Page 40 of A Deadly Education
I lay back down to rest until dinnertime, half drowsing while we talked about plans for the first quarter, how much mana we thought we could build. As Liu scribbled down budget numbers, I couldn’t help but think wistfully of the power-sharer; I rubbed my fingers around my wrist where it had been. I almost couldn’t blame Chloe, anyone from New York. All that mana just flowing at your fingertips, so much you couldn’t see the end of it. I hadn’t been able to feel the work behind it. It had felt as free as air. I’d had it for only a few hours and I already missed it.
I kept almost falling asleep again and then rousing back up. I wasn’t sure why; Aadhya and Liu would have understood, and even watched over me and woken me up for dinner. “We should think about what else we could use, and anyone else we might want to recruit,” Aadhya said. “I might be able to finish the lute early enough to make some more things first quarter. We should go through each other’s spell lists, too.”
Liu said softly, “There’s one more thing I have,” and then she got up and went out the door, and I realized abruptly with strong indignation that the reason I kept starting up was that I waswaitingfor another knock. I glared at the door. And a few minutes later there was another knock, but it was just Liu coming back with a small box in her hands. She sat down on the floor with crossed legs around it and opened the lid and brought out a little white mouse. It wriggled its nose and squirmed around over her fingers, but didn’t make a dash for it.
“You have a familiar!” Aadhya said. “Oh my gosh, it’s so cute.”
“He’s not a familiar,” Liu said. “Or he wasn’t. I’m just starting to…I have ten of them.” She didn’t meet our eyes: it was an all but open admission she’d been going for the very unofficial maleficer track. Nobody brings in ten mice and feeds them out of their supplies for any other reason. “I have an affinity for animals.”
Which was probably why her parents had made her do it, I realized: they’d known she’d be able to keep her sacrifices alive. And also why she’d hated it so much, even after three years, that she’d decided not to go back to it.
“And now you’re making him a familiar?” I asked. I don’t know exactly how that works. Mum has only ever had spontaneous familiars: once in a while an animal arrives in our yurt that needs looking after, she helps it, and then it hangs about and helps her for a while before it drifts away again to being an ordinary animal. She doesn’t try to keep them.
Liu nodded, stroking the mouse’s head with a fingertip. “I could train one for each of you, too. They’re nocturnal, so they can keep watch while you sleep, and they’re really good at checking food for anything bad. This one brought me a piece of a string of enchanted coral beads two days ago. His name is Xiao Xing.” She let us hold him, and I could feel the mana at work in his tiny body: he already had a kind of blue shimmer over the surface of his eyes and if you looked at his fur from a sharp angle, and he sniffed at us curiously, unafraid. After we each stroked him for a bit, Liu put him down and let him just roam around the room; he scampered around sniffing at things and poking his head into places. He got up on the desk and then turned wary right near the spot where the scuttler had been hiding; he ran away from it fast, back to Liu, until she checked it for him and showed him it was clear; then she patted him and praised him and gave him a little chunk of dried fruit out of a bag she had tied to her waist. He climbed into the front pocket on her shirt and sat there nibbling on it happily.
“Could you train the rest for other people?” I asked, watching him, utterly entranced. “You’d get a lot in trade.” I’d never had much time for animals before, once Mum trained me out of wanting to dissect them; I mainly ignored the dogs on the commune and was ignored in turn. I’ve never even liked cute cat videos. But I hadn’t quite realized how starved I was of seeing anything alive and moving that wasn’t trying to kill me. Familiars aren’t common here: it’s really expensive in terms of weight to bring them in, and painfully hard to take care of them inside. When your choices are to feed yourself or feed your cat, you feed yourself, or else the next mal gets you and the cat, too. But mice are cheap enough to feed that it wouldn’t be that difficult. I just hadn’t thought of it as something I’d want.
“Yes, after I train one for each of my cousins,” Liu said. “They’ll be here tonight.”
It took me by odd surprise again, being reminded of something that you already know but that doesn’t seem true yet: We were seniors now. It was our last year. Tonight was induction.
“Can we come pick one out now?” Aadhya said. She was as mesmerized as I was. “Do they need anything? Like a cage?”
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 asSECRET PET MAL,so I had to fight not to go squawking with hysterical laughter into my pillow. They vanished down the corridor.
Orion looked as though he would have liked to run away, which I would have sympathized with, except at least hecould,since he wasn’t already inside his own room. He’d showered, changed clothes, got his hair cut, and evenshaved: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 thedistraction.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!”
“Youdon’tactually 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.
Of course, he was still being inexcusably stupid about it. “Lake, if Ididwant to date you, I wouldn’t want you to date me just because I commanded you to as the price of admission,” I said.
“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 youasking? 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 mywaydownstairs 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 wedoneed,” 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 gettingengagedto 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: thanks ever so, Aadhya. Her mum was a genius, actually. “Can I ask you to meet fordinnerin an hour?”
“No, you twit,” I said, as if I hadn’t just forgot about it myself. “It’s induction. We’ve got half an hour at best.” He immediately looked sheepish, although to be fair to us, we’d definitely had the weirdest graduation day ever. I grimaced and looked down at myself. “I ought to shower. And put on my slightly less filthy top.”
