A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(59)

    But more to the point for me, that was exactly along the lines of the alliance Aadhya had suggested this morning. Liu added, “Do you want to hear?” and held out a tiny music player, the kind with no screen that play for a million hours on a charge. Even so, the only way you can get battery power in here is by hand-cranking, and you could use that kind of work to generate mana instead, so you don’t spend it for nothing. I put in the headphones and listened to the music—no lyrics, which was just as well, since I did not have time to start Mandarin right now. I hummed along with it under my breath, tapping my fingers on my leg to try and beat it into my head. Even wordless, it still had the feel of a spell to it, subtle but building. I don’t know how to describe a spell song as opposed to an ordinary song; the best I can do is that it’s like holding a cup in your hand instead of something solid all the way through. You get a sense that you can put power into it, and how much. This one was deep, a well going far down instead of a cup, something you could drop a coin or a pebble into and hear an echo coming back a long way. I took out the headphones and said to Liu, “Is it a mana amplifier?”

She had been watching me intently. She gave a start and then said, “You can’t have heard it,” which meant it was a family spell they weren’t trading yet; they were probably saving it to exchange for some other piece they’d need to build an enclave of their own.

“I haven’t,” I said. “It just has that feel.”

She nodded a little, her eyes on my face thoughtful.

We walked to history together afterwards and sat next to each other at the uncomfortable desks. The history classrooms are all scattered round on the cafeteria floor, reasonably high up. The worst part of history is that our assigned textbooks are incredibly boring, and there aren’t booths like in the language labs, so you can hear every single noise everyone else is making, whispers and coughs and farts and the endlessly squeaking desks and chairs. Up at the front there’s always this droning flickery video lecture going on that you have to strain to hear, ninety percent of which is completely useless and doesn’t matter even to our grades except for a few random bits that show up for enormous points on quizzes. All the sections are either before lunch, so you’re starving and it’s hard to focus, or after lunch so you’re ready to fall asleep. I always take before lunch, because it’s safer, but it’s a slog.

    Having someone next to me, actually with me, made class at least a hundred times more bearable. We traded off watching the lecture and taking notes in fifteen-minute chunks, and worked on our final papers in between. We’d already exchanged translations of our source materials, and I could see her using the ones I’d given her, so they’d been useful. Liu’s were good, too. I didn’t have to try to think well of her just because she’d maybe put up with me.

Liu takes history in English so she can use it for her language requirement and get more class choice flexibility, so we’ve been in most of the same sections. But we’d almost never sat next to each other before. A couple of times, if she had to get supplies and came a bit late, and it was a choice of me or someone poorly and coughing, or the boy who puts his hand in his pants all class long—he tried sitting next to me once and once only; I stared straight at him with all the murder in my heart and he stopped and took his hand out—she’d take me. But most of the time she’d walk over with whoever she’d sat with in the previous class: there are a dozen other Mandarin-speakers doing English history who were fine letting her sit next to them, even if they got a vague whiff of the malia.

There wasn’t a whiff to be had today. She hadn’t started using it again, I could tell. She still had color, and a shine to her eyes, but it was more than that: she just seemed softer, more pulled-in, a snail mostly tucked into a shell. I wondered if that was an aftereffect or if it was just her: probably her, since that’s what Mum’s meditation spell does. It didn’t really line up with the malia use. Her family might have pushed her to do it: strategically there was good sense to it, and once she’d come in with a basket full of sacrifices, probably all her weight allowance dedicated to that, she’d have been hard-pressed to do anything else.

    I didn’t ask her what her new plan was, if she had one. It wasn’t like she’d been openly using malia, and we weren’t allies yet, so that was the kind of question that could cause alarm, particularly coming from the supposed girlfriend of the local maleficer-slaying hero. She might be in a tough position for graduation now, for that matter, if she didn’t go back to it. She wouldn’t have been storing mana along the way if she’d been planning all along to get a big chunk of malia out of her remaining sacrifices.

Which didn’t make her a great choice for me to ally with, but I didn’t actually care. I wanted her, I wanted Aadhya, and not just because I didn’t have another option. I wanted this thing here between us, walking to lunch together after a morning working hard side by side, a small warm feeling that we were on the same team. I didn’t just want them to help me live. I wanted for them to live. “I’d like to,” I said to her abruptly, on the way to the cafeteria. “If you do.” I didn’t need to tell her what I was talking about. I knew she was thinking about it, too.

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said softly, “I’m pretty behind on mana.”