A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,78

where I couldn’t see her, or at least where I couldn’t have seen if I hadn’t gone after her to scream at her even more. When I saw her sobbing I went back to the yurt and threw myself on the bed crying and determined to let the next mal that came along take me, as I was such a horrible daughter. But I didn’t do it. I wanted to live.

I still want to live. I want Mum to live. And I’m not going to live if I try to go it alone. So I should show off and make clear to all the enclavers that I’m available to be won: a grand prize up for grabs to the highest bidder, a nuclear weapon any enclave could use to take out mals—to take out another enclave—to make themselves more powerful. To make themselves safe.

That’s all Todd wanted. That’s all Magnus wanted. They wanted to be safe. It’s not that much to ask, it feels like. But we don’t have it to begin with, and to get it and keep it, they’d push another kid into the dark. One enclave would push another into the dark for that, too. And they didn’t stop at safety, either. They wanted comfort, and then they wanted luxury, and then they wanted excess, and every step of the way they still wanted to be safe, even as they made themselves more and more of a tempting target, and the only way they could stay safe was to have enough power to keep everyone off that wanted what they had.

When the enclaves first built the Scholomance, the induction spell didn’t pull in kids from outside the enclaves. The enclavers made it sound like a grand act of generosity when they changed it to bring us all in, but of course it was never that. We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here. And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.

But why should they do anything else? They don’t have any reason to care about us. We’re not their children. We’re the other gazelles, all of us trying to outrun the same pack of lions. And if we happen to be faster than their children, more powerful, their children will get eaten. If not while we’re in here, when we get out, and we decide that we want some of the luxury they have tucked into those enclaves for ourselves. If we’re too strong, we might even threaten their own lives. So they shouldn’t care about us. Not until we sign on the dotted line. That’s only sensible. You can’t blame people for wanting their own kids to live. I understand it, every last bit of it.

And I wanted to want in. I want to have a daughter one day, a daughter who will live, who won’t ever have to scream alone in the night when monsters come for her. I don’t want to be alone in the night myself. I want to be safe, and I really wouldn’t mind a little bit of comfort, and even a taste of luxury now and then. It’s all I’ve been hungry for my whole life. I wanted to pretend that all of that was fair and okay, like Orion bleating how we’ve got the same chances.

But I can’t pretend that, because I didn’t grow up in that lie, so I don’t actually want in. I don’t want that safety and comfort and luxury at the cost of other kids dying in here. And sure, it’s not like that, it’s not some simple equation like me in an enclave means kids are dying in here; the kids will go on dying in here anyway, whether I’m in an enclave or not. But just because it’s a forty-sixth-order derivative equation or something doesn’t mean that I can’t work out which side of that equation is the guilty one.

And I’ve probably known it all along, maybe even before I got here, because otherwise Aadhya’s right, I should have just blown the bloody doors off in my freshman year and shown everyone back then.