Page 20 of A Deadly Education
I was still looking forward to my breakfast with anticipation, though. Once Aadhya and I passed the word in the food line that I had something really good on offer, people would stop at the table just to get a quick look. It would be a good way to make more connections, especially with other students who had Sanskrit; I could get even more trades out of it in future. Except then we got to the cafeteria and I knew straightaway my book wasn’t going to be the big news of the morning: a senior was sitting alone at the middle of an absolutely prime table.Completelyalone, hunched over his tray.
Seniors don’t sit alone, no matter how much the other seniors hate them. Freshmen and even sophs will fill in the spaces at their tables for the cover. Seniors get access to a lot more advanced magic, and by graduation time, they’re also bursting with power, especially by comparison with the average fourteen-year-old. The kind of mals that want to hunt freshmen and sophs avoid them. But this one had been isolated so hard there weren’t even any seniors sitting at the tablesaroundhim: they were full of hunched-over desperate loser freshmen.
I didn’t recognize him, but Orion and Chloe had both frozen, staring. “Isn’t he…New York?” Aadhya said, low, and Chloe said blankly, “That’s Todd. Todd Quayle.” That made it even more incomprehensible. Shunning anenclavekid? And Todd hadn’t gone obvious whole-hog maleficer or anything; he looked totally normal.
A freshman was just making a quick dash back from the busing station, having managed to get his tray on the conveyor without problems. Orion reached out and caught him. “What did he do?” he asked, jerking his head over.
“Poached,” the kid said, without really lifting his head; he darted a wary look at Orion and Chloe from under his untrimmed bangs and hurried on; Orion had dropped his arm and was looking sick. Chloe was shaking her head in denial. “Noway,” she said. “Nofuckingway.” But it was almost the only thing big enough to explain it.
Our rooms are handed out on the day we get dropped into them, and you don’t get to change, even if someone dies. The empty rooms do get cleared out at the end of the year when the res halls rotate down, but the Scholomance decides how to reshuffle the walls to hand out the extra space. The only way you can deliberately change to another room is if youtakeit, and not by killing someone. You have to go into their room and push them into the void.
Nobody knows what that really means. The void isn’t a vacuum or instant death or anything like that. Occasionally someone will go crazy and try to walk out into the void on their own—you can, actually,walkinto it. It doesn’t seem to matter that you can also drop things over the edge. Like that slime you can squish between your fingers or roll into an apparently solid ball: it depends how you’re pushing on it, only with your will instead of your hands.
However, those people never make it very far. They panic and run back, and none of them has ever been able to describe what it’s like in there. If someone’s really determined and takes a running start, occasionally their momentum carries them a little further in before they can turn around, and when they do come out, those people can’t talk anymore at all, at least not in any comprehensible way. They make noises like they’re talking, but it’s not a language anyone else knows or can understand. They mostly end up dead some other way, but a couple of them have made it out of the school alive. They’ve still got magic. But no one else can understand their spells, and if they’re artificers or alchemists, the things they make don’t work for anyone else. Like they’ve been shifted sideways somehow.
That’s as deep as anyone can get into the void on their own. But you can push someone else all the way in—with magic, so you get them far enough in to vanish completely, even though they don’t want to go. And if you do that, if you go into someone’s room after curfew and you push them all the way into the dark like a spellbook you don’t want anymore, even while they’re screaming and begging and trying to get back out, then after they’re gone, you can spend the night in their room, and you won’t get swarmed, because there’s only one person in the room, and it’s your room after that.
Of course, it doesn’t make you very popular with, for instance, anyone else who has a room. And it’s not like you can cover it up, either. As soon as people see you coming out of your new room the next morning, they know what you’ve done. Orion clearly wanted to go right at Todd, then and there; I had to shove him towards the food line instead. “We already missed lunch yesterday. If you want to find out more, we can go sit with him after we’ve got breakfast; it’s not like there isn’t room.”
“I’m not sitting with a poacher,” Orion said.
