A Deadly Education

by Naomi Novik

  I stopped in the corridor and stared at her. She wouldn’t look me in the face. She had a vaguely hunted and half-guilty expression, actually, glancing back over her shoulder towards the reading room. We were in dim light, but probably at least partly visible from the New York corner. I could see Magnus there on one of the settees.

  “Just—come sit with us, okay?” Chloe said. “Or go to your room or something.”

  “How long will my room be safe? Surely that’s going to be Magnus’s next clever idea.” I was constructing a very detailed fantasy of marching over there and flattening his nose for him: a good punch straight down from above would do it, and have a really satisfying crunch. “Or maybe not: I suppose he’d be worried about getting Orion with it, too. That would be quite the goal, taking him out yourselves while going to all this trouble just to stop me poaching him.”

  Chloe flinched. “Have you said yes to Dubai?”

  “I haven’t been asked to Dubai! I fixed a chair in their corner because I’m looking to pick up a few measly words of Arabic. And if I had been asked and said yes, it wouldn’t justify you lot trying to murder me with crawlers!” I added through my teeth, because Chloe had the nerve to look relieved.

  “What? No! We didn’t—” Chloe obviously realized halfway through her sentence that denial wasn’t going to work, and shifted tacks. “Look, Magnus thought you were a maleficer. The crawler only had a malia-siphon spell. As long as you weren’t a heavy-duty maleficer, the worst it would do was make you a little bit sick.”

  She made it sound like a noble defense. I stared at her. “I’m strict mana.” Chloe stopped with her mouth agape at me, shocked like the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her. I’m sure it hadn’t, to any of them. That crawler had been about to turn into a shiny new mal. When you make a construct with the ability to collect power on its own in any way, that’s what you’re asking for. You can wag your finger at it and tell it to be good, but if ever it can’t get power from approved sources, the odds are at least fifty-fifty that it’ll start taking it from anywhere it can get it. And since Magnus had made this one with the secret hope in his heart that it would drain evil-me dry, I was reasonably certain its odds were a lot higher. And then it would have killed me.

  Chloe agreed with me, for that matter; she’d gone sickly pale, for good selfish reason: when a construct goes malicious, one of the first people it heads for is its maker, and anyone around them who might have contributed to its creation. It creates a tidy vulnerability that helps the construct suck out their mana. Not that I felt particularly sorry for her. “What’s the present waiting at my desk, a box of jangler mites?” I demanded.

  She swallowed and said, a little tremulously, “No, it’s—it’s an unbreaking sleep spell. He and Jennifer were going to put a hypno spell on you and ask you questions…”

  “Assuming that nothing ate me before they got there.”

  Chloe did have the grace to look ashamed. “I’m so sorry, I really am. We’ve been arguing about it all week—most of us didn’t think it, everyone’s just really worried…But—if you’re strict mana, that’s—great, that’s amazing,” she informed me earnestly—yes, so amazing how her mate had nearly killed me by accident!—and carried right on from there. “Honestly, even without knowing that, most of us already wanted to recruit you. Knowing you’re strict mana, I can just say it, five of us will vote you straight in, and Orion would make six. That’s a majority. You can have one of the guaranteed places, and—”

  “Thanks ever so!” I said, incredulously. “After having a pop at me, twice?”

  She stopped and bit her lip. “Magnus will apologize, I promise,” she said after a moment, as if she thought we were negotiating, as if she thought—

  Well, as if she thought that I’d like a guaranteed enclave slot in New York City, which was more or less everything I’d ever desperately wanted and had spent most of the last six years strategizing to get, and here she was holding it out without even a single string attached.

  And what I felt, because I’m me, was violently irritated, not at her but at Mum, who wasn’t even here to look at me with that shining warm smile in her whole face that she gets once in a very rare while when I’ve made her really happy. Like the time when I was twelve and we had an enormous fight about cheating, because I didn’t see why I shouldn’t just take the last bit of life out of this bird I’d found dying in the forest anyway, and I stormed away and then came back to the yurt very grudgingly an hour later and told her even more grudgingly that I’d just sat in the trees with the bird until it died, and then buried it. I hated having to tell her, I hated how happy it made me seeing her face glow. It felt like giving in, and I hated giving in more than anything.

