“Mu-uum,” I groaned faintly, as if she were there for me to argue with violently, but she was only inside my head, looking at me with all the desperate worry in the world furrowing her face. Keep away from Orion Lake. Was this what she’d seen? Had she caught some glimpse of what it would mean to stack me and Orion up together in a single year, and what I’d have to do in order to pay it off? Because of course I wouldn’t be able to do a thing if everyone took back their mana. But if I took their mana with a lie—it wouldn’t be freely given, after all.

Which wouldn’t hurt me in any obvious way, not the way outright maleficers get hurt. If Prasong’s little freshman-flaying scheme had worked, his anima would’ve been scarred so badly he’d probably never have been able to build mana of his own again even if he’d spent the rest of his life trying to atone and purify himself. That wouldn’t happen to me; I wouldn’t even get black nails and a faint cloud of disquiet, like Liu had, punishment for sacrificing a couple of defenseless mice to survive on. Maleficers got that kind of damage because they were yanking mana out of something that was actively fighting them, resisting them. That’s what turned it into malia. But when you got someone to hand you their mana—it didn’t hurt. You could trick someone, pressure them, lie to them, all you wanted. It wasn’t going to damage you in any way that anyone else would ever see.

Which is why that’s what enclavers did. And then they pretended it wasn’t malia, but it was. There’s a long distance between cheating someone out of a scrap of mana they didn’t urgently need, and turning into a slavering murderous vampire who couldn’t do anything decent ever again, but it’s all on the same road. Mum taught me that, spent her whole life teaching me that, and it had taken a while, but the lesson had stuck.

I knew what she’d say to the idea of doing it for someone’s own good, much less for the sake of future generations. I was only alive because she would never make that bargain. She’d been told flat-out that I was going to be a monstrous killing scourge by people who hadn’t been lying to her, and she hadn’t refused to hand me over because she didn’t believe them. She hadn’t even refused because she loved me: if that had been the only reason, she’d have taken me to live in an enclave when I was nine years old and mals started to come for me, almost five years ahead of schedule. She hadn’t done that either. She’d only refused because she wouldn’t take the first wrong step.

So maybe this was what she’d seen. Me with a beautiful gold-paved road Orion had laid out in front of me, with all the best intentions in the world, while never doing a wrong thing himself. But if I took my first wrong step onto it, who knew how far I’d go? No one could stop me flying down it at top speed, once I got started.

I sat up slowly. Precious scrambled up onto my knees as I folded myself up and twitched her nose at me anxiously. “Well,” I said to her, “let’s go and see.”

I put her into her cup and slogged up to the library. Half the reading room had more or less been turned into a war room. Everyone else from our half-official planning committee was up there: lunch had finished and Liu and Zixuan were telling them all about the upgraded effects of the lute, with pleased and happy—and massively relieved—faces all round. Orion was snoozing on a couch with his mouth hanging open and one arm dangling off limp.

“El!” Aadhya said, when I walked in. “You missed lunch, are you okay?”

Liesel didn’t wait for me to answer, just gave a quick exasperated flick of her eyes as if to say You were skiving off, weren’t you, and said to me sternly, “We have more work to do now, not less. We still do not know how far the lute will reach. It may be able to amplify everyone’s mana, but to find out, we must make an attempt at a full run sooner rather than later.”

“No,” I said. “We don’t need to do any more runs.” Everyone stopped and stared at me—most of them with absolute terror on their faces; I suppose they thought aha, it was time for the curtain to pull back from the monster or something. One girl from Mumbai enclave who I suspected had joined the planning committee to keep an eye on me even started doing a shielding spell. “Not like that,” I said crossly to her, and let the irritation help me say it. “I’ve just been down to the graduation hall. There’s nothing there.”

She paused with her hands in midair. Everyone else just gawked at me in total confusion. They’d probably have felt more sure of themselves if I had given out a maniacal cackle and told them to run for their lives.

Aadhya said tentatively, “So it’s just Patience and Fortitude…?”

“No,” I said. “They’re gone, too. There’s nothing at all. The whole place is cleared out.”

“What?” Orion had sat up and was staring at me. He sounded actually dismayed, which was a bit much, and got most people to look at him sidelong—and then actually take the idea into their own heads, to think about what it would mean, if there literally wasn’t anything—

“Are you sure?” Liesel demanded peremptorily. “How did you go down? How close did you—”

“I kicked the bloody doors, Liesel; I’m sure. Anyone who doesn’t care to take my word for it can go down themselves for the price of a ladder climb,” I said. “The shaft’s in my seminar room, other side of the north wall of the workshop. The school just popped it wide open and sent me down there to see.”

That got variations on “What?” coming out of roughly thirty mouths, and then Chloe said, “The school sent you? Why did it—but it’s been making the runs this hard, it’s been making us do all this—”

A sudden roaring of wind blew through the room, the ordinarily murmuring ventilation fans suddenly starting up loud as jet engines, and the blueprints spread out on the table—the big central table, the largest one in the reading room—all went flying off in every direction along with the sketches and plans in a gigantic blizzard of paper, to expose the silver letters inlaid into the old scarred wood: To Offer Sanctuary and Protection to All the Wise-Gifted Children of the World, and at the same time all the lights in the reading room dropped to nothing except for four angled lamps that swiveled to hit the letters with broad beams that made them shine out as if they’d been lit up from inside.

Everyone was silent, staring down at the message the school had given me, given us all. “It wants to do a better job,” I said. “It wants us to help. And before you ask, I don’t know how. I don’t think it knows how. But I’m going to try.” I looked up at Aadhya, and she was staring back at me still stunned, but I said straight to her, “Please help me,” and she gave a snort-gasp kind of a laugh and said, “Holy shit, El,” and then she sank down in a chair like her knees had given out.