by Naomi Novik
Meanwhile I was in the more threadbare of my two shirts, which hadn’t been improved by my recent adventures, my dirty, patched combat pants with the thick belt holding them up and the two strips I’ve sewn onto the bottoms to make them longer, and the ragged six-year-old Velcro sandals I’d had to trade for midway through sophomore year when I definitively outgrew the pair I’d come in with. I’d gone for a too-big pair at the time, but by now they were on the last inches. My hair was mostly hanging out of the ragged plait I’d done before going down into the hall. Not to mention I hadn’t showered in the last four days, unless you counted getting drenched to the skin in the corridor purge. And I don’t care about dressing up, I wouldn’t even if I could, but the contrast made me feel even more like I’d recently been dragged backwards through an entire hedge maze.
But Chloe didn’t say a polite goodbye; she just stood there in my doorway turning the power-sharer over in her hands. I was about to excuse myself to go and fall into my bed for twelve hours or so, and she blurted, “El, I’m sorry.” I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t clear on what she was apologizing for. After a moment she said, “You just—you know, you get used to things. And you don’t think about whether they’re good. Or even okay.” She swallowed. “You don’t want to think about it. And nobody else seems to, either.
“And there’s nothing you can see to do about it.” She looked at me, her whole soft face and clear eyes unhappy. I shrugged a little. “Because there’s not meant to be anything you can do about it.”
She was quiet, and then she said, “I don’t know anything I can do about it. But I don’t have to make it worse. And I—” She was a collection of fidgets suddenly, looking away and licking her lips, uncomfortable. “I lied. In the library. We weren’t…we weren’t really worried that you were a maleficer. We wanted to be worried about that, because we didn’t like you. We’d all been talking about how you’re so awful and rude, how you were trying to use Orion to make everyone suck up to you. Except it’s the total opposite. That day Orion introduced us, I acted like all I needed to have you be my friend was to let you know that I was willing to let you talk to me. Like I’m so special. But I’m not. I’m just lucky. Orion’s special,” she added, with a huff that was trying to be a laugh and didn’t quite manage it. “And he wants to be your friend because you don’t care. You don’t care that he’s special, and you don’t care that I’m lucky. You aren’t going to be nice to me just because I’m from New York.”
“I’m not nice to anybody, really,” I said grudgingly, feeling squirmy inside being on the other end of her speech; it was too much of a real apology.
“You’re nice to people who are nice to you,” she said. “You’re nice to people who aren’t fake. And I don’t want to be fake. So—I’m sorry. And—I’d like to hang out sometime. If you wanted.”
Yes, because just what I wanted was to make a friend of a rich enclave girl so I could routinely rub my face around in all the luxuries I couldn’t have, all of which were in fact quite nice even if they didn’t measure up to the things I’d chosen in their place. And if Chloe Rasmussen turned out to be an actual decent person and a real friend, that would mean the things I didn’t have weren’t necessarily incompatible with the things I really cared about, and how exactly I was meant to put that together without being discontented all the time, I didn’t see, only I was reasonably certain that saying no and on your way now would in fact make me rude and stuck-up after all, just in a quixotic and contrary way.
“Yeah, all right,” I said, even more grudgingly, and the only good thing that came of it was that then, finally, after she smiled at me a little shyly, she said I looked tired, she’d go and let me rest, and then she did go, so I could shut the door and flop myself down on my bed and sleep like the dead I somehow miraculously wasn’t.
There was another knock on my door some time later, and I heard Liu say, “El, are you awake?” I’d been asleep, but the alert on my door had woken me, and I got up for her and Aadhya. They’d brought me some lunch down from the cafeteria. I gave Aadhya the forge apron and the supplies I’d found for the lute. They’d both got decent supply hauls, if not as amazing as the one I’d managed, and Liu had picked up some good notebooks and spare pens for me while she’d been picking some up for herself.