  And I hated it just as much now when Mum wasn’t here but I could see her face anyway, her happiness that I wasn’t going to take what Chloe was offering me, the priceless unattainable thing I’d declared with enormous firmness I intended to get. Except I couldn’t take it. It was so obviously rubbish after Liu saying quietly, I’m behind on mana. And not even because she and Aadhya wanted me, and Chloe only cared about clinging to Orion. They were just the better deal. When they were offering an alliance, they were offering their lives. They were offering to go all-in, asking me to do the same. Chloe didn’t have a thing on the table by comparison.

  “I don’t want an apology,” I said resentfully. “I’m not coming to New York.”

  Chloe’s face went stricken. “If—Are you going to London?” she asked, her voice shaking. “Is this—is this because of Todd? He’s going to be kicked out, obviously, no one in New York would—”

  “It’s not Todd!” I said, irritated even more, because she hadn’t the slightest right to an answer, only she sounded like I was stabbing her with knives. “I’m not going to any enclave.”

  Chloe was starting to look bewildered. “But—are you and Orion just—” She couldn’t even come up with something to finish the sentence.

  “We aren’t doing anything. I don’t even understand why all of you are freaking out this way. Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m not dating Orion, and even if I were, two weeks ago he didn’t know my name. And you’re ready to offer me a guaranteed slot? What if in a month he’s taken up with a girl from Berlin?”

  I thought that at least would make her back off, but Chloe didn’t look at all comforted. She had an odd, confused wobbling sort of expression, and then abruptly she said, “You’re the only person Orion’s ever actually hung out with.”

  “Right, sorry, I forgot that your kind aren’t allowed to associate with the plebeians.”

  “That’s not what I mean!” she said. “He doesn’t hang out with us, either.” Which was a bizarre thing to say, given I’d seen him hanging out with her almost nonstop for the last three years, and my face must have shown it, because she shook her head. “He knows us, his mom told him to look out for us, but he doesn’t—talk to any of us. He has to sit somewhere at meals and in classes, so he sits with us, but he doesn’t say anything unless you ask him a question. He never comes and just hangs out, not with anyone—not here, not in our rooms; he doesn’t even study with anyone! Except with you.”

  I stared at her. “What about Luisa?”

  “Luisa was constantly begging him to let her follow him around, and he didn’t shove her off because he felt sorry for her,” Chloe said. “He still avoided her whenever he could. I’ve known him since we were born, and the only reason he knows my name is that his mom drilled him with flash cards in second grade. Even when we were kids, all he ever wanted to do is hunt mals.”

  “Yes, how could Candy Land possibly stack up against mal-hunting?” I said, incredulously.

  “You think that’s a joke? When we were in preschool, a suckerworm got into our classroom. The teacher found out because Orion was in the corner laughing, and she asked him what was so funny and he held it up in
both hands to show us. It was thrashing around with its mouth going, trying to bite. We all screamed and he jumped and pulled it into two pieces by accident. All of us got sprayed with its guts.” My face screwed up involuntarily: ew. She grimaced in memory. “He was doing gate shifts by the time he was ten. I don’t mean he’d be assigned, it was his idea of fun. Magistra Rhys, he’s her only kid, all our lives she was constantly dragging him to our places for playdates, to get him to make friends, and the whole time he was over, he’d just try to find ways to sneak out and go down to the gates so he could jump any mals that came in. He’s not—normal.”

  I laughed, I couldn’t help it. It was that, or slap her. “Would you say he’s got negativity of spirit?” I jeered.

  “I’m not being mean!” she said tightly. “You think we didn’t want to like him? I’m alive because of him. The summer when I was nine, we had a lyefly infestation in the city. Not a big deal, right?” she added, in a self-deprecating sort of way, as if she were almost ashamed to complain of anything so trivial. “The older kids had to stay inside while the council figured out what to do, but the lyeflies weren’t bothering any of us under eleven. I was at the playground across the street from the enclave when I got a mana spurt.”