“Then endure the burning curiosity,” I said. “Anyone in the school will be able to tell you all the gory details by lunchtime.”
“It’s amistake,” Chloe said again, her voice high and fraying. “There’s no way Todd poached. He doesn’t need to poach! He’s going with Annabel and River and Jessamy, and they’ve got the valedictorian on board. Why would he poach?”
“It’s not like we’ll be with him for long. The senior bell will go five minutes after we sit down,” Aadhya offered, more practically, and Orion clenched his hands and then shot off to the food line at top speed.
I’d underestimated the power of the gossip chain: we got most of the gory details before we even got out with our trays. Todd had taken out a guy named Mika: one of the last stragglers left, the solitary kids who hadn’t made it into any graduation alliance. If stragglers aren’t maleficers, they pretty much don’t make it out alive, and Mika wasn’t a maleficer; he was just an awkward loser who couldn’t manage decent social skills and wasn’t talented enough for even other losers to overlook the lack. If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like a crime deserving of a death sentence, I would agree with you, since I’ll be in the same boat next year if I don’t set myself up in time. But that’s what it was, more or less. Which meant, of course, he’d been the perfect target.
Orion got out first, and he made a beeline for Todd at his table, slammed his tray down across from him, and didn’t sit. “Why?” he said flatly. “You’ve got a team, a belt shield, a power-sharer, plenty of mana—you made a spirit glaive last quarter! But it wasn’t enough? You had to have abetter room?”
I put my own tray down next to Orion’s and sat and started eating while I had the chance. Aadhya sat down next to me and did the same thing. Chloe hadn’t come with us after all. After hearing the word in the line, she’d peeled off to a different New York table; all the other New York kids were sitting as far away from Todd as they could and still be in the cafeteria. She’d made the right call; I could already tell Orion wasn’t going to get an answer he was going to like much, if he was going to get one at all. Todd hadn’t even reacted to the question. He was hunched over his tray eating systematically, but his hands were shaking, and he was forcing the food down. He wasn’t a maleficer, either; he wasn’t even enough of a sociopath not to mind killing someone. I didn’t know why hehad,but he hadn’t done it for malia. He’d done it in desperation.
“Where was his old room?” I asked.
“Next to the stairs,” Orion said, still staring down at Todd like he could bore a hole through his skull and pull out answers. Thatisa crap room. A stairwell is for moving round the school, and the mals can use it as much as we do, so next to the stairs on the senior dorm level is the equivalent of being the first item on the food line.
But it’s hardly an insurmountable threat. None of us will take the first item on the food line if there’s a lid covering it, not as long as there’s an easier option in the next tray along. Which there would be, because Todd’s an enclaver, with more than enough mana to put up a good shield every single night, and the other enclave kids would have skipped recruiting a few of the neighboring kids, in solidarity. It didn’t seem worth screwing up his alliance and maybe even his whole life—enclaves don’topenlyharbor murderers and maleficers, and literally everyone in the school knew what he’d done.
“Answer me,” Orion said, and reached for Todd’s tray, maybe because he planned to pull it away or shove it in his face, but Todd grabbed it himself first and heaved it up, taking Orion’s tray with it, throwing the whole mess all over him before reaching across the table to give him a good shove. We don’t do a lot of physical fighting in here, everyone thinks of that as a mundane thing, but you don’t need much practice when you’re a six-foot guy who hasn’t been shy about letting other people give you extras for the last four years and the kid on the other side is a shrimp of a junior. Orion staggered back, dripping milk and scrambled eggs, and nearly went over into the next table.
“Fuckyou, Orion,” Todd snarled, his voice cracking into a shrill frantic note, undermining his thug line. “You want to get in my face? Big hero on campus, clearing out the mals for everybody. Guess what, you haven’t made a dent in the real crowd. They’re all still down there, and thanks to you, they’re starving. No little ones to snack on. So they’re not waiting for dinner to be delivered this year. I’ve been hearing them working at the stairwell every night for a week, so loud I can’t sleep. Some of them are already getting through.” He pressed his clenched fists to his temples, his whole face crumpling like a toddler having a wail, tears leaking down. “A fuckingmaw-mouthwent by my room yesterday. Headed upstairs. Didn’t get that one, did you, hero?”
