A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(17)

“Oh, have you done this one already?” I said, insincerely. “Don’t tell me, I want to learn it for myself.”

He spent most of the class watching me instead of doing his own work. It made me angry, but being angry’s always good for my work. My ingredients were iron, gold, water, a chunk of polished lapis lazuli, and half a teaspoon of salt, which had to be arranged at distances proportional to their relative quantities. Woe if you’re off by a millimeter. But I got them lined up properly on the first go. I could hardly embark on an exercise routine in the middle of my class, so instead I softly sang three long complicated songs to raise the mana, two in English and one in Marathi. The sparking-flame bloomed inside my cupped palms, and I managed to edge my ritual tray nearer to Orion before I tipped the spark over the ingredients and jumped back. The thin blue flame swallowed them all in a gulp and roared up mightily, so hot that a sweltering wave rolled out through the entire classroom. There were even a few alarmed shrieks from inside the air ducts, and scrabbling noises went overhead.

    Everyone instinctively ducked under their desks, except Orion. The paper twists he was using to hold his own ingredients had all caught on fire just from proximity, and he was desperately dousing flames. It made me feel much better.

So did having Nkoyo invite me to dinner on the way out of the lesson. “We usually meet at thirteen minutes to six, if you want to join us,” she said. I didn’t bother making sure Orion was overhearing; she’d have made sure of that herself.

“If I can bring Yi Liu.” Hopefully Orion would get bored with my lack of actual evildoing at some point, and I didn’t trust all my new friends not to ditch me as soon as that happened. But Liu would be happy to broaden her circles—she doesn’t have the same effect on people that I do, but she’s still not a popularity queen like Jack; you have to really go the whole hog before the malia starts to cover up—and she’d remember I’d done her a favor when I had a chance.

I caught Liu in our hall going back to her room after class and told her; she’d been at an afternoon workshop section herself. She nodded and looked at me thoughtfully and volunteered, “Orion was asking questions about Luisa in writing workshop after lunch.”

“Of course he was.” I grimaced. Jack would definitely blame me for that, what with Orion following me around. “Thanks. I’ll see you at thirteen to six.”

I didn’t see Jack anywhere around, but I checked for any malicious spells on my cell door and did an especially thorough look over the room before I went inside, just in case he’d got ambitious. But there wasn’t anything, so I buckled down to my mana-storing exercise routine until dinnertime.

My plan has been to fill crystals throughout this year unless an emergency or a really golden opportunity presents itself—like that soul-eater could have been!—and then use a few of them judiciously to establish my reputation just before the end of term, so I can get into a solid graduation alliance early next year. We all stockpile mana as much as we can in between near-death experiences; even enclavers. It’s about the one thing you can’t bring in with you, even stored tidily in a power sink like Mum’s crystals.

    Or rather, you’re very welcome to bring all the filled-up power sinks you want, but they’ll get sucked completely dry by the induction spell that lands us all in here, which is massively mana-hungry. In fact, you get extra weight allowance in exchange. Not much extra, so it’s not worth it unless you’re an enclaver and can casually throw away thirty filled power sinks for an extra quarter-kilo. But Mum’s never had more than ten filled crystals round in my life, and the last few years we had less. I came in with my one small knapsack and my empties instead.

And I’m ahead of the game at that. Most power sinks are a lot bigger and heavier than Mum’s crystals, so lots of kids can’t afford to bring empties in, and most of them don’t work nearly as well, especially when they’ve been built in the shop by a fourteen-year-old. I’m in a decent position, but it’s really hard to get on when I’m constantly having mals flung at my head. And it gets harder and harder to fill them with exercise, because the older I get and the better shape I get in, the easier the same exercise gets. Mana’s annoying that way. The physical labor isn’t what counts. What turns it into mana is how much effort it costs me.

Next year I desperately need people watching my back and helping me fill more. If I can only make it to graduation with fifty full crystals, I’m confident I can single-handedly blaze a path for me and my allies straight to the gates and out, no more clever strategy required. It’s one of the few situations in which a wall of mortal flame might actually be called for: in fact that’s how the school cleans out the cafeteria and does the twice-yearly scouring of the halls. But I’m not going to get there unless I stick to my pace. Which currently means, drumroll, two hundred push-ups before dinner.

    I’d like to say I didn’t give Orion a thought, but actually I lost a good chunk of my push-up time pointlessly calculating the odds that he’d follow me to dinner. I settled on sixty–forty, but I admit I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen the flash of his silver-grey hair at the meeting point when I came out. He was waiting for me. Nkoyo and Cora were both waiting, too, failing not to stare at him. There was a wild struggle between jealousy and confusion going on on Cora’s face, and Nkoyo just looked woodenly blank. Liu joined me halfway down the hall, and Jowani came out of his room and hurried to meet us just in time for the walk. “Any of you know anyone else studying Old English?” I asked as we set out.