A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  “You aren’t that bright, are you,” I said, speaking from downward-dog position. “Why do you think people want to be in enclaves in the first place?”

  “That’s outside,” he said. “We’re all in here together. Everyone has the same chances—”

  He turned around to look at me halfway through that sentence, at which point my upside-down stare knocked him off track and he listened to the regurgitated rubbish coming out of his own mouth. He stopped and looked unhappy again, as he deserved to. I gave him the snort he’d earned as I got up and started planking. “Right. So Luisa had the same chances as Chloe.”

  “Luisa was screwed!” Orion said. “She didn’t know anything, she wasn’t prepared for any of it. That’s why I was looking out for her so much. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Fine. You think I have the same chances as Chloe?”

  He couldn’t sell that to himself, either, and it obviously pissed him off. He looked away and said, “You’re screwing up your chances all on your own.”

  I stood up and said, “Fuck off, then, and get away from me,” my throat knotted-up around it.

  He just gave a huff without even looking back at me, like he thought I was joking. “Yeah, see, like that. You’ll barely talk to me and I’ve saved your life five times.”

  “Six times,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Do you know that literally everybody I know has tried to tell me the last three days that I need to watch out for you because you’re a maleficer? You act like one.”

  “I don’t!” I said. “Jack acted like a maleficer. Maleficers are nice to you.”

  “Okay, no one’s going to accuse you of that.” He bent back over his books, still frowning; he hadn’t even realized I was about to punch him in the head. And I still wanted to punch him in the head, and I wanted to shout at him that I didn’t have to do anything to make people assume I was evil, I never had, except—he hadn’t assumed it. He’d only ever thought I was a maleficer when I’d given him a really good solid reason, and more to the point he was there sitting at my desk talking to me like I was a person, and I didn’t want that to stop. So instead of punching him in the head, I just finished my sun salutation and then I went back to the desk and got on with my paper.

  When the warning bell went off for curfew and we finally packed up, he said tentatively, “Want to come back after breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Some of us can’t afford to outsource our maintenance shifts,” I said, but the anger had gone. “Who’s doing yours?”

  “I don’t have one,” he said, with perfect sincerity, and only looked puzzled when I gave him a look. We’ve all got maintenance shifts, one a week; not even being the future Domina’s son from New York gets you out of being assigned. It only gets you out of doing it yourself. Enclavers generally club together in groups of ten and trade all their maintenance shifts to one kid in exchange for the promise that the kid gets to join one of their alliances at graduation time. We call that maintenance track, even though it’s strictly unofficial, and it’s one of the most reliable ways to get into an enclave after graduation. They’re happy to let in anyone who’s willing to literally do the shit work, and maintenance-track kids come out with practical experience in patching up the same kind of infrastructure that the big enclaves use.

  But it’s also one of the best ways to die. Maintenance-track kids end up skipping around half their lessons, so they’re always on the razor’s edge of failing dangerously, and they miss out on a lot of theory and advanced spells. More to the point, they’re the ones who have to go into the rooms with the mysterious holes in the walls, the leaking pipes, the burned-out lights; the places where the wards are wobbly and the mals are more likely to wriggle in. And you can’t sign up for maintenance track and then just skip your shifts. If you don’t adequately complete your maintenance shift within the week it’s due, you aren’t allowed into the cafeteria again until it’s done. And if you don’t do someone else’s maintenance shift that you’ve promised to do, they don’t get to go into the cafeteria, so enclavers keep a sharp eye on their little helpers. Most enclavers, anyway.

  “Someone else from New York made the arrangements for you, didn’t they, and you don’t even know,” I said. “That’s sad, Lake. At least say thank you once in a while to the poor kid.” Poor kid, ha. I’d have gone for maintenance track myself in a flash: I’ve already got a massive target stuck on my back. But actually the competition for it is quite stiff, and I had to give up in the first fortnight because I couldn’t find an enclaver to hire me. They wouldn’t even talk to me, so I didn’t have much opportunity to suck up to them. To be fair, opportunity clearly wasn’t my only hurdle there.

  He flushed. “What are you doing for your shift?”

  “Cleaning the labs,” I said. Alchemy lab cleaning shifts are lousy the way any maintenance shift is lousy, but it’s nothing like as bad as trying to patch a hole in a wall or mend a warding spell. Once, I had to fix a fraying ward over an air vent in one of the seminar rooms, close to the shop. The protection had worn so thin that there was literally a pack of scuttlers waiting to come through. They’d pressed the frontmost ones right squish up against it: five or six pairs of round lemur eyes staring at me full of hungry longing, drooling from their mouths full of needle-teeth. I finally got fed up and wasted a bit of mana to physically shove them back into the vent far enough so that I didn’t have to look at them until I had woven the new barrier spell into place.

  Cleaning’s not nearly as dangerous, even in the labs. There might be a bit of acid or contact poison or some iffy alchemical substance left behind, but that’s not hard to catch. Most kids don’t bother, they just fill a bucket of soapy water, slap an animation spell on some rags and a mop, shove them in, and keep watch on the process from the door. But unless I’m really knackered, I do it all by hand. In the commune we all did upkeep on a rota, and my mum wouldn’t let me use magic, so I know my way around a mop and bucket. I was aggrieved at the time. Now it means I actually get some mana out of the deal instead of the reverse, and I’ve occasionally found some usable supplies among the leftovers. It’s still not a magical good time, though.

