knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, because that would cost her. If Orion was a person, he didn’t owe it to her to keep wearing that convenient little buzzer on his wrist, just in case she or any of her actual friends needed help, for nothing in return. If he was a person, he had as much right as she did to be scared and selfish, and she was supposed to pay back everything he gave her. She wasn’t interested in that deal, was she? She wasn’t going to come running if he needed help. She’d be running the other way.
Her expression faded into uncertainty as I went on standing there: probably hearing the faint rumble of storm clouds in the distance. “Right,” I said, through a sour throat. “Of course I’ve got to be a maleficer. Surely there can’t be any other reason he’d prefer my company to you absolute doorknobs.” Chloe flinched back. “Keep the enclave seat for someone who wants it. But ta very much for saving me the pleasure of having your friends poke through my head. In return, I’ll let you in on my secret handling technique. I treat Orion like he’s an ordinary human being. You might all try it yourselves and see how you get on, before you go to any more trouble on my account.”
I DIDN’T TRy to find somewhere else to work. I knew I wasn’t going to get a thing done. I just shouldered past Chloe and went for the stairs, and I ran down the whole way to our res hall, although I knew better. Over the weekend, everything had started to warm up for graduation, oil pumping to lubricate the big gears in the core; they were coming loose, helped along by a bit of preliminary rocking. The stairs were shifting along with them, like glacially slow escalators that might reverse direction at any time. And I paid for being careless: a couple of stairs up from the landing, there was the start of a putrid opalescent slick, a remnant of something that had been killed just recently, and I stepped onto it too fast, skidded, and had to throw myself onto the landing in a hard tumble to keep from going headfirst onwards down the stairs.
I was limping down the corridor to my room when I realized I was going past Aadhya’s door. I paused, and after a moment, I slowly knocked. “It’s El,” I said, and she cracked the door, made sure it was me, then saw the blood.
“What happened?” she said. “You want some gauze?”
My throat was tight. I was almost glad for falling down the stairs. Who cared about changing Chloe’s mind? “No, it’s not worth it, it’s just a scrape,” I said. “I was just stupid, I tripped coming off the stairs. Come with me to the girls’?”
“Yeah, sure,” Aadhya said, and she walked with me and kept watch while I rinsed off my bloody elbow and my bloodier knee. My gut was aching all over again. I didn’t care.
Liu got back shortly after we had finished, and the three of us climbed the stairs—more cautiously—up to the cafeteria. The main food line and the tables were locked away behind the movable wall, and we could smell the smoke of the cleansing fires going back there—self-clean ovens have nothing on mortal flame—but there were a few dozen kids around waiting their turn at the snack bar. That’s a glorified term for what it is, a bank of vending machines that take tokens. Each of us gets three a week. I actually had almost twenty saved up: the risk of coming without other people isn’t worth the boost of calories, unless you’ve had a few days in a row of really bad luck at meals and are starting to feel light-headed or sluggish.
You don’t get to choose what comes out, of course. The items are rarely contaminated, as they’re all things in packets, but they’re usually aged, and sometimes inedibly ancient. Once, I got a military ration from World War I. I’d come up that time because I was feeling light-headed, so I was hungry enough to open it, but even then I couldn’t bring myself to risk anything but the biscuit, and by biscuit I mean the kind of hardtack they sent on yearlong sea voyages. Today I got a bag of off-brand crisps, a packet of mostly crumbled peanut butter crackers, and the prize, a Mars bar