A Deadly Education

Aadhya and El walk to breakfast together, meeting up with Orion and Nkoyo; they’re joined by Chloe, who rushes out of the bathroom and asks them to wait for her. At breakfast, other students come to see the book as the word spreads. El notices one senior sitting alone—a New York kid named Todd. Someone tells them Todd “poached,” which means he went into another student’s room and stole the dorm by pushing the student into the void. No one knows what being in the void means; sometimes people try to go into it, but they never make it far and they can’t describe it once they’re out. Those who make their way too far into the void never speak comprehensively again and their magic seems altered, so the things they make don’t work for anyone else. Poaching means slowly shoving someone into the void, either physically or with magic, until they completely disappear. This is one of the only things bad enough that would cause an enclave senior to be shunned and isolated.

They get more detailed information in the food line, and then they go sit with Todd. Orion demands to know why Todd did it. Todd gets angry and shoves Orion; he says Orion hasn’t saved anyone, not really, because the mals have been starving for three years thanks to Orion’s rescues. The starving mals are all waiting in the graduation hall, and some of them are even working on breaking through the walls. Todd says he’s heard them breaking through the wall next to his old room all week. He also says he saw a maw-mouth pass his room yesterday, which shocks the other students. Orion is stunned. El stands and defends Orion, saying that none of this gives Todd the right to kill another student, or more right to move than any of the rest of them. She asks Todd how long it took for Mika, the dorm’s previous resident, to stop screaming. The room is silent.

El, Orion, and Aadhya move to another table, where they’re welcomed by Ibrahim and some of his friends. No one knows what to say, so Aadhya asks if any of them are doing Sanskrit and starts talking about El’s new book. Ibrahim recognizes its Baghdad enclave origins immediately and is excited. Orion thanks El for her defense, even if he knows she “didn’t mean it” (162). El says she did. They split up, with El going to languages; she is unsurprised to find an Arabic worksheet waiting for her there.

At lunch, the social situation seems tenuous again. El imagines that Todd’s argument about Orion making the mals desperate has swayed a number of the enclave kids to his side. Aadhya asks El to save her and some friends seats, and Nkoyo joins them. Liu also joins the table, looking healthier than she has thanks to her deciding to stop using malia. Todd’s shunning is already diminishing, and El suspects he’ll have a new alliance before graduation, which is in one week. He is a powerfully connected New York enclave kid, which will make independent students overlook a lot.

After lunch, Orion says he’ll meet El later in the library. El thinks he is probably going to look for the maw-mouth. She goes to the library and is surprised to find it nearly deserted—she reasons many students would consider it prime hunting grounds for the maw-mouth, which everyone thinks is still roaming free. El evicts a freshman from a badly torn armchair, which she starts repairing with her crochet hook to build mana. Once it’s repaired, she writes her name on it; there’s an unwritten rule that if you fix something, you get to claim it for the rest of the term. She spends the remainder of the work period working on her Arabic language studies.

At dinner, Orion confides that he couldn’t find the maw-mouth. Liu says that he won’t find it because a maw-mouth wouldn’t be hiding if it was in the school; “It would be eating” (167). The other students find this convincing and reassuring and decide that Todd—who’d confessed he hadn’t been sleeping lately—must have dreamed or hallucinated it. Back in the library, El evicts a Dubai enclave kid from her chair and studies with Nadia and Ibrahim. Orion joins them eventually; the Dubai enclave kids switch to English from Arabic and start buttering him up. El snips at him about whether he got anything done that day. The other students obviously don’t understand that El and Orion enjoy bantering in this way, so they find it baffling.

El doesn’t realize until later that, from the outside, it looks as though she has signed on with the Dubai enclave, earning her spot by poaching Orion from New York. Because she isn’t aware of this, she isn’t on as high of guard as she usually is, and she is almost killed by a crawler. A crawler is not a mal but a malignant cursed object created by a student—in this case, El is confident Magnus had a direct hand in it and that he was backed by the New York enclave. Orion sees the crawler just before it attacks her; he pulls her off of the chair just in time and then blasts the crawler and the chair along with it. El is hurt and angry; she returns to her room to cry and pace angrily. According to Scholomance rules, Magnus and the enclave’s actions give El the right to retaliate, but she knows that would take her down a dark path.

Aadhya comes to El’s room that night. El sees her room through Aadhya’s eyes and thinks it must look spartan and pathetic, impersonal, and unadorned in a way that confirms El doesn’t have anyone in her life to count as a friend. Abruptly, Aadhya asks if El took out the maw-mouth. It sends El briefly back into the trauma of the experience. She sobs and throws up, losing track of time. When she’s better, she confirms it to Aadhya, who asks why El hasn’t revealed that she’s so powerful to the others. El says they wouldn’t believe her; Aadhya asks why El doesn’t put on a demonstration because all of the enclaves will want her. El angrily says that she doesn’t want to be on the same team as the enclave kids.

El can’t fall asleep that night. She remembers being angry with her mother for refusing to join an enclave and making them live alone. El knows she should “show off and make clear to all the enclavers that [she’s] available to be won: a grand prize up for grabs to the highest bidder, a nuclear weapon any enclave could use to take out mals—to take out another enclave—to make themselves more powerful. To make themselves safe” (182).