  “I’ll come with,” Orion said.

  “You’ll what?” I said, and laughed when he wasn’t joking: everyone would really think he was in love. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  * * *

  HIS HELP MADE short work of my shift, and we spent the rest of the weekend in the library together. I have to admit I took a lot of petty and objectively stupid satisfaction from the way the New York crew all eyed me anxiously every time we walked past their corner in the reading room, to and from meals. I knew better. I should have been chumming up with all of them. I wasn’t dating Orion, but he really was my friend; that wasn’t just a temporary illusion. I had an actual in at New York. If they took me in, I wouldn’t need to worry about finding any other allies. I could pop on one of those power-sharers and glide all the way to the gates and right on through like I was on ice skates. I wouldn’t even need to grovel, I suspected, just make myself decently polite.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t encourage any of the enclaver kids who kept trying to make up to me; I just cold-shouldered them all. I wasn’t subtle about it, either. On Saturday night, on our way to brushing our teeth, Aadhya actually said to me, tentatively, “El, have you got some kind of a plan going?”

  I instantly knew what she meant. But I didn’t say anything; I didn’t want to be talked sensibly out of my stupid behavior. After a pause, Aadhya said, “It is what it is. I was really popular at school outside. Soccer and gymnastics, a million friends. But my mom sat me down a year before induction and told me I was going to be a loser in here. She didn’t say it like, be ready if that happens. She just told me flat-out.”

  “You aren’t a loser,” I said.

  “Yeah, I am. I’m a loser because I have to think about it al
l the time: how am I getting out of here? We have one year left, El. You know what graduation is going to be like. The enclave kids are going to pick and choose from the best of us. They’ll hand out shields and power-sharers, and cast a timespear or light up a kettler and zoom right out the gates, and the mals will come for everybody else. We don’t want to be everybody else in that scenario. Anyway, what are you going to do after? Go live in a hut in the Rockies?”

  “A yurt in Wales,” I muttered, but she was right, obviously. It was everything I’d planned on, in fact, with one crucial exception. “They don’t want me, Aadhya. They want Orion.”

  “So what? Use it while you can,” Aadhya said. “Look, I’m only saying any of this because you’ve done me a solid, and I think you’re smart enough to hear it, so don’t get mad: you know you turn people off.”

  “But not you?” I said, trying to sound cool about it, when I didn’t feel cool at all.

  “I wasn’t immune or anything,” she said. “But my mom also told me to be polite to rejects, because it’s stupid to close doors, and suspicious of people who are too nice, because they want more from you than they’re letting on. And she was right. Jacky W turns out to be Hannibal Lecter, and you turn out to be so hardcore you’d ditch New York and London to stick with me just because I didn’t completely rip you off trading.” She shrugged.

  We were at the bathroom by then, so we couldn’t talk anymore: I seethed the whole way through brushing my teeth and washing my face and keeping watch for Aadhya’s turn. But on the way back, I burst out, “Just—why? What have I ever done that turns people off?”

  I waited for her to say all the usual things: You’re rude, you’re cold, you’re mean, you’re angry, all the things people say to make it my fault, but she looked over at me and frowned like she was really thinking about it, and then she said with decision, “You feel like it’s going to rain.”

  “What?”

  But Aadhya was already waving her hands around and elaborating. “You know that feeling when you’re a mile away from anywhere, and you didn’t take your umbrella because it was sunny when you left, and you’re in your good suede boots, and suddenly it gets dark and you can tell it’s about to start pouring buckets, and you’re like Oh great.” She nodded to herself, satisfied with her brilliant analogy. “That’s what it feels like, whenever you show up.” She paused and glanced back behind us, making sure there wasn’t anyone in earshot, and then said to me abruptly, “You know, if you cheat a little too much, it can mess up your vibe. I know a kid in alchemy track who has a really good spirit cleanse recipe—”

  “I don’t cheat,” I said through my teeth. “I’ve never cheated.”

  She gave me a dubious look. “For serious?”

  So that was really helpful. Of course, it should have been. Aadhya was one hundred percent correct, and I should’ve listened to her and parlayed my one week of not-dating Orion into the outright invitation to join at least three separate enclaves that I could have got for the asking right then and there, setting myself up for half a dozen more to come during each further week we kept not-dating. Because I feel like rain.

  But instead what I did the very next morning was say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” with immense coldness when Sarah invited me to swap spells with her Sunday Welsh revision group. Full of UK enclave kids, each with an inherited spellbook crammed with top-notch and thoroughly tested spells, all the more valuable because the language is completely phonetic: just about anyone who can get through the full name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll—that isn’t, by the way, the full name—can pick up most of the spells without even knowing what all the words are, so you get all the benefits of a rarer language, with a bigger trading group. My own Welsh is quite solid, thanks to good old Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi, although I never got to use it outside of lessons. Anytime I walked into shops or the pub, they’d switch to English to talk to me without even thinking, and sometimes keep on even if I spoke Welsh back. Sarah sounded a bit dubious asking herself: “I heard you grew up in Wales, I thought perhaps,” was how she phrased it. Oh, and she wanted to do this at their table in the library, after breakfast, and of course I was completely welcome to bring a friend.

