A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(53)

I’m not a moron, I knew it was dangerous: I was on the edge of casting. That’s all that magic is, after all. You start with a clear intention, your destination; you gather up the power; and then you send the power traveling down the road, giving the clearest directions you can, whether it’s with words or goop or metal. The better the directions are, the more well-traveled the road, the easier it is for the power to get to where you want it to go; that’s why most wizards can’t just invent their own spells and recipes. But I can blaze a trail to Mordor anytime I want, and I still had nine full crystals in my chest, and so what if those ran out? There was loads of power to be had. After all, if Magnus deserved to die, why shouldn’t I put his life to good use?

    And that thought is exactly why I knew I had to stop, I knew I had to let it all go, or else I’d become a much worse person than Magnus and Todd and Jack all put together, and no more prizes for me. But I knew it the way you know the sixth biscuit in a row isn’t good for you and you’ll be sorry, and they’re not even really very nice, and yet you keep eating them anyway.

That’s why I opened the door when Aadhya knocked. I did check it was her and kept well back this time, I wasn’t getting caught the same way twice, but I let her in, even though I didn’t want company at all. At least having her there would make it harder for me to keep cramming the biscuits of revenge fantasy into my mouth. “Yeah?” I said shortly but not outright rude, my idea of self-restraint at the moment.

Aadhya came in and let me shut the door, but she didn’t answer me for a moment, which was odd for her; she doesn’t dither. She looked around the room: it was the first time she’d ever come over. It was the first time—apart from Jack and Orion—that I’d ever had anyone over, in fact. At most a few people have come round to swap things with me, and on those occasions they didn’t come in far enough for the door to close behind them. My room’s pretty spartan. I spent my freshman year turning my cupboard into wall-mounted shelves, which are massively safer than any piece of furniture that has enclosed areas and a dark underside; I got credit in shop for it. I stripped my desk drawers for the same reason, traded for metal, and reinforced the legs and top of the desk instead, which is why it survived the incarnated flame’s visit. I’ve got a wobbly and rusted metal rack on top for papers that I also made myself out of the easiest metal I could get. Nothing else, besides the bed and the tool chest at the foot that I use to hold anything important enough that it would probably disappear if I left it lying around. Most kids have at least a few decorative bits here and there, a photo or cards on display; people give pottery and drawings at New Year. I’ve never been given any, and I don’t waste my own time making them.

    It didn’t feel bare to me, but I grew up in a one-room yurt with a couple of boxes under our bed and Mum’s worktable under the one round window. Except there I had the whole green world outside the door, and here this was clearly the room of a miserable loner, somebody like Mika, who couldn’t even afford the risk of cupboards. It made me even more furious, looking at it through another person’s eyes. Magnus probably had a quilt and a spare pillow, made sometime in the last thirty years by another New York student who’d passed them down on graduation day. His walls were probably covered with cheery cards and pictures people had made for him, or even actual wallpaper, if he’d wanted it enough. His furniture would be polished warm wood, with warded locks on the drawers and cubbyholes. Maybe he had a keep-fresh larder box; he certainly had a proper desk lamp. His pens never disappeared on him.

I could go and find out. Magnus would be in his room by now; it was close to curfew. I could force my way in and tell him I knew what he’d tried to do to me, and then I could shove him into the dark—not like Todd had done Mika, not all the way in, just enough to make clear that I could do it; that anytime I wanted to, I could push him in and take his lush, comfortable room all for me, since he and his enclave buddies thought that was a reasonable thing to do to another human being.

    I had my hands clenched again, and I had almost forgotten Aadhya was there, and then she said, abruptly, “Did—El, did you take out the maw-mouth?”

It was like having a bucket of just-melted ice thrown all over me. My eyesight actually fuzzed out a bit, going dim: for a moment I was back inside the maw-mouth again, the horrible pulsing wet hunger of it, and I lunged for the middle of the room and threw up into the floor drain, heaving up wet chunks of my half-digested dinner burning with stomach acid. The feeling of them in my mouth made me heave again, sobbing in between rounds. I kept going until I was empty and for a while afterwards. I was vaguely aware that Aadhya was holding my hair back out of my face: my plait had come undone. When I stopped, she gave me a cup of water, and I rinsed and spat over and over until she said, “This is the last of the jug,” and then I made myself sip a little, trying to wash the last bile back down my throat.

I crawled a few steps back from the drain and eased myself against the wall with my knees pulled up and my mouth wide open, trying not to smell my own breath.

“Sorry,” Aadhya said, and I raised my head and stared at her. She was sitting on the floor just a little way from me, cross-legged with the jug in her hands. She was in her pajamas already, or what passes for that in here, a ratty pair of too-small shorts and long-sleeved top let out with cheap mending, like she’d got herself ready for bed and had been about to get in and then instead she’d come to ask me—ask me—“You did, didn’t you,” she said.