A Deadly Education

Orion joined us with his own mail already in his hand, a fat envelope and a small bag, and whispered to me in a cheerful singsong under his breath, “Busted,” slinging his arm around my neck and grinning at me. I made a face at him, but I couldn’t help smiling a little myself as I carefully unrolled my very own letter

And then a boy with a voice that hadn’t quite finished breaking called, uncertainly, “I’ve got a note from Gwen Higgins?” I didn’t hear it the first time, but there was a little lull after, as people heard it, and he said it again.

Aadhya had come over, bringing both her letter and the black girl, from Newark, whose name was Pamyla—one of the reasons parents will have their kids spend a tiny bit of their precious weight allowance on a letter is that they know they’ll get an automatic older friend on the other side in return. “Do you think it’s that Gwen Higgins? Does she have a kid in here?” Pamyla said to Aadhya, sounding hopeful.

Aadhya just made a shrugging expression. Liu was shaking her head. “If she does, they’re keeping quiet; everyone would be on them for healing magic, I guess.”

Then the boy said, “For her daughter Galadriel?” and both of them—along with the handful of other people around who’d been paying enough attention to hear him—gave me a double take, and then Aadhya shoved me in the shoulder, indignantly. Several other people were having a furtive look around the cafeteria like they thought maybe there was some other girl named Galadriel in the place. I gritted my teeth and went over. Even the kid looked doubtfully up at me.

“I’m Galadriel,” I said shortly, and held out my hand: he put a tiny little thing almost like a shelled hazelnut into my palm, probably not even the weight of a single gram. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Aaron?” he said, like he wasn’t completely sure. “I’m from Manchester?”

“Well, come on,” I said, and gave him a jerk of my head, leading him back past a bunch of staring faces. There wasn’t really an escape from them, though: Aadhya and Liu were eyeing me themselves, Aadhya with a narrowed look that suggested I was in for another good long lecture as soon as she got me alone. I introduced Aaron to the others a bit grudgingly, and he and the other three freshmen started talking; Liu’s cousins both spoke English without the slightest hitch, and as fluently as either he or Pamyla did. Aadhya had a small sheet of enchanted gold leaf in her letter: she showed it to us gleefully. “I’ll put this round the argonet-tooth pegs, on the lute.”

“Are you just trying to be dense?” He glared at me. But I glared right back, indignantly, and then in the tones of someone speaking to a dim pony, he said, “I’d want to. If you want, I want. And if you don’t want, then—I don’t want.”

“That’s the general idea of the thing,” I said, getting wary all over again: that sounded alarmingly like he did want. “Otherwise it’s just stalking. Are you asking? And I’m not kicking you out of my life no matter what!” I added, although I hadn’t any idea what I’d do if he did ask. “I kicked you out of my way downstairs because I had the odd notion that you’d prefer your life saved, which I’d like to point out for the record I’ve now done in turn.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m up to thirteen at this point, so you’ve got a way to go,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, but it didn’t really have the right effect: he looked too thoroughly relieved.

“We needn’t quibble about numbers,” I said, loftily.

“Oh, I think we do need,” he said, and then just when I was about to relax, thinking I’d steered us back into safer waters, he dropped his arms again and his face went open and a little pale, leaving scared pink standing out on the edges of his cheekbones. “El, I’d—I’d like to ask. But not—in here. After we—if we—”

“Don’t even try. I’m not getting engaged to go out with you,” I said rudely, shoving in before he could drag us back onto the shoals. “If you’re not asking now, that’s sufficient unto the day! If we make it out of here alive and you slog across the pond to come ask me, I’ll decide what I think of it at the time, and until then, you can keep your Disney movie fantasies,” and your secret pet mal, my brain unhelpfully inserted, “to yourself.”

He said, “Okay, okay, fine!” in a tone one-tenth irritation and nine-tenths relief, while I looked away, trying to stop my mouth contorting around the laugh I was having to fight desperately to keep in yet again

He’d showered, changed clothes, got his hair cut, and even shaved: I eyed his newly smooth jawline with suspicion. I really had absolutely no intention of going out with anyone at school. Forget pregnancy; the last thing I needed was the distraction. He was already generating more than enough distraction in my life even when I didn’t have to wonder whether kissing was going to happen anytime he was in my vicinity.

“Look, Lake,” I said, just as he blurted, “El, listen,” and I heaved a sigh of deep relief. “Right. You just wanted to tick it off before you died.”

“No!”

“You don’t actually want to date me, do you?”

“I—” He looked baffled and desperate and then said, “If you—I don’t—it’s up to you!”

I stared at him. “It is, but that’s my part. Your part’s not up to me. Or are you actually trying to further develop this bizarre loser form of dating where you never actually get round to asking the other person what they think of the idea? Because I’m not helping you with it.”