“Do you want to tell us about it?” Liu said, after I’d finished wolfing down the food and had sprawled back out on my bed.
“The machinery was broken in some different exciting way that took them more than an hour to fix,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “We lost one of the artificers on the way in, and Pires keeled over doing the shield, and we got back late and got caught on the shop floor during the cleaning and Orion kissed me,” which I hadn’t actually meant to say, but it came out, and Liu gave a squeak of excitement and covered her mouth.
“But how did you get clear of the cleaning fires?” Aadhya said, deadpan, and Liu shoved her knee and said, “Stop that! Was it nice? Is he a good kisser?” and then blushed bright red and burst into giggles and covered her face.
I would probably have been the same color if I could have managed it. “I don’t remember!”
“Oh, come on!” Aadhya said.
“I don’t! I—” I groaned and sat up and put my face against my knees and finished in a mutter, “I kneed him and shoved him off me so I could cast a firebreak,” and Aadhya laughed so hard she fell off the bed while Liu gawked at me, totally stricken on my behalf.
“ ‘I’m not dating Orion at all, we’re just friends,’ ” Aadhya wheezed from the floor without even getting up, mimicking what I’d told her and Liu the night before we’d shaken on our alliance: I hadn’t wanted them to come into it on false pretenses. “You fail at dating so hard.”
“Thanks, I feel loads better,” I said. “And I wasn’t wrong! I wasn’t dating him.”
“Yeah, that’s fair,” Aadhya said. “Only a boy would date somebody for two weeks and not mention it to them.”
We all kind of sniggered together for a bit, but after we settled back down, Liu said, tentatively, “Do you want to?” Her face was serious. “My mother told me it was a really bad idea.”
“My mom told me that all boys are carrying a secret pet mal around in their underwear, and if you get alone with them they let it out,” Aadhya said. We both shrieked with laughter, and she laughed, too. “I know, right? But she did it on purpose, she told me to pretend that was true, the whole time I was in here, because it would be true, if I let a boy get me pregnant.”
Liu gave a shiver all over and wrapped her arms around her knees. “My mother got me an IUD.”
“I tried one. I got massive cramps,” Aadhya said grimly.
I swallowed. I hadn’t bothered; it had seemed the least likely of my many worries. “My mum was almost three months gone with me at graduation.”
“Oh my God,” Aadhya said. “She must have freaked.”
“My dad died getting her out,” I said softly, and Liu reached out and squeezed my hand. My throat was tight. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone.
We sat quiet for a bit, and then Aadhya said, “I guess that means you’ll be the only person ever to graduate twice,” and we all laughed again. It didn’t feel like tempting fate, just then, to talk about graduating like something that was going to happen.
I lay back down to rest until dinnertime, half drowsing while we talked about plans for the first quarter, how much mana we thought we could build. As Liu scribbled down budget numbers, I couldn’t help but think wistfully of the power-sharer; I rubbed my fingers around my wrist where it had been. I almost couldn’t blame Chloe, anyone from New York. All that mana just flowing at your fingertips, so much you couldn’t see the end of it. I hadn’t been able to feel the work behind it. It had felt as free as air. I’d had it for only a few hours and I already missed it.
I kept almost falling asleep again a
nd then rousing back up. I wasn’t sure why; Aadhya and Liu would have understood, and even watched over me and woken me up for dinner. “We should think about what else we could use, and anyone else we might want to recruit,” Aadhya said. “I might be able to finish the lute early enough to make some more things first quarter. We should go through each other’s spell lists, too.”
Liu said softly, “There’s one more thing I have,” and then she got up and went out the door, and I realized abruptly with strong indignation that the reason I kept starting up was that I was waiting for another knock. I glared at the door. And a few minutes later there was another knock, but it was just Liu coming back with a small box in her hands. She sat down on the floor with crossed legs around it and opened the lid and brought out a little white mouse. It wriggled its nose and squirmed around over her fingers, but didn’t make a dash for it.
