A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(26)

I got ready to turn around and change my target—I’d take having to redo the mirror in exchange for not being frozen into paralyzed horror by sirensong and having my blood delicately and slowly sucked out of me—and then Orion grabbed a sledgehammer someone had left on a nearby bench, vaulted over the table behind us, and charged them, because of course he did. Aadhya gave a shriek and dived underneath the table, covering her ears. I just gritted my teeth and dived into my incantation while Orion and the sirenspiders chimed and clanged around behind me like six pipe organs collapsing.

    The surface of the mirror shimmered like hot oil, and I crushed it perfectly smooth, not a single break in my chanting even when a large sirenspider leg came flying over my head, slammed into the wall, and bounced off to land on the worktable right next to me, still twitching and chiming broken bits of a song of unearthly horrors et cetera. By the time Orion finished up and staggered back, panting, to ask, “You girls okay?” it was all over, and the silver had solidified without a single bubble into a glossy greenish-black pool, just aching to spit out dark prophecies by the dozen.

Aadhya crawled out shakily from under the table and performed her own ritual thanks to Orion with complete sincerity while I wrapped the useless rubbishy mirror. If she didn’t cling to his arm as we went out of the shop, it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. To give her credit, she pulled herself together halfway up the stairs, at which point she asked me, “Can you still get credit? How bad did it warp?” I took the cover off the mirror long enough to show her the surface, and I knew what was coming even before she opened her mouth and said, admiring, “I can’t even believe it. Orion, what’d you do with the silver to get it to set that smooth?”

I took the mirror back to my room and hung it over a particularly bad scorched spot the incarnate flame had left on the wall. The wrappings fell off as I put it up, and before I could drape it again, a ghastly fluorescing face appeared partway from the churning depths as if emerging from a pool of bubbling tar, and told me in sepulchral tones, “Hail, Galadriel, bringer of death! You shall sow wrath and reap destruction, cast down enclaves and level the sheltering walls, cast children from their homes and—”

    “Right, yeah, old news,” I said, and threw the covers back on. It muttered things from underneath all night long and occasionally burst into ghostly wailing accompanied by vividly glowing purple and neon-blue light shows. My gut was aching enough to keep me awake for it all. I glared at the tiny scuttling mals revealed up on the ceiling and felt extremely put upon. By morning I was stewing so violently that I got all the way through toothbrushing, breakfast, and my language classes of the day before I snapped at something Orion said to me in history and only then noticed he was still there. I stopped biting his head off long enough to side-eye him. There was no way that his friends hadn’t yet found an opportunity and begged him at length to dump me. What was he even doing?

“In case it makes you feel better,” I told him irritably as we walked to lunch—he’d even stayed with me after class—“if I ever do go maleficer, I promise you’ll be the absolute first to know.”

“If you were going to go evil, you’d have done it by now just to avoid letting me help you,” he said, with a huff, which was—spot-on, actually, and I laughed before I meant to. Chloe and Magnus were coming to the lunchroom from the opposite direction just then, and both of them eyed me with the grim and resentful expressions you’d normally reserve for a really vicious final exam.

“Orion, I was hoping to catch you,” Chloe said. “I’m having some trouble with my focusing potion. Would you look at the recipe over lunch?”

    “Sure,” Orion said. Neatly done, and it left me the choice to tag along after Orion to their table like a trailing girlfriend, or what I actually did, which was take my tray to an empty table of my own. He’d distracted me enough I’d forgotten to pay attention, too, so I was early, and there wasn’t anyone for me to even tentatively try joining. I put my tray down in the middle of the empty table—at least it was a relatively good one—and checked the underside of the table and all the chairs, did a quick cleaning charm on the table surface—there were a few suspicious stains, probably just from some senior’s lunch, but if the cleaning charm hadn’t worked on them, they could’ve been a sign of something worse—and burned a small smudge of incense, which would probably nudge along anything lurking in the ceiling overhead. By the time I was done and sitting down, more people were starting to come off the line, all of them seeing Orion over at the New York enclave table and me alone at mine.

I was sitting with my back to the queue. That’s the safer way to sit—if you’re friendless—since it puts you that much closer to the mass of moving students, with a better view of the doors. I resolutely started eating with my Latin book open on the table in front of me. I wasn’t going to watch for any of the people I’d waved over to sit with me and Orion, the last few days. They’d decide for themselves what they wanted to do. It was just as well he wasn’t sitting with me today: I’d find out where I stood. I was glad of it.

I almost managed to convince myself. Almost. I didn’t want Orion’s help and I didn’t want him to sit with me and I didn’t want any fair-weather tagalongs sitting with me, I didn’t, but—I didn’t want to die, either. I didn’t want a clinger to jump me and I didn’t want anoxienta spores to erupt out of the floor beneath me and I didn’t want some slithering mess to drop on my head from the ceiling tiles, and that’s what happens to people who sit alone. For the last three years, I’ve had to think and plan and strategize how I’m going to survive every single meal in here, and I’m so tired of it, and I’m tired of all of them, hating me for no reason, nothing I’ve ever done. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been tying myself in knots and working myself to exhaustion just to avoid hurting any of them. It’s so hard, it’s so hard in here all the time, and what I was really glad of was having half an hour three times a day where I could take a breath, where I could pretend that I was just like everyone else, not some queen of popularity like an enclave girl but someone who could sit down at a good table and do a decent perimeter and people would join me instead of going out of their way in the opposite direction.