Every word out of his mouth was stoking my already substantial desire to show up on his enclave’s doorstep and set the entire place on fire. “They made it feel as though it were all your fault, and that as a result you owed it to all the rest of them to dump the mana you get, all on your own, into their bank, and accept whatever bits they like to dribble back out to you in exchange,” I said through my teeth. “Which, by the way, is the only reason you’re low on mana in the first place. You’d still be aglow—”

“I don’t care about the mana!” He shifted and I got myself out of the way to let him get up; he went and sat on the steps, looking out into the still-falling amphisbaena rain. I grabbed my t-shirt—the New York one he’d given me, which came down to mid-thigh on me—and put it on and went and sat next to him. He had his elbows on his knees and was hunched over as if he couldn’t bear watching my face, whatever he’d see on it when he told me about his horrible evil self who’d swallowed this swill from everyone round him so long that he couldn’t even tell the taste was rotten. “I like the hunting. I like going after the mals, and—” He swallowed. “—and taking them apart and pulling the mana out of them. And I know that’s creepy—”

“Shut your bloody mouth,” I said. “I’ve seen creepy, Lake; I’ve been inside creepy, and you’re nothing like.”

He said softly, “That’s not true. You know it’s not. In the gym, when those kids tried to kill you—”

“Us,” I said pointedly.

“—you wouldn’t have hurt them,” he went on, without a pause. “And I—I wanted to kill them. I wanted to. And it did freak you out. I’m sorry,” he added, low.

I said in measured tones, “Lake, I’m useless at this nonsense, but as my mum’s not here at the moment, I’m just going to feed you her lines. Did you kill them?”

He gave me an annoyed look that no one ever gives Mum when she’s gently leading them along, so I don’t think I’d got the tone quite right, but that was his own fault picking me for an agony aunt. “That’s not the point.”

“I think they’d agree with me that it is. I’ve wanted to kill loads of people. But wanting can’t do harm without a pair of hands behind it.”

He gave a shrugging heave of shoulders and arms. “The point is, I never wanted normal things. And that’s not my parents’ fault, okay? You can be mad at them if you want to be, but—”

“Thanks, I will.”

He snorted. “Yeah. I know you think they’re jerks for letting me hunt when I was little. They aren’t. That’s why they’re not jerks. Because that’s all I ever wanted to do. They tried to stop me. I’m not just saying that. You think Magnus is spoiled? They gave me anything I looked at for more than three seconds. Toys or books or games…I didn’t want any of it. When I was ten, I started sneaking out of school to hunt. So my dad—my dad, who’s one of the top five artificers in New York—literally quit working and hung out with me all day, trying to teach me himself, doing stupid kid projects with me in his home workshop. And I was mad at him for it. After a couple of months, I threw a gigantic freakish tantrum because he wasn’t letting me hunt. I wrecked the whole shop, part of our apartment, chunks of major artifice projects…and then I ran away and hid down in the enclave sewage pipes. When my mom found me, she made me a deal: if I stayed in school all day and did all my homework and did a playdate every Saturday, on Sundays they’d let me take a gate shift and fight real mals. I cried I was so happy.”

I scowled over this confessional torrent. I was really disinclined to be sympathetic to his parents, for what I had to acknowledge were many grotesquely selfish reasons, which was making it hard for me to winkle out the other reasons I still didn’t like it. I did have to admit they had a right to struggle with a ten-year-old whose only idea of a good time was taking the guard duty shifts that otherwise would go to the best fighters that New York’s mana could hire. Their gates would attract at least as many mals as the school on a daily basis, if not more. The Scholomance isn’t in a major metropolitan area with five or six entrances, wizards coming and going the entire day. Ten years on a guard shift is enough to earn you an enclave spot; the only problem is very few people survive to claim it.

But Orion was saying, with perfect sincerity, “It made everything so much better. Then at least people liked me for wanting it, even if they still thought I was weird. And then here—”

“And why did they even send you?” I interrupted, still looking for something to be angry about. “Just to look out for the other kids? You didn’t need protecting.”

“They weren’t going to,” Orion said. “I wanted to come. I know everyone else hates school. But I don’t. The Scholomance—the Scholomance is the best place I’ve ever been.”

I emitted an involuntary gargled noise of outrage.

He huffed a little. “Yeah, see, even you think I’m weird. But it is. I could do the one thing I wanted and also be doing something right, all the time. I wasn’t just weird and creepy. I got to be—a hero.” I grimaced; that wasn’t on the nose or anything. “Except whenever people tried to say thanks, or anything, I always felt like it was a giant lie. Because they thought I was being brave, and if they knew I liked it, they’d be weirded out, just like everyone from home. And yeah, I thought something was probably going to get me at graduation, because I wasn’t going to go until after everyone else was out—”

He delivered this statement with all the agonized soul-searching and drama of someone announcing he’d go for a nice walk; I suffered a burst of private irritation that died very abruptly when he said, “—but I didn’t really care.”

I stared at him stricken.

“I didn’t want to die,” he hastened to tell me, as if that was an enormous improvement. “I just wasn’t scared of it, either. I didn’t have a plan except to kill mals until one of them got me, so why not in here? I’d get to help so many kids, not just my own enclave. I didn’t really know about that stuff, you know,” he added abruptly. “Not until I met you. I sort of assumed everyone lived someplace like New York. Even after I met Luisa, I thought she had it really bad, not that we had it so much better. But it made sense to me anyway. Why should I run out on everyone just to go home and hang out on New York’s gate until something got me there? I didn’t want anything else. Not like normal people—”

I grabbed his near hand, gripping tight. “Stop it!” I said, on the verge of shrieking incoherently. I knew that wouldn’t be helpful, but helpful felt so far beyond my reach, it might as well have been on the moon, so I was tempted to go the other way instead.