Page 23 of A Deadly Education
I didn’t want to talk. My throat was really sore. I reached over to my little box and opened it and showed her my crystals; the two cracked ones and the dull drained ones next to the primed empties and my last nine full crystals. “Push-ups,” I said briefly, and shut the box again and put it away.
“Push-ups,” Aadhya said. “Sure, why not, push-ups.” She let out a bray of a laugh and looked away. “Why aren’t you telling anyone? Every enclave in the world is going to be drooling over you.”
The half accusation in the words made me angry and want to cry at the same time. I got up and got my little half-full jar of honey off my shelf. I take it to meals every weekend for the chance of a refill, but it’s hard to get, so I use it sparingly. But this called for it. I whispered Mum’s throat-soothing charm over a small spoonful and washed it down with the last lukewarm swallow of water in the glass before I turned back to Aadhya and stuck out my hand down at her, mockingly.
“Hi, I’m El. I can move mountains, literally,” I said. “Doyoubelieve me?”
Aadhya stood up. “So you do a demo! You should’ve done one freshman year, just asked some enclavers to spot you the mana. They’d be fighting to have you on their teams—”
“I don’twantto be on their teams!” I yelled hoarsely. “I don’t want to be on their teams at all!”
ILOVE HAVINGexistential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful. I lay awake for at least an hour after the final bell, staring furiously at the blue flicker of the gaslight by the door. Every five minutes or so I told myself to unclench my hands and go to sleep, with no effect. I tried to get up and get a drink of water—Aadhya felt bad for me being mental, I suppose, so she’d gone with me to the loo so I could refill my jug—and I even tried doing some maths homework, and I still couldn’t fall to sleep.
I’ve been bellowing at Mum about joining an enclave ever since I was old enough to work out that when enclave wizards from as far away as Japan are turning up at your yurt for advice, it probably means that they would be happy to have you in-house. After the scratcher attack, she even went to visit one. She wouldn’t look at London, but she tried this old place in Brittany that specializes in healing. She picked me up from school that afternoon and said, “I’m sorry, love, I just can’t,” and only shook her head when I demanded to know why. I told her flat-out I was going into an enclave after I graduated if I could get one to take me, and she just looked sad and said, “You’ll do whatever’s right for you, darling, of course.” Once—I still feel a bit sick about it remembering—when I was twelve, I even screamed at her in tears and told her if she loved me she’d take us to an enclave, and she just wanted something to get me so nobody would blame her and it wouldn’t hurt her perfect reputation. Three mals had tried for me that afternoon.
She kept a calm face on with me, but then she went back to the trees and cried herself sick where I couldn’t see her, or at least where I couldn’t have seen if I hadn’t gone after her to scream at her even more. When I saw her sobbing I went back to the yurt and threw myself on the bed crying and determined toletthe next mal that came along take me, as I was such a horrible daughter. But I didn’t do it. I wanted to live.
I still want to live. I want Mum to live. And I’m not going to live if I try to go it alone. So I should show off and make clear to all the enclavers that I’m available to be won: a grand prize up for grabs to the highest bidder, a nuclear weapon any enclave could use to take out mals—to take out another enclave—to make themselves more powerful. To make themselves safe.
That’s all Todd wanted. That’s all Magnus wanted. They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.
When the enclaves first built the Scholomance, the induction spell didn’t pull in kids from outside the enclaves. The enclavers made it sound like a grand act of generosity when they changed it to bring us all in, but of course it was never that. We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.
But why should they do anything else? They don’t have any reason to care about us. We’re not their children. We’re the other gazelles, all of us trying to outrun the same pack of lions. And if we happen to be faster than their children, more powerful, their children will get eaten. If not while we’re in here, when we get out, and we decide that we want some of the luxury they have tucked into those enclaves for ourselves. If we’re too strong, we might even threaten their own lives. So they shouldn’t care about us. Not until we sign on the dotted line. That’s only sensible. You can’t blame people for wanting their own kids to live. I understand it, every last bit of it.
And I wanted to want in. I want to have a daughter one day, a daughter who will live, who won’t ever have to scream alone in the night when monsters come for her. I don’t want to be alone in the night myself. I want to be safe, and I really wouldn’t mind a little bit of comfort, and even a taste of luxury now and then. It’s all I’ve been hungry for my whole life. I wanted to pretend that all of that was fair and okay, like Orion bleating how we’ve got the same chances.
But I can’t pretend that, because I didn’t grow up in that lie, so I don’t actually want in. I don’t want that safety and comfort and luxury at the cost of other kids dying in here. And sure, it’s not like that, it’s not some simple equation like me in an enclave means kids are dying in here; the kids will go on dying in here anyway, whether I’m in an enclave or not. But just because it’s a forty-sixth-order derivative equation or something doesn’t mean that I can’t work out which side of that equation is the guilty one.
And I’ve probably known it all along, maybe even before I got here, because otherwise Aadhya’s right, I should have just blown the bloody doors off in my freshman year and shown everyone back then. Instead I’ve spent three years putting it off and coming up with convoluted plans for how I was going to arrange my dramatic revelation and meanwhile, at the first chance I got, I just started being as rude as I could to every enclave kid who crossed my path. I’d certainly done my very best to chaseOrionoff. If he wasn’t a towering weirdo who liked that in a person, I’d have succeeded. And now Aadhya saying, “I won’t tell,” like she was making me a promise, and I’d said, “Thanks,” instead of sayingNo, no, tell everyone!