  “I don’t mind,” Orion actually said to me as we sat down with our trays; he’d overheard.

  “I do,” I snarled at him viciously, and if he’d said another patronizing word I’d probably have tipped my porridge over his head, but instead he went all red and stared down at his tray hard and visibly swallowed, looking on the outside roughly the way I’d felt on the inside when Aadhya had sat down with me. Like it was exactly as new an experience for him, somebody who didn’t want to use him to the last drop. I nearly upended my porridge over his head anyway, but instead I ground my teeth and just shared the jug of cream I’d scrounged that morning, half full.

  So the end result was, I was just as knee-deep in it as I’d been a week ago when he’d white-knighted into my bedroom, if not worse. Apparently I wasn’t going to actually use his friendship to get anywhere, and he was going to be worse than useless as help himself: it was already blindingly obvious to me that he was going to be the last one out of the gates on graduation day. Meanwhile I was well on the way to successfully making myself violently, instead of just modestly, hateful to every enclave kid in the place, probably before the end of term at my current pace. And while Aadhya and Liu and Nkoyo might not actively avoid me anymore, they weren’t going to choose me over survival. The alliances were going to begin forming up next year in earnest, and all three of them were sure to get scooped up early by one group of enclavers or another. For all Aadhya wants to talk about being a loser, she has a well-polished reputation; they all do. Mine started out grimy and was in the process of being covered in the slop of my own stupid pride.

  But fine: since I didn’t have the self-restraint to swallow it and just make a smarmy git of myself for long enough to save my own life, the obvious answer was I had to find a way to let everyone in on the amount of power I had. Then some people would want me for myself, and then maybe I’d stop sabotaging every possible alliance offer I could get.

  Anyway that’s been my plan all along, to sacrifice a few crystals and establish my reputation somehow, and now was the time for it, since maleficaria activity drops off quite a bit after graduation. Loads of mals down below get killed off by the escaping seniors or eaten by each other in the feeding frenzy, and the rest are well fed and busy finding quiet corners in which to make lots of little baby mals. And up here, the pest control has wiped out most of the ones living among us. The builders knew that some mals would wriggle their way up to us, so twice a year the halls get a good scouring. A very loud warning bell goes, we all run for our dormitory cells, shut ourselves in, and barricade our doors as thoroughly as we can. Then massive cleansing walls of mortal flame get conjured up and sent running on their merry way throughout the whole building, from top to bottom, incinerating hordes of desperate fleeing mals. It also helps warm up the machinery at graduation time, just before the dorms all rotate down to their new places.

  If you’re wondering why they don’t also run this excellent system down in the graduation hall to clear out the mals before dumping in the seniors, the answer is they meant to, but the machinery down there has been broken since about five minutes after the school opened. No one’s going down to the graduation hall to do maintenance.

  Anyway, that’s why induction happens literally the evening after graduation: it’s the safest day of the year in the Scholomance, and the place stays relatively quiet for a good month or two afterwards. So if I can’t dredge up a decent excuse for blowing a lot of power by then—like a soul-eater, not that I’m nursing a lingering bitterness or anything—I’m not going to get a better one until the end of the first quarter, and by then loads of alliances will have been formed.

  I hardly got any work done the whole morning. The Zhou enclaves, which destroyed each other about
three thousand years ago, had a hard time competing in my brain with the very compelling question of what I ought to do to show off. I could just make a scene in the cafeteria some morning and disintegrate a row of tables, but I writhed at the idea of wasting mana like that, and just throwing it away would make me look more than a bit thick. Or worse, people might get the idea that I had absurd amounts of power available to throw away, which I wouldn’t except if I was, you guessed it, a maleficer. And they all wanted to believe that anyway.

  I gave up on my own paper and started doing the translations I owed Liu for hers instead. The only Sanskrit dictionary on the shelf today was the monstrous six-kilo one, but at least slogging through its pages was mechanical, and left a considerable portion of my brain able to keep worrying the problem. I decided I’d set myself a deadline to come up with something by the end of next week. Otherwise, I’d just pretend I’d been startled by something, maybe in shop class where Aadhya would see—

  My train of thought got interrupted just then as Orion turned his head to look behind us, and I realized that was the third time he’d done it. I hadn’t really noticed before because that’s a normal thing to do; I glance over my shoulder probably once every five minutes, automatically. But it wasn’t normal for him, and before I could ask what he’d picked up on, he was up from the table, just leaving all his books and everything, and running back into the stacks towards the reading room. “What the hell, Lake!” I yelled after him, but he was already going.

  I could have chased after him quickly enough to catch up, maybe, except then I’d’ve been running towards whatever it was at top speed, and undoubtedly the whatever was really dangerous. If he was already too far ahead, the aisles could just stretch enough to keep me from catching up, and then I’d be running full-tilt in the dark stacks all alone, which is just as brilliant an idea as it sounds.