“You have a familiar!” Aadhya said. “Oh my gosh, it’s so cute.”
“He’s not a familiar,” Liu said. “Or he wasn’t. I’m just starting to…I have ten of them.” She didn’t meet our eyes: it was an all but open admission she’d been going for the very unofficial maleficer track. Nobody brings in ten mice and feeds them out of their supplies for any other reason. “I have an affinity for animals.”
Which was probably why her parents had made her do it, I realized: they’d known she’d be able to keep her sacrifices alive. And also why she’d hated it so much, even after three years, that she’d decided not to go back to it.
“And now you’re making him a familiar?” I asked. I don’t know exactly how that works. Mum has only ever had spontaneous familiars: once in a while an animal arrives in our yurt that needs looking after, she helps it, and then it hangs about and helps her for a while before it drifts away again to being an ordinary animal. She doesn’t try to keep them.
Liu nodded, stroking the mouse’s head with a fingertip. “I could train one for each of you, too. They’re nocturnal, so they can keep watch while you sleep, and they’re really good at checking food for anything bad. This one brought me a piece of a string of enchanted coral beads two days ago. His name is Xiao Xing.” She let us hold him, and I could feel the mana at work in his tiny body: he already had a kind of blue shimmer over the surface of his eyes and if you looked at his fur from a sharp angle, and he sniffed at us curiously, unafraid. After we each stroked him for a bit, Liu put him down and let him just roam around the room; he scampered around sniffing at things and poking his head into places. He got up on the desk and then turned wary right near the spot where the scuttler had been hiding; he ran away from it fast, back to Liu, until she checked it for him and showed him it was clear; then she patted him and praised him and gave him a little chunk of dried fruit out of a bag she had tied to her waist. He climbed into the front pocket on her shirt and sat there nibbling on it happily.
“Could you train the rest for other people?” I asked, watching him, utterly entranced. “You’d get a lot in trade.” I’d never had much time for animals before, once Mum trained me out of wanting to dissect them; I mainly ignored the dogs on the commune and was ignored in turn. I’ve never even liked cute cat videos. But I hadn’t quite realized how starved I was of seeing anything alive and moving that wasn’t trying to kill me. Familiars aren’t common here: it’s really expensive in terms of weight to bring them in, and painfully hard to take care of them inside. When your choices are to feed yourself or feed your cat, you feed yourself, or else the next mal gets you and the cat, too. But mice are cheap enough to feed that it wouldn’t be that difficult. I just hadn’t thought of it as something I’d want.
“Yes, after I train one for each of my cousins,” Liu said. “They’ll be here tonight.”
It took me by odd surprise again, being reminded of something that you already know but that doesn’t seem true yet: We were seniors now. It was our last year. Tonight was induction.
“Can we come pick one out now?” Aadhya said. She was as mesmerized as I was. “Do they need anything? Like a cage?”
Liu nodded, getting up. “You’ll need to make something enclosed so they can hide during the day while you’re out and they’re sleeping. But come and choose one now. You have to play with it for at least an hour every day for a month or so before you take it. I’ll show you how to give them mana: you have to put it into the treats you give.” I swung my feet off the bed and got on my shoes, and then Liu opened the door and we all jumped back, because Orion was standing right outside like a creeper. He jumped himself, so it wasn’t that he’d actually been planning to ambush me; I could only guess that he’d been standing there working himself up to knocking.
“I’ll come and take a look now, Liu,” Aadhya said loudly. “I can figure out how to put together a good enclosure.” She pushed Liu—who was blushing again and trying not to look at Orion—ahead of her and out the door past Orion, and then from behind his back she made a wild pointing motion towards him and exaggeratedly mouthed words that I had no trouble recognizing as SECRET PET MAL, so I had to fight not to go squawking with hysterical laughter into my pillow. They vanished down the corridor.
