I went to the basin and rinsed off my hands and face again as well as I could: I was down to just a tiny bit left in my jug. “If you’re waiting for a thank-you, you’ll be here a while,” I told Orion after I finished drying off. He was still standing in the corner eyeing me.
“Yeah, I noticed,” he said with a huff. “You weren’t kidding about your affinity, were you. So you’re—what, a strict-mana maleficer?”
“That doesn’t even make sense. I’m not a maleficer at all, and as long as I’m trying to not turn into one, maybe you’d better go away,” I said, spelling it out since that was evidently necessary. “It’s got to be nearly curfew by now, anyway.”
Bad things happen if you’re in someone else’s cell past curfew. Otherwise, of course, we’d all double and triple up and take shifts on watch, not to mention that seniors would be en masse shoving freshmen out of their rooms on the top floor and postponing graduation for a year or two. Apparently there was a rash of incidents like that early on, after people started to realize there was a gigantic horde of mals waiting down in the graduation hall. I don’t know exactly what the builders did about it, but I do know that having two or more kids in a room makes you a horrible magnet. And forget about running out into the corridor trying to get back to your room once you realize what trouble you’re in. Two girls just down the way from me tried it in our first year. One of them spent a long time screaming outside my door before she stopped. The other one didn’t make it out of the room at all. It’s not the sort of thing anyone sane wants to risk.
Orion just kept staring at me. Abruptly he said, “What happened to Luisa?”
I frowned at him, wondering why he was asking me, and then I realized—“You think I did for her?”
“It wasn’t one of the mals,” he said. “My room’s next to hers, and she disappeared overnight. I’d have known. I stopped mals going in after her twice.”
I thought it over fast. If I told him, he was going to go after Jack. On one hand, that meant Jack would probably cease to be a problem for me. On the other hand, if Jack denied it, which wasn’t unlikely, I could end up with him and Orion as problems together. It wasn’t worth the risk when I didn’t have any proof. “Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “There are practicing maleficers in here, you know. Four in the senior class at least.” There were six, actually, but three of them were openly practicing, so saying four would hopefully make me look like I had a tiny bit of inside knowledge, believable but not enough to be worth interrogating. “Why don’t you pester one of them if you don’t have enough to do looking out for the sad and gormless.”
His face went set and hard. “You know, considering I’ve saved your life twice,” he began.
“Three times,” I said coldly.
It threw him off. “Uh—”
“The chimaera, end of last term,” I supplied even more coldly. Since I was obviously going to stick in his head now, he was at least going to remember me correctly.
“Fine, so three times, then! You might at least—”
“No, I mightn’t.”
He stopped, flushing. I don’t think I’d ever seen him angry before; it was always just aw-shucks hunching and resolution.
“I didn’t ask you for your help, and I don’t want it,” I said. “There’re more than a thousand students still left in our year and all of them gagging to swoon over you. Go and find one of them if you want some adoration.” The bells rang in the hallway: five minutes to curfew. “And if you don’t, go anyway!” I grabbed my door and flipped the shiny new—well, dull new—bolt and opened it.
He obviously wanted to leave on a snappy comeback, but couldn’t think of one. I suppose he wasn’t ever called on to produce them in the ordinary course of things. After a moment of struggle, he just scowled and stalked out.
I’m delighted to report my repaired door slammed shut on his heels beautifully.
I WAS EXHAUSTED, but I spent another half hour doing sit-ups in my room and built up the mana to cast a protective barrier over my bed. I can’t afford to do it every night, but tonight I was shattered, and I needed something to keep me from being the lowest-hanging fruit on the vine. Once I had it up, I crawled into bed and slept like a rock, barring the three times I woke with warning jabs from the trip wires round my door: par for the course, and nothing actually tried to come in.
The next morning Aadhya knocked to get me for showers and breakfast company, which was nice of her. I wondered why. A drill was valuable, but not that valuable. Thanks to her company, I was able to take my first shower in a week and refill my water jug before we headed to the cafeteria. She didn’t even try to charge me for it, except watching in turnabout while she did it, too.
All became clear as we started down the hallway. “So, you and Orion did all right in the shop last night,” she said, in an overly casual, making-conversation way.
I didn’t stop short, but I wanted to. “It wasn’t a date!”
“Did he ask you for anything? Even a fair share?” Aadhya darted her eyes at me.
I ground my teeth. That was the usual rule for distinguishing between a date and an alliance, but it hardly applied. “He was paying a debt.”
“Oh, right,” Aadhya said. “Orion, are you going to breakfast?” she called—he was just closing his door behind him, and then I realized she must’ve put a trip wire on his door this morning, so she’d got a warning when he went to brush his teeth. She was trying to get in with him through me, which would have been funny if it hadn’t made me want to punch her in the head. The last thing I needed was for people to get even more of an idea that I needed him to look out for me. “Walk together?”
He threw a look at me—I glared back, trying to hint him off—and said, “Sure,” inexplicably. It wasn’t as though he needed company, so evidently he was just doing it to spite me. He fell in on Aadhya’s other side while I contemplated various forms of retribution. I couldn’t just fall out, either: there wasn’t anyone else waiting for a group, and then I’d be vulnerable. Breakfast isn’t half as dangerous as dinner, but it’s still never good to walk alone. Hope in your heart doesn’t count.
“Anything unusual down in the shop last night?” she asked him. “I’ve got metalwork this morning.”
“Um, nothing much, really,” he said.
“What’s wrong with you!” I said. You’re not obliged to go out of your way to warn others, we all have to look out for ourselves, but if you start misleading people and setting them up, you’re really in for it. That’s a long step down from maleficer in most students’ opinions. “There were five mimics hanging about as chairs,” I told her.