My hopes of graduating would have been in equal shambles, except for that spellbook I’d found. The Golden Stone phase-changing spell is so valuable outside that Aadhya had been able to run an auction among last year’s seniors that had netted me a heap of mana, and even a pair of lightly used trainers on top of it. She was planning to do another one among the kids in our year soon. With luck I would end up short seven crystals instead of nineteen. That was still a painful deficit to be making up, and I needed another thirty at graduation on top of it, at least.

That’s what I’d planned to use my glorious free Wednesday afternoons for. Ha very ha. The baby vipersac turned out to be only the first of a series of maleficaria that all seemed irresistibly drawn to this specific library classroom. There were mals waiting to leap when we walked in the door. There were mals hiding in shadows that pounced while we were distracted. There were mals that came in through the vents halfway through class. There were mals inside the roll-top desk. There were mals waiting when we walked out the door. I could have avoided learning Chinese with absolutely no problem, just by not doing a thing. The entire pack of freshmen would have been gone before the second week of the term.

The writing was on the wall by the end of our first Wednesday session, in letters of dripping blood, literally: I’d just smeared a willanirga across the entire perimeter of the room, stomach sac and intestines and all. As we all headed to dinner in more-or-less bespattered condition, I swallowed my own irritation and told Sudarat—the enclave girl—that if she wanted more rescuing, she’d need to share some of her mana supply.

Her face went all red and blotchy, and she said, haltingly, “I don’t—I’m not,” and then she burst into tears and ran on ahead, and Zheng said, “You haven’t heard about Bangkok.”

“What haven’t I heard about Bangkok?”

“It’s gone,” he said. “Something took out the enclave, just a few weeks before induction day.”

I stared at him. The point of enclaves is they don’t get taken out. “How? By what?”

He made a big arms-spread shrug.

“Have you all heard about Bangkok?” I demanded at dinner, wondering how I’d missed a piece of news that big, but actually I was ahead of the curve: Liu was the only one at the table who nodded, and she said, “I just heard in history.”

“Heard what?” Aadhya wanted to know.

“Bangkok’s gone,” I said. “The enclave’s been destroyed.”

“What?” Chloe said, jerking so hard she slopped her orange juice all over her tray. She’d asked to eat with us—and nicely, not like she was doing us a favor gracing us with her presence—so I’d gritted my teeth and said yes. “That’s got to be fake.”

Liu shook her head. “A girl from Shanghai in our class confirmed it. Her parents told her little sister to tell her about it.”

Chloe stared at us, still frozen with her glass midair. You couldn’t blame her for being more than a bit freaked out. Enclaves don’t just go popping off for no reason, so if an enclave had just been hit hard enough that it was taken out, it was a sign that some kind of enclave war was on the way, and New York was the prime candidate for being in the middle of it somehow, but after the third time in five minutes she asked for more of the details that neither Liu or I had, I finally said, “Rasmussen, we don’t know. You’re the one who can find out; your enclave’s freshmen must know more about it by now.”

She did actually say, “Watch my tray?” and then got up and went across the room to the table where the freshmen from the New York enclave were sitting. She didn’t come back with much: not even that many of the freshmen had heard about it yet. The Bangkok kids weren’t making any effort to spread the news, and Sudarat was literally the only freshman from the place who’d survived to be inducted. Everyone else in her year had gone down with the ship. Which alarmed all the enclavers even more. Even when enclaves are damaged badly enough to make them collapse, there’s usually enough warning and time for the non-combatants to escape.

By the end of dinner, it became clear that nobody knew what had happened. We barely know anything in here to start with, since all our news about the real world comes in once a year via terrified fourteen-year-olds. But an enclave going down is big news, and not even the Shanghai kids had any details. Shanghai helped start Bangkok—they’ve been sponsoring new Asian enclaves these last thirty years, not incidentally while making increasingly pointed noises about the disproportionate number of Scholomance seats allocated to the US and Europe. If someone had taken out Bangkok as a first shot in coming at Shanghai, their freshmen would’ve come in with clear instructions to close ranks round the Bangkok kids.

On the other hand, if Bangkok had carelessly blown themselves to bits, which happens occasionally when an enclave gets a bit too ambitious in developing new magical weaponry without telling anyone, the Shanghai kids would’ve been given instructions to ditch the Bangkok kids entirely. Instead, they’d just gone—cautious. Meaning even their parents didn’t have any better idea than the rest of us did, and if the Shanghai enclavers didn’t know, nobody knew.

Well, except for whoever had done it. Which was its own source of complication, because if anyone were going to be orchestrating an indirect attack on Shanghai, the top candidate was New York. It was hard to imagine any other enclave in the world doing it without at least their tacit support. But if New York had secretly arranged anything as massive as taking out an entire enclave, they certainly wouldn’t have told their freshmen a thing about it, which meant that not even the New York kids knew whether or not their enclave had been involved, but they—and the Shanghai kids—all knew that if it had been anything other than an accident, their parents were very likely at war outside right now. And we’d have absolutely no way of knowing one way or another for a year.

It wasn’t a situation you’d call conducive to fellow-feeling among the enclavers. Personally, I didn’t mind not knowing. I wasn’t going to be joining an enclave myself. I’d made that decision last year—resentfully—and I wasn’t going to be getting involved, if there was a war. Even if it was just some hideous maleficer going around taking out enclaves, it wasn’t anything to me, except possibly my future competition, according to the unpleasant prophecy that would have made my life loads easier if it would just hurry up and come true.

What I did mind was that Sudarat couldn’t help out with what was clearly about to be my fifth seminar, in freshman rescue. Their enclave’s mana store had been fairly new and small to begin with, and now the Bangkok seniors had taken full control and were desperately trading on it to other enclavers to try and get themselves graduation alliances. They weren’t even sharing with the juniors and sophomores. All of them had just become ordinary losers like the rest of us, scrabbling for allies and resources and survival. Their one big bargaining chip for alliance-building had been the chance of a spot in their fast-growing enclave, which they didn’t have anymore, and they were operating under an aura of creepy uncertainty because no one knew what had happened. The other freshmen hadn’t been avoiding Sudarat because they hadn’t known she was from Bangkok; they’d been avoiding her because they had. She hadn’t even been given a share of the gear that last year’s seniors had left behind. That bag she’d brought in was all the resources she had.