  I’ve read about mana spurts in the cheery “As Your Mana Grows” pamphlet that Mum pushed on me, but I’ve never experienced one myself. The capacity to hold mana does expand in sudden jumps for most of us, but you don’t get overwhelmed with a surge of mana when you haven’t got enough of it to fill the capacity you already have. Chloe had obviously been in a different situation.

  “I was playing—” she shaped an enclosed space with her hands, “—under the slide, with a couple of friends. No mundanes. And the lyeflies, the whole swarm, they all just came for me. They started gnawing through the shield my mom made me wear. There were so many—” She stopped and swallowed. “My friends screamed and ran out. I couldn’t do anything. It felt like mana was coming out my nose, my mouth, my ears. I didn’t remember a single spell. I still have nightmares about it sometimes,” Chloe added, and I believed her. She’d wrapped her arms around herself without even thinking, her shoulders hunched in. “Orion was walking around the playground edge, just kicking pebbles, not playing with any of us. He ran right in and burned them all off me. I thought he was the most amazing person in the entire world.”

  I was trying ferociously hard to hang on to being angry, but it was hard going. I didn’t want to give her any sympathy. The one time a swarm of lyeflies came through the commune, when I was small, Mum had to sit up all day and night holding me tight in her lap, singing a shield over us without stopping until they gave up and flew onward, and if she’d lost her voice, we’d both have died. Chloe had an enclave to hide in, and a shield with enclave power behind it, and surely if Orion hadn’t come to her rescue, one of the grown-up childminders would have dashed right over to help. It was the one thing that had happened to her, the one bad thing, not the first of a thousand bad things. But—I couldn’t help but be with her in it: nine years old with mana erupting through you, being swarmed by a cloud of lyeflies, feeling them gnawing their way to your flesh—I was hunching up myself, hearing a scratcher clawing at the wards on my threshold.

  But fortunately for my spleen, Chloe was going on urgently from there, saying, “I spent months after that, following him around, trying to be his friend, asking him to do things together. He always said no unless his mom made him. And it wasn’t just that he didn’t like me. All of us have tried. Some of our parents even told us to, but that’s not why, we didn’t do it to suck up to the Domina in waiting or anything. It was for him. We all knew he was special, we were all grateful. But it didn’t even register. He wasn’t being a snob or anything, he’s never mean or rude, I just—didn’t matter to him. Nobody ever mattered to him before.”

  She waved a hand up and down over me, and she sounded so very sincerely bewildered. “Then he talks to you once, and all of a sudden he’s making excuses for following you around. One day he’s got to help you fix a door, the next he thinks you’re a maleficer, then he’s got to help you because you’re hurt. He sits with you at lunch, he even comes to the library when you ask him. You know how many times I’ve tried to get him to come to the library? He came with us twice, the first week of freshman year, and I don’t think he’s come up here since. We even heard he did your maintenance shift with you! So yes, we are all freaking out. We weren’t arguing over whether or not it’s worth giving you a guaranteed spot. If Orion actually liked someone, none of us would think twice, nobody in the whole enclave would. We’ve only been arguing whether or not you’re a maleficer who’s doing something to him.”

  She finished up this litany and stopped defiantly, as if she was waiting for me to yell at her, but I just stood there, disappointing as usual. I was too something to speak. Not angry, exactly. I’d been angry at Magnus when I’d thought he was trying to murder me to hang on to Orion in all his strategic value, filthily and remorselessly selfish. Oh, how I’d enjoyed all that sweet crisp righteous anger, my favorite drug: I’d nearly ridden the high straight into murder. This sensation felt murky as sludge by comparison, thick with exhaustion.

  I’d already worked out that what Orion wanted was someone who didn’t treat him like a shining prince; I just hadn’t understood why. Now I understood so well it made my stomach hurt. Chloe, Magnus, all of them, probably everyone in their entire enclave, had come up with this story that Orion was some kind of inhumanly heroic monster-slayer, who loved nothing more than spending all day and all night saving all their lives, who didn’t give a thought to his own happiness. They’d made up that lie because of course they desperately wanted that from him. Oh, they’d have been happy to cosset him and flatter him and give him the best of everything in return—why not, they had it to give, that didn’t cost them anything. They’d gladly hand that priceless enclave spot to me, to any rando girl Orion so much as smiled at; they’d probably have taken Luisa in just because he pitied her. Cheap at the price.

