A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,86

But I nodded, and we just looked at each other for a moment, walking down the corridor, and Liu smiled at me, just a little tentative wobble at the corners of her mouth, and I was smiling back at her. It felt strange on my face.

“Want to work on the history paper after lunch?” I asked. “I have a carrel in the library, in the languages section.”

“Sure,” she said. “But isn’t Orion going with you?” And what she didn’t mean by that was whether Orion was going to be there for her to hang out with; she just meant, was there enough room for all three of us.

“It’s a monster of a desk,” I said. “It’ll be fine, we’ll just grab a folding chair on the way,” but actually after lunch Orion said to me hurriedly, “I’m going downstairs, I’ve still got some stuff to do.”

“Are you saying that because you’ve got some stuff to do, or because you’d rather lurk below than endure even modest amounts of human interaction?” I asked. “Liu’s not going to be a twat around you.” I firmly didn’t offer to ditch her for his sake: we weren’t actually dating.

“No, she’s fine,” Orion said. “I like her, she’s fine. No, I’ve got stuff to do.”

He didn’t sound very convincing, but I wasn’t going to point that out. He didn’t owe me excuses. I shrugged. “Try not to dissolve yourself in acid or anything.”

Liu and I had a great work session: we blazed through almost half our history papers. “I’ve got a group project down in the lab after dinner tonight, but I’d do work period again tomorrow,” she told me as we left. I nodded, aglow with the thought that maybe I’d ask Aadhya or even Nkoyo to come up with me after dinner instead. I had people, in the plural, that I could ask to join me in the library, and even if they said no, they weren’t really saying no, they were only saying not this time. It almost made me happier when Aadhya did cry off when I asked her at lunch, because she said she wanted to do some artifice work in her own room, and I could believe her; it wasn’t just an excuse.

“But stop in before bedtime,” she said. “We could go for a snack bar run, if you’ve got credit,” and Liu and I nodded: we’d all had a chance to think it over, it was time to talk about it, to decide if we were going ahead.

I hugged the feeling to me all through afternoon classes, and I didn’t even let it be spoiled when I saw Magnus and Chloe talking to Orion outside the cafeteria at dinner, asking him to come to the library with the New York crew afterwards. “Bring El,” she was even saying, asking him to serve me up for the next attempt on a silver platter.

“I can’t, I’m—going to the lab,” Orion said.

“The lab, huh?” Magnus said. “Not a room?”

Orion did sound like he was making up an excuse, but Magnus shot a look over at me that made clear what he thought was getting covered up. Orion just said, obliviously, “Huh? No, not a room,” about as convincing as before.

“Yeah, okay,” Magnus said. “Galadriel going to be in the lab with you?”

“Afraid not,” I said, with a snap: if he was going to be asking about me, I felt every right to intrude on the conversation. “I’m working on a paper.”

“You want to join us in the library, El?” Chloe actually said to me outright. “We’ve got room at our table.” A sure sign of the magnitude of their desperation: enclave kids didn’t ask you to join them. At most they told you that you were welcome, with enormous condescension. Magnus himself looked highly annoyed by the necessity.

“No,” I said. Then I went on into the cafeteria without saying bye to them, and Orion actually left them to catch up to me in the line.

“You can’t tell me that Chloe was trying to get you to suck up, just then,” he said.

“No, it was a pure and generous offer straight from her heart,” I said. “Meant to go straight to mine, too. That crawler last night didn’t go after me randomly.”

“Oh for—right, they’re being nice, so now they’re trying to murder you, for no reason,” Orion said. He had the gall to sound exasperated. “Are you kidding me? You want me to come after all and protect you