“For the love of—” He dissolved into a strangled noise of wild irritation and shoved both his hands into his hair: if it hadn’t just been mostly shingled close, it would’ve been standing up like an Einstein mop. Then he said flatly, without looking me in the face, “I’m trying not to get kicked out of your life,” and I got it, embarrassingly belated. I had Aadhya and Liu, now, and not just him. It was like all that mana at my hands, something so vital you could get used to it so fast you’d almost forget what life had been like without it—until it went away again. But he didn’t. He didn’t have anybody else; he’d never had anybody, the same way I’d never had anybody, but now he’d had me, and he wanted to lose that about as much as I wanted to trade him and Aadhya and Liu for an enclave seat in New York.

Liu nodded, getting up. “You’ll need to make something enclosed so they can hide during the day while you’re out and they’re sleeping. But come and choose one now. You have to play with it for at least an hour every day for a month or so before you take it. I’ll show you how to give them mana: you have to put it into the treats you give.” I swung my feet off the bed and got on my shoes, and then Liu opened the door and we all jumped back, because Orion was standing right outside like a creeper. He jumped himself, so it wasn’t that he’d actually been planning to ambush me; I could only guess that he’d been standing there working himself up to knocking.

“I’ll come and take a look now, Liu,” Aadhya said loudly. “I can figure out how to put together a good enclosure.” She pushed Liu—who was blushing again and trying not to look at Orion—ahead of her and out the door past Orion, and then from behind his back she made a wild pointing motion towards him and exaggeratedly mouthed words that I had no trouble recognizing as SECRET PET MAL, so I had to fight not to go squawking with hysterical laughter into my pillow. They vanished down the corridor.

“Do you want to tell us about it?” Liu said, after I’d finished wolfing down the food and had sprawled back out on my bed.

“The machinery was broken in some different exciting way that took them more than an hour to fix,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “We lost one of the artificers on the way in, and Pires keeled over doing the shield, and we got back late and got caught on the shop floor during the cleaning and Orion kissed me,” which I hadn’t actually meant to say, but it came out, and Liu gave a squeak of excitement and covered her mouth.

“But how did you get clear of the cleaning fires?” Aadhya said, deadpan, and Liu shoved her knee and said, “Stop that! Was it nice? Is he a good kisser?” and then blushed bright red and burst into giggles and covered her face.

I would probably have been the same color if I could have managed it. “I don’t remember!”

“Oh, come on!” Aadhya said.

“I don’t! I—” I groaned and sat up and put my face against my knees and finished in a mutter, “I kneed him and shoved him off me so I could cast a firebreak,” and Aadhya laughed so hard she fell off the bed while Liu gawked at me, totally stricken on my behalf.

“ ‘I’m not dating Orion at all, we’re just friends,’ ” Aadhya wheezed from the floor without even getting up, mimicking what I’d told her and Liu the night before we’d shaken on our alliance: I hadn’t wanted them to come into it on false pretenses. “You fail at dating so hard.”

“Thanks, I feel loads better,” I said. “And I wasn’t wrong! I wasn’t dating him.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Aadhya said. “Only a boy would date somebody for two weeks and not mention it to them.”

We all kind of sniggered together for a bit, but after we settled back down, Liu said, tentatively, “Do you want to?” Her face was serious. “My mother told me it was a really bad idea.”

“My mom told me that all boys are carrying a secret pet mal around in their underwear, and if you get alone with them they let it out,” Aadhya said. We both shrieked with laughter, and she laughed, too. “I know, right? But she did it on purpose, she told me to pretend that was true, the whole time I was in here, because it would be true, if I let a boy get me pregnant.”

Liu gave a shiver all over and wrapped her arms around her knees. “My mother got me an IUD.”

“I tried one. I got massive cramps,” Aadhya said grimly.

I swallowed. I hadn’t bothered; it had seemed the least likely of my many worries. “My mum was almost three months gone with me at graduation.”

“Oh my God,” Aadhya said. “She must have freaked.”

“My dad died getting her out,” I said softly, and Liu reached out and squeezed my hand. My throat was tight. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone.

We sat quiet for a bit, and then Aadhya said, “I guess that means you’ll be the only person ever to graduate twice,” and we all laughed again.

I was about to excuse myself to go and fall into my bed for twelve hours or so, and she blurted, “El, I’m sorry.” I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t clear on what she was apologizing for. After a moment she said, “You just—you know, you get used to things. And you don’t think about whether they’re good. Or even okay.” She swallowed. “You don’t want to think about it. And nobody else seems to, either.

“And there’s nothing you can see to do about it.” She looked at me, her whole soft face and clear eyes unhappy. I shrugged a little. “Because there’s not meant to be anything you can do about it.”

She was quiet, and then she said, “I don’t know anything I can do about it. But I don’t have to make it worse. And I—” She was a collection of fidgets suddenly, looking away and licking her lips, uncomfortable. “I lied. In the library. We weren’t…we weren’t really worried that you were a maleficer. We wanted to be worried about that, because we didn’t like you. We’d all been talking about how you’re so awful and rude, how you were trying to use Orion to make everyone suck up to you. Except it’s the total opposite. That day Orion introduced us, I acted like all I needed to have you be my friend was to let you know that I was willing to let you talk to me. Like I’m so special. But I’m not. I’m just lucky. Orion’s special,” she added, with a huff that was trying to be a laugh and didn’t quite manage it. “And he wants to be your friend because you don’t care. You don’t care that he’s special, and you don’t care that I’m lucky. You aren’t going to be nice to me just because I’m from New York.”

