A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,106
say the word out loud. If she didn’t want it to be true, it could just be a joke. But actually I meant it with great sincerity on both fronts. I’ve never seen the films, either. Mum read me the books out loud from beginning to end once a year from when I was born, but she was disappointed by the violence of the movies and wouldn’t let me see them. Everyone else in the commune has, though. I’ve heard a lot of clever remarks on the contrast.
But Liu gave me a brief, shy smile. “I have the idea,” she said. “But…no malia.” It wasn’t really a question.
“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