A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(16)

    Which would make it self-defense when I killed him, which I gave some newly serious thought to doing: it was starting to seem like I might really have to. People seem to have no trouble convincing themselves that I’m dangerous and evil even when they aren’t actively looking for reasons. Of course, I could have killed him just by draining his mana, but I didn’t want to actually become a maleficer and then go bursting out of this place like some monstrous butterfly hatching from a gigantic chrysalis of doom to lay waste and sow sorrow across the world as per the prophecy.

The problem was Luisa, I realized abruptly. He hadn’t bought my answer about her. Just like I have a good sense of who’s using malia, what they’re doing, he’s almost certainly got a sense for—I don’t even know. Justice? Mercy? The pathetic and vulnerable? Anyway, he knew I was lying to him about Luisa, without knowing exactly how I was lying, so he’d probably decided that I really had killed her. I’d taken his question about her as a minor point, but he hadn’t. I didn’t know much about her, except that she’d been one of the deeply unlucky few who don’t have wizard parents. The ability to hold mana does pop up in mundanes every so often, but usually they don’t get in here, they just get eaten. Probably a kid who lived near her was slated to come, got eaten before induction, and she got sucked up instead because the parents didn’t bother notifying the school, I can’t imagine why. So in some sense she was lucky, but from her perspective, one morning she just found herself sucked up out of her ordinary life and dumped without warning into a black hole of a boarding school, surrounded by strangers, no way to get in touch with her family, no way out, and a horde of maleficaria coming to kill her. I’m sure her plight was calculated to pull on every one of Orion’s finely tuned heartstrings.

    And thanks to my own fit of temper the other night, he’s also just discovered I’m a potential dark witch of apocalyptic proportions. Put all of that together, probably every instinct he had was now going wild with the desire to put a stop to my not-yet-begun reign of terror.

Naturally that made me want to go and launch said reign of terror immediately, but first I had to sit through two hours of language and one of Maleficaria Studies, everyone’s favorite, which is held in a massive hall on the cafeteria level. We all get lumped into the room together regardless of language, as there’s no lecture. The walls are covered with a huge and vividly detailed mural of the graduation ceremony, set in the moment when the senior hall rotates down. The landing is just coming into view, and the marble hall is crammed full of the various delightful creatures waiting ravenous for the buffet to begin. We each get a textbook in our mother tongue, and read along while the current mal we’re studying comes alive off the walls and prowls around the stage demonstrating all the ways it might kill us. Occasionally the animated version will try to upgrade itself from being a temporary construct by actually killing someone in the front rows and consuming their mana.

I almost always have to sit in the front rows. It keeps my attention remarkably focused.

Today, though, I was able to get a seat about halfway up, and no one around it said oh sorry, that one’s saved. It helped me to calm down to sullen irritation before lunch. The initial damage was already done, in terms of people thinking Orion was saving me, so it was time to take a deep breath and find a way to rescue the situation. And as soon as I’d forced myself to do that, my revised strategy became obvious.

    So at lunchtime I made a point of sitting down next to Aadhya and whispering to her, “He walked me to class!” and followed it up with, “He can’t really like me, though,” just before he came out of the line, spotted me, and came over to our table and sat down across from me with narrowed eyes.

Orion’s never dated anyone, or so I concluded from the fact that I hadn’t heard about him dating anyone. Unsurprisingly, the news that he was apparently gone on me bolted through the entire school at even more lightning speed than the story of his rescuing me in the first place. By the time I had to go down to the alchemy labs for my last session of the day, a boy named Mika, whom I’ve never even spoken to—I think he’s Finnish—had saved two seats at a prime table, and when I came in, he called, “El, El,” and pointed to the one next to him.

That certainly was a change. I always rush to get to lab early despite the higher risk of being one of the few there while the room’s mostly empty, because if I don’t arrive while there’s still a decent table open, everyone will have saved the good seats for their friends, and then I’ve got to sit at one of the bad tables, the ones directly underneath the air vents or closest to the door. I can’t wheedle for a spot, it makes me too angry, and threatening makes me feel equally terrible, just in the opposite way. So it was very nice to walk right into a half-full room and still get a seat at the best table, without having to barter for it.

Of course, this happy state of affairs was dependent on Orion playing his part, but he came in just before the bell, looked round the room, and came straight to the seat next to mine. Mika craned his head around me to peer at him and smile hopefully. Too bad for him the gesture was lost on Orion, who was too busy studying all my ingredients and the reaction I was working on.

    Most people get alchemy assignments to produce antidotes and preventive elixirs, or the good old standby of producing gold out of cheaper elements. I’m never set recipes for anything that useful; I’ve got to trade for them. I had already rejected several assignments this week—turning lead into radioactive palladium, producing a deadly contact poison, and converting flesh into stone—before I got my current assignment to produce a jet of superheated plasma, which might be useful under at least some circumstances. For example, it would be absolutely ideal for charring bones into ash, which you wouldn’t think would be the first thing that would jump to a person’s mind, except Orion looked at it and said immediately, “That’s hot enough to disintegrate bone,” with hard suspicion.