Page 27 of A Deadly Education
Chloe was starting to look bewildered. “But—are you and Orion just—” She couldn’t even come up with something to finish the sentence.
“Wearen’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’mnotdating 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 inpreschool,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’malivebecause 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’twantto 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.Allof 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 forhim. 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 yourmaintenance shiftwith you! So yes, weareall 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’sdoingsomething 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 toosomethingto 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 desperatelywantedthat 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 howwonderfulhe was, how they’d alltried 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 tochange 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 thatwouldcost 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 ifheneeded 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.”
IDIDN’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.
You don’t get to choose what comes out, of course. The items are rarely contaminated, as they’re all things in packets, but they’re usually aged, and sometimes inedibly ancient. Once, I got a military ration from World War I. I’d come up that time because Iwasfeeling light-headed, so I was hungry enough to open it, but even then I couldn’t bring myself to risk anything but the biscuit, and by biscuit I mean the kind of hardtack they sent on yearlong sea voyages. Today I got a bag of off-brand crisps, a packet of mostly crumbled peanut butter crackers, and the prize, a Mars bar only three years past the sell-by date. Liu got a bag of salted licorice, which is inexpressibly vile but you can swap it with the Scandinavian kids for almost anything, another packet of crisps, and a slightly questionable box of cured meat. Aadhya got a small packet of halvah, a completely fresh salmon onigiri dated this very morning, amazing, and a whole tin of chestnut spread so large it clanged the whole machine when it came down.
“Let me try and get something to put it on,” I said, and put in another token: when you use a token you’ve saved for a while, usually you get something particularly good or particularly bad. This time I was in luck: out came the glorious orange plastic of a packet of Hobnobs.
We got our little paper cups of tea and coffee from the lukewarm urns and went back to Aadhya’s room to share the lot. She had tapped the gas line of her room lamp to build herself a little Bunsen burner, which we used to boil the meat in an alchemy beaker while we wolfed down the onigiri, and then ate Hobnobs slathered with chestnut spread and topped with halvah and crushed peanut butter crackers. When the meat had cooked long enough, we ate it with the crisps, a feast finished off with celebratory slices of Mars bar. Aadhya sat at the desk, working on the belly of her lute, and Liu and I sat on the bed and worked on our papers.
