A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(75)
“No,” I said, with a deep, gusty sigh. “No malia. At all. I can’t…do it just a little.” I looked over at her, meaningfully.
Her eyes widened a moment, and then she looked down and put her arms around herself, rubbing her upper arms. “No one can,” she said, low. “Not really.”
Chloe actually met us coming down. She had run up to the alchemy floor and got Magnus and two other New York kids out of their lab section and they’d recruited basically the entire class to come and help. Either that or they’d bet on having a big crowd around them for trying to get to the gates and escape. Her total astonishment when she saw us and blurted, “Oh my God, you’re alive!” would have been insulting if she hadn’t sounded half glad about it.
The crowd, all of whom desperately wanted to know what had happened, was so big that none of them found out anything for a while, as they couldn’t hear our explanations over the babble of other voices asking the very same questions. I finally had to cup my hands over my mouth and shout, “The stairwell is sealed. Nothing is coming up!” which answered the most urgent one for most people and calmed things down.
“What happened with the argonet?” Chloe said to me, as we all started moving back upstairs en masse: nobody was going back to their lessons at this point, and it was almost dinnertime by now. She swallowed and added, in a rush, “I’m sorry that—I figured I should get help—” without actually meeting my eyes.
“Liu put a shield up, and Aadhya and I got the wall fixed in time,” I said, and didn’t tell Chloe it was okay, which I’m sure she wanted me to. I’d been right about her not wanting the deal. She’d run away exactly the way that every enclave kid ran away when bad things showed up, letting their entourages take the hit. That was why they had the entourages, and the kids in those entourages were doing it because they were desperate for a way out at graduation, and they had nothing else to offer that would get an enclaver to recruit them. So they made shields out of their bodies, and if they lasted all the way to graduation, at least the most dedicated of them would be offered filler spots in enclave kids’ alliances. And that wasn’t okay, and she could work out for herself it wasn’t okay.
She didn’t ask me for the comforting lie again. She just said, “I’m really glad you’re all right,” quietly, and then fell back in with Magnus.
THE BELL FOR DINNER hadn’t rung yet; the line wasn’t open. But we were such a big crowd that we didn’t even need to worry the way you normally would if you tried to go to the cafeteria alone while classes were still in session. We got six tables together and did perimeters and checks on all of them, and sat down to wait for the food to be served, sharing gossip instead.
“What happened to our senior friends?” I asked Orion.
“Hiding out somewhere in the library, I guess,” Orion said. “I managed to get out of the yanker spell on the landing on this level, but they kept going up the stairs.”
“They’ll be back downstairs trying to bash through your work ten minutes after dinner,” Magnus said. He and Chloe had taken seats at our table. He was talking to Orion only, though; English might inconveniently leave the pronoun ambiguous, but in this case the your in your work was very clearly intended to be singular. “We should call a tribunal on them.”
However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another. People do lose it all the time, but if you lose it for any length of time, something hungry finds it and you, too. If anyone tries to organize anything especially alarming, like a gang of maleficers, and other kids find out about it but don’t have the firepower to stop it on their own, they can call a tribunal, which is just a pretentious word for standing on a table in the cafeteria at mealtime and yelling out that Tom, Dick, or Kylo has gone over to the dark side and asking everyone to help take them down.
But that’s not justice. There’s no hand of the law that comes down to ceremonially spank you if you’ve been bad. Todd was still around, going to classes, eating; presumably sleeping, although hopefully not very well. If someone’s giving you a hard time, that’s your problem; if you’re giving someone a hard time, that’s their problem. And everyone else will ignore any situation that’s remotely ignorable, because they’ve all got problems of their own. It’s only worth calling a tribunal if you can reasonably expect that everyone else in the school is going to instantly agree that there’s a very clear, very imminent threat to their lives from the person you’re accusing.
Which wasn’t the case in this situation. “The seniors will be on their side,” Aadhya said, since Magnus apparently needed it said.
He didn’t like it at all. I imagine he had always blithely operated on the assumption that he could call a tribunal if ever he saw an imminent threat to his life, and naturally everyone would agree: like Chloe and her maintenance requests. “The seniors can’t take the whole rest of the school,” he said defensively. “And they can’t afford a fight the week before graduation anyway.”
“We can’t either,” I said. “What’s it going to get us? Those five kids are graduating in a week. Do you want to punish them for wanting to improve their odds at someone else’s expense? I could think of some people in our year who’d do the same.” He gawked at me, shocked that I’d even hint at a parallel.