with her finger stuck into a hole in the dike, and whenever I finally fell down, here the torrent would come.

“Is that what you wanted me to learn?” I said savagely to the pale blank square on the metal wall where the frame had been, a window through the grime of a century and more. “You should’ve done it quicker. At this point, I might as well save everyone as not,” and then I looked down, and the crashed frame wasn’t a blueprint. It was the front page from the May 10, 1880, issue of The London Whisper, dominated by a large photograph of a gaggle of men in Victorian suits, a grandly mustachioed blond one out in front with his arms cocked out from his hips and a self-congratulatory air. There were copies of that all over the building, too. For years I’d been reading it without paying attention, in droning history lectures and the cafeteria queue, the way you read the back of cereal boxes while you’re eating because you haven’t anything else to do with your eyes.