A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,89

her off because he felt sorry for her,” Chloe said. “He still avoided her whenever he could. I’ve known him since we were born, and the only reason he knows my name is that his mom drilled him with flash cards in second grade. Even when we were kids, all he ever wanted to do is hunt mals.”

“Yes, how could Candy Land possibly stack up against mal-hunting?” I said, incredulously.

“You think that’s a joke? When we were in preschool, a suckerworm got into our classroom. The teacher found out because Orion was in the corner laughing, and she asked him what was so funny and he held it up in both hands to show us. It was thrashing around with its mouth going, trying to bite. We all screamed and he jumped and pulled it into two pieces by accident. All of us got sprayed with its guts.” My face screwed up involuntarily: ew. She grimaced in memory. “He was doing gate shifts by the time he was ten. I don’t mean he’d be assigned, it was his idea of fun. Magistra Rhys, he’s her only kid, all our lives she was constantly dragging him to our places for playdates, to get him to make friends, and the whole time he was over, he’d just try to find ways to sneak out and go down to the gates so he could jump any mals that came in. He’s not—normal.”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. It was that, or slap her. “Would you say he’s got negativity of spirit?” I jeered.

“I’m not being mean!” she said tightly. “You think we didn’t want to like him? I’m alive because of him. The summer when I was nine, we had a lyefly infestation in the city. Not a big deal, right?” she added, in a self-deprecating sort of way, as if she were almost ashamed to complain of anything so trivial. “The older kids had to stay inside while the council figured out what to do, but the lyeflies weren’t bothering any of us under eleven. I was at the playground across the street from the enclave when I got a mana spurt.”

I’ve read about mana spurts in the cheery “As Your Mana Grows” pamphlet that Mum pushed on me, but I’ve never experienced one myself. The capacity to hold mana does expand in sudden jumps for most of us, but you don’t get overwhelmed with a surge of mana when you haven’t got enough of it to fill the capacity you already have. Chloe had obviously been in a different situation.

“I was playing—” she shaped an enclosed space with her hands, “—under the slide, with a couple of friends. No mundanes. And the lyeflies, the whole swarm, they all just came for me. They started gnawing through the shield my mom made me wear. There were so many—” She stopped and swallowed. “My friends screamed and ran out. I couldn’t do anything. It felt like mana was coming out my nose, my mouth, my ears. I didn’t remember a single spell. I still have nightmares about it sometimes,” Chloe added, and I believed her. She’d wrapped her arms around herself without even thinking, her shoulders hunched in. “Orion was walking around the playground edge, just kicking pebbles, not playing with any of us. He ran right in and burned them all off me. I thought he was the most amazing person in the entire world.”

I was trying ferociously hard to hang on to being angry, but it was hard going. I didn’t want to give her any sympathy. The one time a swarm of lyeflies came through the commune, when I was small, Mum had to sit up all day and night holding me tight in her lap, singing a shield over us without stopping until they gave up and flew onward, and if she’d lost her voice, we’d both have died. Chloe had an enclave to hide in, and a shield with enclave power behind it, and surely if Orion hadn’t come to her rescue, one of the grown-up childminders would have dashed right over to help. It was the one thing that had happened to her, the one bad thing, not the first of a thousand bad things. But—I couldn’t help but be with her in it: nine years old with mana erupting through you, being swarmed by a cloud of lyeflies, feeling them gnawing their way to your flesh—I was hunching up myself, hearing a scratcher clawing