and sniping back and forth with Orion. I’d like to claim I couldn’t bring myself to go, but I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment: I wanted to stay until enough of the Dubai kids finally did go to bed that there was a different chair left open, so I wasn’t giving any of them anything.
But I’m more embarrassed to admit that it never crossed my mind to consider what the cozy situation looked like to someone who might be watching, for instance, from the New York corner across the reading room. As far as they could tell, I’d finally taken one of those many dangled enclave invites, Orion had in fact trotted after me, and we were now comfortably ensconced in the Dubai corner with some of those loser kids I’d recruited.
Dubai wouldn’t have been a crazy choice, at that. The enclave there is relatively new and highly international. It’s got a top-notch reputation for English and Hindi incantation, plus they recruit a lot of artificers and alchemists. Ibrahim also made perfect sense as a connecting point: his older half-brother was in the UAE doing work for the enclave already, and he’d probably get invited aboard, too, if Ibrahim helped them bag Orion. So it was an obvious conclusion for the New York kids to draw, and if I’d thought about it, their response would have been equally obvious. As I hadn’t thought, I just sat there like a prat down the pub with my mates, and didn’t pay the slightest attention when Magnus walked by to go into the alchemy aisle near us, even though he had absolutely no business going into the stacks at all when he could send any of six hangers-on to fetch him any book he wanted.
I doubt he’d have done it on his own initiative alone. They had surely been talking options amongst themselves: How do you solve a problem like Galadriel? And I bet Todd came into it, too. It was one thing for the New York kids to desert him, and another for a loser girl like me to rip into him in the cafeteria in front of everyone. And then to take Orion off to Dubai the very same day, after he’d already power-shared with me and—as Chloe clearly thought—got me an incredibly powerful spellbook.
I do have to give Magnus credit, the crawler was a really good one. It would absolutely have got me, too; I can’t even pretend. It was made of paper, a little crumpled twist covered with what looked at a glance like math equations instead of an animating inscription. The library was full of scrap paper on a good day, much less right after a massive attack that had destroyed dozens of books and thrown kids’ papers every which way, and lots of the scraps move on their own anyway. I actually noticed it moving vaguely in my direction and didn’t think about it again. I didn’t even have my usual baseline shield up, because I was sitting in the reading room in the library with a good line of sight and lots of other eyes watching, and I needed to save every drop of mana that I could. If I’d been sitting in an ordinary chair, or if I’d been working hard, with my feet planted on the ground, the crawler would have been able to get to the bare skin of my ankle, and one second afterwards it would have sent a heap of magic fibers corkscrewing into my flesh, and there wouldn’t have been anything I could do to stop it sucking the life straight out of me.
But because I was demonstratively curled up in my nice comfy chair with my feet tucked up underneath me, it had to come up the chair leg and go over the arm. Orion happened to be looking at me in time to grab me and yank me out sprawling over the floor in front of the whole Dubai crowd, just before he disintegrated the crawler, incidentally along with three-quarters of my lovely repaired chair.
I figured out what had happened almost instantly, especially since Magnus was just sitting back down in the New York corner. Everyone was looking over at me and Orion, the way you do when something explodes into flames unexpectedly, but he and several other New York kids were just a bit slow looking