Murmurs and freaked-out gasps went out from around us like an expanding ripple as everyone at the nearby tables overheard. The whole room was absolutely agog and watching the drama unfold, some kids actually standing on benches to peer over other people’s heads and see. Todd laughed a little hysterically. “Yeah, I wonder where it’s gonna settle down. Keep an eye out at the supply room, everybody!” he called out, turning to the whole room and spreading his arms wide and up to take in the kids leaning over from the mezzanine, a parody of a friendly warning. “But yeah, Orion, we’re so lucky to have you here protecting us. What would we do without you.”
It was almost down to the letter my own thoughts about Orion’s heroic campaign, and even more obviously accurate after the last week: a soul-eater in the junior res hall, mimics and sirenspiders in the shop, manifestations and maw-mouths in the library. Todd was right: there had to be a hole somewhere letting them through, a hole they’d forced through in hungry desperation.
Orion didn’t say anything back. He just stood there with egg literally on his face and blobs of porridge clinging to his hair, pale and bewildered. Everyone around was darting uncertain looks at him. I stood up and said to Todd, “You’d sail right out of here, enclave boy. And let the mals eat the kid in the room next to yours instead of you. That’s whatyou’ddo. But yeah, have a go at Orion. Sorry, did I miss why you have more of a right to live than anybody he’s saved? More than Mika? How long did it take for him to stop screaming when you shoved him into the dark? Do you even know, or did you just plug your ears and look the other way until it was over?”
The whole room had gone so deathly quiet I could hear Todd’s gulping as he stared at me bloodshot. Everyone was probably holding their breath not to miss a single nuance of this magnificent escalation of gossip. I picked up my tray and turned round to Orion, who looked back at me still shut-down, and I told him, “Come on. We’re getting another table.” I jerked my head to Aadhya, too, who was gawking up at me herself, and she scrambled up and grabbed her own tray and fell in with me, darting looks at my face sideways. Orion did come after us, moving a little slowly.
The only empty tables left were bad ones, far at the edges and right by the doors or under the air vents—obviously nobody had left the cafeteria a second early with this excitement going on—but as we were passing him, Ibrahim blurted into the still-total silence, “El, we have room,” and waved some of the kids at his table to slide over and make space for us. The senior bell went off then, and we sat down surrounded by the sudden burst of activity and noise of all the seniors jerking into motion at once, shoveling in the last of their food and grabbing their things to rush out. Todd went out with them, weirdly separate from the rest, a ring of space left round him.
Orion sat down on the end of the bench, empty-handed. Yaakov was on the other side across from him; he picked up his napkin, hesitating, and I reached out and took it and shoved it at Orion. “You’re a mess, Lake,” I said, and Orion took it and started wiping himself clean. “Can anyone spare anything?” I put one of my own rolls in front of him, and then one after another every single one of the kids at the table started passing something down, even if it was just half a mini muffin or a section of orange, and a kid at the table behind us reached out and tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a carton of milk for him.
The conversation at our table was completely dead at first; with Orion right there, nobody wanted to talk about the only thing anybody wanted to talk about. Aadhya was the one who got things moving; she finished drinking the milk from the bottom of her cereal bowl—in here that’s standard, not bad manners—and wiped her mouth and said, “Any of you doing Sanskrit? You’re not going to believe what El got. El, you’ve got to show them,” and I was even more grateful that I’d petted my book so much and put it in the special sling, because I’d forgotten about it completely for a few seconds, and if I’d had it in my bookbag, I am absolutely sure it would have vanished on me.
“Baghdad enclave!” Ibrahim and two others yelped instantly, the second I pulled it out—all the kids who know Arabic can spot books from the Baghdad enclave three shelves away—and since they couldn’t talk about the real news, mine did for second-best.