  They were desperate to keep him in the exact same way that everyone back at the commune wanted to get rid of me. He was living the same garbage story I was, only in mirror image. Trying so hard to give them what they wanted, trying to fit himself into the beautiful lie they’d made up about him, staring obediently at flash cards his mum made so he could be polite to them. But of course he couldn’t be friends with them. He could tell, surely, that they only wanted to be his friends as long as he stayed in the lie. Chloe with her big eyes telling me how wonderful he was, how they’d all tried so hard.

  But I couldn’t just be angry at her. Obviously I wanted to scream at her and set her whole enclave on fire, but that was just habit. What I really wanted, what I wanted with frantic desperate hunger, was to change her mind, the same way I wanted to change everyone’s mind about me. I wanted to grab her and shake her and make her see Orion—me—for five seconds as a person. Only I knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, because that would cost her. If Orion was a person, he didn’t owe it to her to keep wearing that convenient little buzzer on his wrist, just in case she or any of her actual friends needed help, for nothing in return. If he was a person, he had as much right as she did to be scared and selfish, and she was supposed to pay back everything he gave her. She wasn’t interested in that deal, was she? She wasn’t going to come running if he needed help. She’d be running the other way.

  Her expression faded into uncertainty as I went on standing there: probably hearing the faint rumble of storm clouds in the distance. “Right,” I said, through a sour throat. “Of course I’ve got to be a maleficer. Surely there can’t be any other reason he’d prefer my company to you absolute doorknobs.” Chloe flinched back. “Keep the enclave seat for someone who wants it. But ta very much for saving me the pleasure of having your friends poke through my head. In return, I’ll let you in on my secret handling technique. I treat Orion like he’s an ordinary
human being. You might all try it yourselves and see how you get on, before you go to any more trouble on my account.”

  I DIDN’T TRy to find somewhere else to work. I knew I wasn’t going to get a thing done. I just shouldered past Chloe and went for the stairs, and I ran down the whole way to our res hall, although I knew better. Over the weekend, everything had started to warm up for graduation, oil pumping to lubricate the big gears in the core; they were coming loose, helped along by a bit of preliminary rocking. The stairs were shifting along with them, like glacially slow escalators that might reverse direction at any time. And I paid for being careless: a couple of stairs up from the landing, there was the start of a putrid opalescent slick, a remnant of something that had been killed just recently, and I stepped onto it too fast, skidded, and had to throw myself onto the landing in a hard tumble to keep from going headfirst onwards down the stairs.

  I was limping down the corridor to my room when I realized I was going past Aadhya’s door. I paused, and after a moment, I slowly knocked. “It’s El,” I said, and she cracked the door, made sure it was me, then saw the blood.

  “What happened?” she said. “You want some gauze?”

  My throat was tight. I was almost glad for falling down the stairs. Who cared about changing Chloe’s mind? “No, it’s not worth it, it’s just a scrape,” I said. “I was just stupid, I tripped coming off the stairs. Come with me to the girls’?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Aadhya said, and she walked with me and kept watch while I rinsed off my bloody elbow and my bloodier knee. My gut was aching all over again. I didn’t care.

  Liu got back shortly after we had finished, and the three of us climbed the stairs—more cautiously—up to the cafeteria. The main food line and the tables were locked away behind the movable wall, and we could smell the smoke of the cleansing fires going back there—self-clean ovens have nothing on mortal flame—but there were a few dozen kids around waiting their turn at the snack bar. That’s a glorified term for what it is, a bank of vending machines that take tokens. Each of us gets three a week. I actually had almost twenty saved up: the risk of coming without other people isn’t worth the boost of calories, unless you’ve had a few days in a row of really bad luck at meals and are starting to feel light-headed or sluggish.