A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,133

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I WAS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about Orion needing no encouragement: the shirt he brought me had the Manhattan skyline on it in silver glitter, a single spot marked out roughly halfway along the island with a rising swirl of colored glitter, presumably the enclave location: not at all meaningful or claim-staking in any way. I’d have thwapped him across the head with it, except it was clean, and in fact smelled faintly of washing powder: he’d probably had it wrapped up somewhere in a drawer waiting for his senior year. At least it gave me the excuse to abandon him for the girls’ bathroom instantly so I could put it on, a clean top over clean showered skin: bliss.

He had waited for me outside, and we collected Aadhya and Liu from her room. I peeked into the big tank she had the mice in. Aadhya’s was already marked with a bright-pink dot that she’d put on with a highlighter. “You can pick yours tonight,” Liu said.

The stairs felt odd when we started up because they weren’t moving anymore: like getting off a ship after you’ve been on the water for a long time. The gears had all settled back into place, and there was only the faint ticking of the minor machinery, more or less just keeping time until the end of next year. Everyone was going upstairs in a big tidal flow together, so it didn’t even take long to climb to the cafeteria and join the waiting crowd.

The food line hadn’t opened yet, and about half the tables were folded up against the walls to leave a big open space cleared in the middle, with wide aisles leading to it from each of the stair landings. Up above was the brand-new res hall, same as the old res hall, more or less literally, just waiting for the brand-new shivering freshmen to be dropped inside.

We’d cut it a little fine. Induction started moments after we got there: we could feel the faint ear-popping sensation of so many bodies displacing volumes of air, one after another, and it was followed almost immediately by the loud clanging and scraping of doors being slid open, up on the freshman dorm level. Unless you’re one of the monstrously unlucky few like Luisa, you’ve been told over and over what to do the second you arrive, no matter how vomitous or shell-shocked you are: you get out of your room and run straight down to the cafeteria. The freshmen came streaming in through all four doors, a few of them holding paper bags that they were throwing up into even as they kept staggering along. Induction is about as much fun as a yanker, and it takes longer.

In ten minutes or so, they were all shaking and huddled in the middle of the cafeteria. They looked so tiny. I hadn’t been one of the tallest kids when we came in, but I couldn’t remember ever being that short myself. We had all gathered around them, keeping an eye on the ceilings and the drains, pouring them glasses of water carefully. Even the worst people will come out to protect the new inductees. Selfishly, if for no other reason; as soon as the freshmen calmed down and drank some water, they started calling out our names: they had letters from the other side, especially if they were enclave kids.

I knew there wouldn’t be one for me. We weren’t close to any other families with wizard kids: the couple of times Mum tried to arrange for us to play together when I was little didn’t go amazingly well. And she wouldn’t have been able to pay someone to give up some of their allotment to bring me a letter. The only thing she had to barter that would be worth as much as a gram’s allowance to another wizard would’ve been her healing, and she doesn’t charge for healing. She told me she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get me anything, and I’d told her it was all right.

But even knowing, I would have been there anyway, and this time I even got to enjoy it vicariously. Aadhya was given a letter by a black girl with her hair in a million braids—each one with a tiny enchanted protection bead at the end, really clever idea. Liu brought over her cousins to introduce them to me, two carbon-copy boys with bowl cuts who bowed really politely like I was a grown-up, and I suppose