“I’m not nice to anybody, really,” I said grudgingly, feeling squirmy inside being on the other end of her speech; it was too much of a real apology.

“You’re nice to people who are nice to you,” she said. “You’re nice to people who aren’t fake. And I don’t want to be fake. So—I’m sorry. And—I’d like to hang out sometime. If you wanted.”

Yes, because just what I wanted was to make a friend of a rich enclave girl so I could routinely rub my face around in all the luxuries I couldn’t have, all of which were in fact quite nice even if they didn’t measure up to the things I’d chosen in their place. And if Chloe Rasmussen turned out to be an actual decent person and a real friend, that would mean the things I didn’t have weren’t necessarily incompatible with the things I really cared about, and how exactly I was meant to put that together without being discontented all the time, I didn’t see, only I was reasonably certain that saying no and on your way now would in fact make me rude and stuck-up after all, just in a quixotic and contrary way.

“Yeah, all right,” I said, even more grudgingly, and the only good thing that came of it was that then, finally, after she smiled at me a little shyly,

However, I was much more inclined to watch for a wall of mortal flame coming back than I was to look down at Orion, since I’d have to see his expression and might have to actually say words to him at that point.

Then I nearly went over as the whole place began to heave and surge beneath my feet. The walls and floor outside the ring where my protective wall had been were all still scorching-hot, so I had to crouch inside the tiny space with him, both of us clinging to each other with one arm and holding out the other like a clumsy two-headed surfer trying desperately not to topple over and sear ourselves on the heated walls. At least I couldn’t have heard anything he tried to say to me. The gears were going, a hundred times louder than when I’d been safely tucked inside my room for graduation, and the stairway outside began to really move, squealing horribly. The familiar landing of our own res hall ground slowly into view and then continued on to vanish further below; it was all the way out of sight before the stairs locked into place again with a heavy clanging thump, and the grinding noise stopped.

A moment later all the sprayers turned on at once, and the corridor instantly filled with clouds of steam. We were left sopping-wet in a humid cloud of fog so thick we could barely see or breathe for a moment, but the walls were already baking off the moisture, and the hollow roar of the drain vacuums began to suck up the excess, leaving just the drowned-rat pair of us gasping in the middle of a sparkling-clean corridor. The end-of-term bell clanged away, and faintly echoing in the stairwell I heard doors clanging open in the dormitories above and below.

“You saved my life,” he said, sounding baffled about it. I gritted my teeth and turned to look back at him, ready to inform him he wasn’t the only one who could be useful on occasion, except he was staring at me with an absolutely unmistakable expression, one I’d seen fairly often in my life: men occasionally aim it at my mum. Not the kind of expression you’re thinking of; men don’t lust after Mum in a leering kind of way. It was more like looking at a goddess, accompanied by thinking that maybe you might get the goddess to smile at you if you, I don’t know, proved yourself sufficiently worthy, and I’d never once imagined anyone pointing anything remotely like it at me.

I had absolutely no idea what to do with it, other than possibly knee Orion again even harder and flee. That was really appealing the more I thought about it, but I didn’t get the chance; instead he shoved me to the floor, straight into a half-frozen and half-scalding puddle, and fired off half a dozen targeted blasts over my head to destroy a small pack of gorgers who had evidently survived in the ceiling inside the pocket of safety I’d created, and were now jumping down to have us for a celebratory feast.

Which was exactly the moment when a dozen people came off the landing, just in time to see me on the floor at Orion’s feet, him standing heroically over me, his hands full of glowing smoke and the scorched and smoking corpses of the gorgers in a neat circle around me, just as the last one came thumping down.

Orion’s breath was coming in short wavery gasps. I hadn’t seen him afraid down in the hall even once that I’d noticed, but mortal flame isn’t a mal: it consumes mals, it consumes anything in its path that has mana or malia to burn up. Combat magic isn’t any use against them; you can’t fight it. But to do him credit, he didn’t panic, even if he was staring down the one and only thing that he was actually afraid of; he just stood there staring at it sort of blankly, like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening to him.

I straightened up and shut my eyes, getting ready to start casting, and then had to push him off; he was trying to grab hold of my hand, which I needed rather urgently right then. “What are you doing?” I said, trying to get loose: he was being stupidly persistent about it. Yes, I really sincerely hadn’t any idea: whatever was Orion doing, trying to hold hands with me in the moment of what he thought was his imminent demise, and then as soon as I spared it that much of a thought, the answer became so obvious that I felt like a complete idiot. “You are dating me?” I yelled at him, in a fury, and he turned around with his face screwed up in pinched determination and grabbed my face and kissed me.

I kneed him with as much energy as the situation called for, since I also needed my voice, and then pushed him down to the floor so I could turn back to the onrushing fires and conjure up my own wall of mortal flame, just in time to put it around us as a firebreak.