A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,9
into my room, and then he blasted open my door, and then he incandensed it before I could say boo and left a stinking mess on my floor,” I snapped, but you can guess how well that went. Everyone wants to believe he’s a magnificent hero who’s going to save them all. Ugh.
AFTER DINNER, I had to try and get someone to come with me to the workshop, so I could get some materials to patch up my door. It’s an extremely bad idea to leave your door unlocked at night, much less with a gaping hole in it. I tried to make it casual, “Does anyone need anything from the shop?” But no one was buying. After hearing my story, they could all guess that I needed to go down, and we’re all alive to the main chance in here. You don’t make it out unless you use every advantage you can get, and nobody likes me enough to do me favors without payment in advance.
“I could come,” Jack said, leaning forward and smiling at me with all his shiny white teeth.
I wouldn’t need anything to crawl out of a dark corner if he went with me. I looked him straight in the eye and said hard, “Oh really?”
He paused and had a moment of being wary, and then he shrugged. “Wait, sorry, just remembered I’ve got to finish my new divining rod,” he said cheerfully, but his eyes had narrowed. I hadn’t really wanted him to know that I knew about him. I’d have to make him pay me for my silence now, or else he’d think he had to come after me to shut me up, and he might bet on that anyway. Yet another thing Orion had now cocked up for me.
“What’s it worth to you?” Aadhya said. She’s the sharp and pragmatic sort; she’s one of the few people in here willing to make deals with me. One of the few people in here willing to talk to me at all, really. But she was also brutally hard-nosed about this sort of thing. I normally appreciated that she didn’t beat about the bush, but knowing I was hard up, she wasn’t going to put herself on the line for anything less than twice the going value of a trip down, and she also would certainly make sure I took all the significant risk. I scowled.
“I’ll go with you,” Orion said from the table next to ours, where the New York kids were sitting. He’d kept his head down all dinner even while everyone at our table talked loudly about how massively wonderful he was. I’d seen him do the same after his other notable rescues, and had never quite decided if he was making a pretense of modesty, was actually modest to the point of pathology, or was just so horribly awkward he had nothing to say to people complimenting him. He didn’t even lift his head now, just spoke out from under his shaggy overhang of hair, staring down at his cleared plate.
So that was nice. Obviously I wasn’t going to turn down free company to the shop, but it was going to look like more of the same, Orion protecting me. “Let’s go, then,” I said tightly, and got up at once. Here at school, you’re always better off going as soon as you’ve got a plan, if your plan is to do something unusual.
The Scholomance isn’t precisely a real place. There are perfectly real walls and floors and ceilings and pipes, all of which were made in the real world out of real iron and steel and copper and glass and so forth, and assembled according to elaborate blueprints that are on display all over the school, but if you tried to duplicate the building in the middle of London, I’m reasonably sure it wouldn’t even go up for long enough to fall over. It only works because it was built into the void. I’d explain what the void is, but I haven’t any idea. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to live in the days when our cave-dwelling ancestors stared up at this black thing full of twinkly bits of light with no idea whatsoever what was up there and what it all meant, well, I imagine that it was similar to sitting in a Scholomance dorm room staring out at the pitch-black surroundings. I’m happy to be able to report that it’s not pleasant or comfortable at