Orion looked as though he would have liked to run away, which I would have sympathized with, except at least he could, since he wasn’t already inside his own room. He’d showered, changed clothes, got his hair cut, and even shaved: I eyed his newly smooth jawline with suspicion. I really had absolutely no intention of going out with anyone at school. Forget pregnancy; the last thing I needed was the distraction. He was already generating more than enough distraction in my life even when I didn’t have to wonder whether kissing was going to happen anytime he was in my vicinity.
“Look, Lake,” I said, just as he blurted, “El, listen,” and I heaved a sigh of deep relief. “Right. You just wanted to tick it off before you died.”
“No!”
“You don’t actually want to date me, do you?”
“I—” He looked baffled and desperate and then said, “If you—I don’t—it’s up to you!”
I stared at him. “It is, but that’s my part. Your part’s not up to me. Or are you actually trying to further develop this bizarre loser form of dating where you never actually get round to asking the other person what they think of the idea? Because I’m not helping you with it.”
“For the love of—” He dissolved into a strangled noise of wild irritation and shoved both his hands into his hair: if it hadn’t just been mostly shingled close, it would’ve been standing up like an Einstein mop. Then he said flatly, without looking me in the face, “I’m trying not to get kicked out of your life,” and I got it, embarrassingly belated. I had Aadhya and Liu, now, and not just him. It was like all that mana at my hands, something so vital you could get used to it so fast you’d almost forget what life had been like without it—until it went away again. But he didn’t. He didn’t have anybody else; he’d never had anybody, the same way I’d never had anybody, but now he’d had me, and he wanted to lose that about as much as I wanted to trade him and Aadhya and Liu for an enclave seat in New York.
Of course, he was still being inexcusably stupid about it. “Lake, if I did want to date you, I wouldn’t want you to date me just because I commanded you to as the price of admission,” I said.
“Are you just trying to be dense?” He glared at me. But I glared right back, indignantly, and then in the tones of someone speaking to a dim pony, he said, “I’d want to. If you want, I want. And if you don’t want, then—I don’t want.”
“That’s the general idea of the thing,” I said, getting wary all over again: that sounded alarmingly like he did want. “Otherwise it’s just stalking. Are you asking? And I’m not kicking you out of my life no matter what!” I added, although I hadn’t any idea what I’d do if he did ask. “I kicked you out of my way downstairs because I had the odd notion that you’d prefer your life saved, which I’d like to point out for the record I’ve now done i
n turn.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m up to thirteen at this point, so you’ve got a way to go,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, but it didn’t really have the right effect: he looked too thoroughly relieved.
“We needn’t quibble about numbers,” I said, loftily.
“Oh, I think we do need,” he said, and then just when I was about to relax, thinking I’d steered us back into safer waters, he dropped his arms again and his face went open and a little pale, leaving scared pink standing out on the edges of his cheekbones. “El, I’d—I’d like to ask. But not—in here. After we—if we—”
“Don’t even try. I’m not getting engaged to go out with you,” I said rudely, shoving in before he could drag us back onto the shoals. “If you’re not asking now, that’s sufficient unto the day! If we make it out of here alive and you slog across the pond to come ask me, I’ll decide what I think of it at the time, and until then, you can keep your Disney movie fantasies,” and your secret pet mal, my brain unhelpfully inserted, “to yourself.”
He said, “Okay, okay, fine!” in a tone one-tenth irritation and nine-tenths relief, while I looked away, trying to stop my mouth contorting around the laugh I was having to fight desperately to keep in yet again: thanks ever so, Aadhya. Her mum was a genius, actually. “Can I ask you to meet for dinner in an hour?”
“No, you twit,” I said, as if I hadn’t just forgot about it myself. “It’s induction. We’ve got half an hour at best.” He immediately looked sheepish, although to be fair to us, we’d definitely had the weirdest graduation day ever. I grimaced and looked down at myself. “I ought to shower. And put on my slightly less filthy top.”