A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,67
Why would he poach?”
“It’s not like we’ll be with him for long. The senior bell will go five minutes after we sit down,” Aadhya offered, more practically, and Orion clenched his hands and then shot off to the food line at top speed.
I’d underestimated the power of the gossip chain: we got most of the gory details before we even got out with our trays. Todd had taken out a guy named Mika: one of the last stragglers left, the solitary kids who hadn’t made it into any graduation alliance. If stragglers aren’t maleficers, they pretty much don’t make it out alive, and Mika wasn’t a maleficer; he was just an awkward loser who couldn’t manage decent social skills and wasn’t talented enough for even other losers to overlook the lack. If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like a crime deserving of a death sentence, I would agree with you, since I’ll be in the same boat next year if I don’t set myself up in time. But that’s what it was, more or less. Which meant, of course, he’d been the perfect target.
Orion got out first, and he made a beeline for Todd at his table, slammed his tray down across from him, and didn’t sit. “Why?” he said flatly. “You’ve got a team, a belt shield, a power-sharer, plenty of mana—you made a spirit glaive last quarter! But it wasn’t enough? You had to have a better room?”
I put my own tray down next to Orion’s and sat and started eating while I had the chance. Aadhya sat down next to me and did the same thing. Chloe hadn’t come with us after all. After hearing the word in the line, she’d peeled off to a different New York table; all the other New York kids were sitting as far away from Todd as they could and still be in the cafeteria. She’d made the right call; I could already tell Orion wasn’t going to get an answer he was going to like much, if he was going to get one at all. Todd hadn’t even reacted to the question. He was hunched over his tray eating systematically, but his hands were shaking, and he was forcing the food down. He wasn’t a maleficer, either; he wasn’t even enough of a sociopath not to mind killing someone. I didn’t know why he had, but he hadn’t done it for malia. He’d done it in desperation.
“Where was his old room?” I asked.
“Next to the stairs,” Orion said, still staring down at Todd like he could bore a hole through his skull and pull out answers. That is a crap room. A stairwell is for moving round the school, and the mals can use it as much as we do, so next to the stairs on the senior dorm level is the equivalent of being the first item on the food line.
But it’s hardly an insurmountable threat. None of us will take the first item on the food line if there’s a lid covering it, not as long as there’s an easier option in the next tray along. Which there would be, because Todd’s an enclaver, with more than enough mana to put up a good shield every single night, and the other enclave kids would have skipped recruiting a few of the neighboring kids, in solidarity. It didn’t seem worth screwing up his alliance and maybe even his whole life—enclaves don’t openly harbor murderers and maleficers, and literally everyone in the school knew what he’d done.
“Answer me,” Orion said, and reached for Todd’s tray, maybe because he planned to pull it away or shove it in his face, but Todd grabbed it himself first and heaved it up, taking Orion’s tray with it, throwing the whole mess all over him before reaching across the table to give him a good shove. We don’t do a lot of physical fighting in here, everyone thinks of that as a mundane thing, but you don’t need much practice when you’re a six-foot guy who hasn’t been shy about letting other people give you extras for the last four years and the kid on the other side is a shrimp of a junior. Orion staggered back, dripping milk and scrambled eggs, and nearly went over into the next table.
“Fuck you, Orion,” Todd snarled, his voice cracking into a shrill frantic note, undermining his thug line. “You want to get in my face? Big hero on campus, clearing out the mals for