A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,66

any seniors sitting at the tables around him: they were full of hunched-over desperate loser freshmen.

I didn’t recognize him, but Orion and Chloe had both frozen, staring. “Isn’t he…New York?” Aadhya said, low, and Chloe said blankly, “That’s Todd. Todd Quayle.” That made it even more incomprehensible. Shunning an enclave kid? And Todd hadn’t gone obvious whole-hog maleficer or anything; he looked totally normal.

A freshman was just making a quick dash back from the busing station, having managed to get his tray on the conveyor without problems. Orion reached out and caught him. “What did he do?” he asked, jerking his head over.

“Poached,” the kid said, without really lifting his head; he darted a wary look at Orion and Chloe from under his untrimmed bangs and hurried on; Orion had dropped his arm and was looking sick. Chloe was shaking her head in denial. “No way,” she said. “No fucking way.” But it was almost the only thing big enough to explain it.

Our rooms are handed out on the day we get dropped into them, and you don’t get to change, even if someone dies. The empty rooms do get cleared out at the end of the year when the res halls rotate down, but the Scholomance decides how to reshuffle the walls to hand out the extra space. The only way you can deliberately change to another room is if you take it, and not by killing someone. You have to go into their room and push them into the void.

Nobody knows what that really means. The void isn’t a vacuum or instant death or anything like that. Occasionally someone will go crazy and try to walk out into the void on their own—you can, actually, walk into it. It doesn’t seem to matter that you can also drop things over the edge. Like that slime you can squish between your fingers or roll into an apparently solid ball: it depends how you’re pushing on it, only with your will instead of your hands.

However, those people never make it very far. They panic and run back, and none of them has ever been able to describe what it’s like in there. If someone’s really determined and takes a running start, occasionally their momentum carries them a little further in before they can turn around, and when they do come out, those people can’t talk anymore at all, at least not in any comprehensible way. They make noises like they’re talking, but it’s not a language anyone else knows or can understand. They mostly end up dead some other way, but a couple of them have made it out of the school alive. They’ve still got magic. But no one else can understand their spells, and if they’re artificers or alchemists, the things they make don’t work for anyone else. Like they’ve been shifted sideways somehow.

That’s as deep as anyone can get into the void on their own. But you can push someone else all the way in—with magic, so you get them far enough in to vanish completely, even though they don’t want to go. And if you do that, if you go into someone’s room after curfew and you push them all the way into the dark like a spellbook you don’t want anymore, even while they’re screaming and begging and trying to get back out, then after they’re gone, you can spend the night in their room, and you won’t get swarmed, because there’s only one person in the room, and it’s your room after that.

Of course, it doesn’t make you very popular with, for instance, anyone else who has a room. And it’s not like you can cover it up, either. As soon as people see you coming out of your new room the next morning, they know what you’ve done. Orion clearly wanted to go right at Todd, then and there; I had to shove him towards the food line instead. “We already missed lunch yesterday. If you want to find out more, we can go sit with him after we’ve got breakfast; it’s not like there isn’t room.”

“I’m not sitting with a poacher,” Orion said.

“Then endure the burning curiosity,” I said. “Anyone in the school will be able to tell you all the gory details by lunchtime.”

“It’s a mistake,” Chloe said again, her voice high and fraying. “There’s no way Todd poached. He doesn’t need to poach! He’s going with Annabel and River and Jessamy, and they’ve got the valedictorian on board.