But if I’m not joining an enclave, I really don’t want anyone to know, after all. If people in here find out I destroyed a maw-mouth, some of them are going to look up that same journal article I read on the subject and understand what I am, what I can do. I could certainly stop being angry at Magnus then, because probably half of the enclavers would start trying to take me out. Especially if any of them pick up a whisper of my great-grandmother’s prophecy. And I still want to live.
Filled with all these cheery and relaxing thoughts, I passed a comfortable night in which I slept perhaps three hours all broken up with marvelous nightmares of being back in the maw-mouth and wide-awake bursts of gnawing anxiety in which I contemplated my odds of making it out of here alive all on my own with my nine remaining crystals against a whole graduation hall full of maleficaria. There was a side of gnawing hunger, too; I’d thrown up most of my day’s food. My throat was still sore and painful the next morning, and my eyes were gummy.
Aadhya had been knocking on my door in the mornings on the way to the loo. I half expected her not to come that morning, but she called round, and then Liu poked her head out and called, “Will you wait a moment?” We stopped at her door while she grabbed her toothbrush and flannel and comb, so I didn’t even have the worry of whether we were going to talk about the things I didn’t want to talk about. As we walked, Liu and I talked about our history papers instead, and in the bathroom Aadhya and I took first watch while Liu grimly attacked the mysteriously appearing snarls in her waist-long hair. She was having to pay back three years’ worth of great hair days all at once. Malia is great for your looks, right up until it really really isn’t.
“I need to cut this all off,” she said out loud, with gritted teeth. It was the sensible choice, and not just for saving time on hair care: you don’t want to offer any mals a convenient handhold. Almost everyone in here shares the same fabulous hairstyle: half grown out after having been shingled as short as possible, as quickly as possible, the last time you had a chance to use a pair of proper scissors or hair clippers. Bringing a pair of bad ones that close to vital bits like eyes and throats is a very iffy proposition. If you’d like to know the hard-and-fast rule for telling whether a pair has gone to the bad, so would all of us. There’s a senior named Okot from Sudan, one of the maintenance-track kids, who blew most of his induction weight allowance on a battery-powered electric razor and a hand-crank charger. He’s made an absolute killing loaning it out to people over the years, and at the start of this year, he promised it to a group of five freshmen, who’ve spent all their free time since building him mana for graduation. Now he’s in an alliance with three enclavers from Johannesburg.
Going fully shaved like that is popular if you can afford it. Dreadlocks are unfortunately not a great idea thanks to lockleeches, which you can probably imagine, but in case you need help, the adult spindly thing comes quietly down at night and pokes an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside, and creeps away. A little while later the leech hatches inside its comfy nest, attaches itself to your scalp almost unnoticeably, and starts very gently sucking up your blood and mana while infiltrating further. If you don’t get it out within a week or two, it usually manages to work its way inside the skull, and you’ve got a window of a few days after that before you stop being able to move. On the bright side, something else usually finishes you off quickly at that point.
So the very longest anyone usually lets their hair get is shoulder-length; mine only ever gets a couple inches longer than that because no one goes out of their way to let me know when they’ve got hold of good scissors. Even most enclavers won’t bother to grow their hair. Liu’s hair had been a power statement, an announcement of her family’s growing strength for anyone who met her. But without malia, it was probably going to be too much of a liability for her to maintain.
Aadhya threw me a quick look to make sure I was still attending, then broke bathroom silence. “Are you serious?”
“Getting there!” Liu said, letting her arms drop for a rest, panting.
“I’d buy it off you,” Aadhya said. “I could make you something of your choice next term, first quarter.”
“Really?” Liu said.
“Yeah,” Aadhya said. “It’s long enough to string the sirenspider lute I’m making.”
“I’ll think about it,” Liu said, and went back to combing the tangles out of her hair with more enthusiasm. Aadhya went back to watching. She wasn’t entitled to an answer right then: bathroom and table company is important, but it’s not like an alliance. And if Aadhya wanted Liu’s hair, there would be other kids who’d want it. Enclave kids in artifice track, making themselves top-notch weapons for graduation, and some of them with extras or maybe even an alliance slot to offer in trade.
I thought about it hard while I took my turn in the shower. Aadhya was even more clearly my best shot for an alliance at this point. She was the only person who knew what I had going, and she at least wanted me for bathroom company. But I still was a long way from being a good bargain for her. I certainly wouldn’t have picked me in her place: if she pulled off a sirenspider lute during the first half of next term, she was sure to get at least a dozen alliance offers from enclavers. Nobody else in here was going to have a sirenspider instrument: they’re too large to bring inside, except maybe a tiny flute or something, and wind instruments aren’t a great bet for graduation. You need your breath for casting incantations and running and optionally screaming. With a prize like that, she might even get one of those guaranteed placement offers, like the one Todd and his crew had dangled to get the valedictorian. Enclaves favor applications from kids who have been allies with their kids, but they don’t actually take everyone.
I was increasingly sure to get zero alliance offers from enclavers, and apparently I wasn’t going to take them if they did come. I couldn’t even offer Aadhya the strategy of putting together a solid small team that one of the more loserish enclaver kids would pick to get them out. If I wanted her to even think about taking the chance of going with me, I was going to have to score a lot of points between now and New Year’s.
