A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(11)

“I know this is going to be a challenge for you,” I said through my teeth, still fighting back the sniffles, “but try not being an idiot for five minutes. If I was a maleficer, I’d have sucked you dry downstairs and told everyone you died in the workshop. It’s not like anyone would’ve been suspicious.” He didn’t look like he’d found that particularly comforting. I rubbed the back of my sooty hand across my face. “Anyway,” I added desolately, “if I was a maleficer, I’d just suck all of you dry and have the whole school to myself.”

“Who’d want it?” Orion said after a moment.

    I snorted a laugh up into my nose; all right, he had a point. “A maleficer!”

“Not even a maleficer,” he said positively. He did lower his hands then, still warily, only to take another step back again when I stood up. I rolled my eyes and made a little jump at him with my hands raised like claws and squeaked, “Boo!”

He glared at me. I went over to where he’d put the rest of the supplies on the floor. The rest of the scrap pieces got shoved under my mattress where they couldn’t be replaced by something unpleasant during the night without my noticing. The drill and pliers got strapped securely down to the lid of my storage chest next to my two knives and my one precious small screwdriver. If you keep things strapped to the underside of the lid, then if they’ve come loose, you can see the straps dangling when you crack it a bit. I’m really systematic about checking, so I haven’t had a tool go bad for a long time: the Scholomance doesn’t waste its time.

I went to the basin and rinsed off my hands and face again as well as I could: I was down to just a tiny bit left in my jug. “If you’re waiting for a thank-you, you’ll be here a while,” I told Orion after I finished drying off. He was still standing in the corner eyeing me.

“Yeah, I noticed,” he said with a huff. “You weren’t kidding about your affinity, were you. So you’re—what, a strict-mana maleficer?”

“That doesn’t even make sense. I’m not a maleficer at all, and as long as I’m trying to not turn into one, maybe you’d better go away,” I said, spelling it out since that was evidently necessary. “It’s got to be nearly curfew by now, anyway.”

Bad things happen if you’re in someone else’s cell past curfew. Otherwise, of course, we’d all double and triple up and take shifts on watch, not to mention that seniors would be en masse shoving freshmen out of their rooms on the top floor and postponing graduation for a year or two. Apparently there was a rash of incidents like that early on, after people started to realize there was a gigantic horde of mals waiting down in the graduation hall. I don’t know exactly what the builders did about it, but I do know that having two or more kids in a room makes you a horrible magnet. And forget about running out into the corridor trying to get back to your room once you realize what trouble you’re in. Two girls just down the way from me tried it in our first year. One of them spent a long time screaming outside my door before she stopped. The other one didn’t make it out of the room at all. It’s not the sort of thing anyone sane wants to risk.

    Orion just kept staring at me. Abruptly he said, “What happened to Luisa?”

I frowned at him, wondering why he was asking me, and then I realized—“You think I did for her?”

“It wasn’t one of the mals,” he said. “My room’s next to hers, and she disappeared overnight. I’d have known. I stopped mals going in after her twice.”

I thought it over fast. If I told him, he was going to go after Jack. On one hand, that meant Jack would probably cease to be a problem for me. On the other hand, if Jack denied it, which wasn’t unlikely, I could end up with him and Orion as problems together. It wasn’t worth the risk when I didn’t have any proof. “Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “There are practicing maleficers in here, you know. Four in the senior class at least.” There were six, actually, but three of them were openly practicing, so saying four would hopefully make me look like I had a tiny bit of inside knowledge, believable but not enough to be worth interrogating. “Why don’t you pester one of them if you don’t have enough to do looking out for the sad and gormless.”

    His face went set and hard. “You know, considering I’ve saved your life twice,” he began.

“Three times,” I said coldly.

It threw him off. “Uh—”

“The chimaera, end of last term,” I supplied even more coldly. Since I was obviously going to stick in his head now, he was at least going to remember me correctly.

“Fine, so three times, then! You might at least—”

“No, I mightn’t.”

He stopped, flushing. I don’t think I’d ever seen him angry before; it was always just aw-shucks hunching and resolution.

“I didn’t ask you for your help, and I don’t want it,” I said. “There’re more than a thousand students still left in our year and all of them gagging to swoon over you. Go and find one of them if you want some adoration.” The bells rang in the hallway: five minutes to curfew. “And if you don’t, go anyway!” I grabbed my door and flipped the shiny new—well, dull new—bolt and opened it.