When the school was first built, only kids from enclaves were pulled in for admission. Eventually, the enclaves opened it up to kids from outside; they made it seem like they were doing to it to be more inclusive, but El knows it was so there would be more vulnerable students available to be eaten and serve the enclave kids: “We’re cannon fodder, and human shields, and useful new blood, and minions, and janitors and maids, and thanks to all the work the losers in here do trying to get into an alliance and an enclave after, the enclave kids get extra sleep and extra food and extra help, more than if it was only them in here” (183). She doesn’t blame them for the cunning; she understands everyone just wants to live. But she’s so aware of the reality of the situation that she revolts against the idea of joining an enclave even as she actively plans and works for a spot.

In the morning, El, Aadhya, and Liu accompany each other to the bathroom. Liu’s waist-length hair is reacting to the sudden lack of malia by snarling and tangling. Liu says she needs to cut it off, which leads El to reflect on how long hair is a liability in the school because mals can easily grab onto to a long ponytail when you’re trying to flee for your life. Aadhya offers to buy Liu’s hair to use as strings for a lute she is making—in trade, she would make something of Liu’s choice in the next term. El thinks about how Aadhya is her best chance of a good alliance, but El herself isn’t “a good bargain” for Aadhya, as Aadhya increasingly has items of value to offer more powerful groups (187).

In an attempt to become a more attractive alliance partner, El asks if Liu needs the phase-control spell. She suggests a kind of three-way trade—phase-control spell for Liu, wizard hair for Aadhya, movement closer to an alliance for El. Liu is surprised, but Aadhya openly makes an alliance offer instead: “Or you could give it to me […] And El could give you the spell. And we’d have the lute for graduation. You could write some spells for it, and El can sing” (188). El is stunned. Before she can confirm that she’s in, Orion chases a mal past them. El thinks about it over lunch. She’s not used to anyone liking her, but now she has Orion, Aadhya, Liu, and even Nkoyo, who’s been friendly. Experimentally, El asks Nkoyo if anyone is revising for their Latin class. Nkoyo confirms this and casually invites El to join them.

During the work period, Liu tells El she’s working on writing English lyrics for a song spell that was passed down by her great-grandmother. Translating spells from one language to another is “basically impossible,” but song spells are an exception. It doesn’t always work, but it is possible. Liu offers to play the song for El. El asks if it’s a mana-builder, which surprises Liu at first, but then makes her thoughtful when El says it just had “that feel” to it (196). They discuss the possibility of the alliance. El says she’d like to do it; Liu admits she’s behind on mana storage. El says it won’t matter as much if they have the phase-control spell and can work out the mana-building song spell.

At dinner, El sees Magnus and Chloe asking Orion to join them in the library afterwards. They include a suggestion to bring El. Orion begs off, saying he has things to do. Magnus asks if El will be along with him for these “things,” but El snaps that she’ll be working on paper. Chloe directly invites El, but El knows they’re just looking for another opportunity to attack her. She says no. On the way to the library, Chloe intercepts El and warns her not to go to her study carrel because Magnus and one of the others cast a curse on it. Outraged, El asks how long her own room will be safe, and then says she guesses Magnus wouldn’t try to kill her there, lest he risk taking out Orion too. Chloe asks if El has already said yes to Dubai. El says they haven’t asked, and even if they had, it wouldn’t justify New York’s attempts to murder her. Chloe argues that the crawler was only a malia-siphon and would have made El a little sick at worst unless she was “a heavy-duty maleficer” (203). Angrily, El tells Chloe that she is “strict mana” (203) and that the crawler would have developed into something more dangerous as a result.

Chloe is horrified by what this could have meant if the crawler succeeded, but she’s also excited. She says that El will have a guaranteed spot once the others know. El turns it down and says she doesn’t want a spot in any enclave. Confused, Chloe asks about El and Orion. El says it’s absurd that they’re trying to recruit her based on a few weeks of friendship and asks if they’d offer a spot to the next girl he hung out with too. Chloe tells El she is the only person Orion has ever hung out with, including the New York enclave kids. She tells El that Orion has always been a loner who only cared about mals—by the time he was 10, he’d been doing adult shifts guarding the enclave gates against mals. All of the kids had been grateful for him and tried to build friendships, but he simply wasn’t interested in engaging with any of them. She says,

Then he talks to you once, and all of a sudden he’s making excuses for following you around. One day he's got to help you fix a door, the next he thinks you’re a maleficer, then he’s got to help you because you’re hurt. He sits with you at lunch, he even comes to the library when you ask him (208).

She tells El that everyone in the enclave would be on board to give a spot to anyone Orion liked and that they’ve only been arguing over whether El is “a maleficer who’s doing something to him” (208).

El is very angry after Chloe’s speech. She recognizes Orion’s story is hers in mirror image—a kid whose story overtook their identity as a person. Thinking of Orion as a special, natural-born hero allows them to take advantage of his instinct to protect and defend without having to pay him back anything in exchange. El tells Chloe that she’s still not interested in the enclave but offers her “secret handling technique” for Orion: “I treat Orion like he’s an ordinary human being” (211).

El storms away from Chloe, running recklessly through the halls. She slips on something and falls, scraping her knee and elbow. Aadhya accompanies her to the bathroom to get cleaned up. Liu joins them after that and they go to the “snack bar,” which is a bank of vending machines in the cafeteria. Each student gets three tokens for the vending machines per week, but El has almost twenty saved because it’s so dangerous to go to the snack bar without backup. The three girls accumulate a supply of snacks—crisps, peanut butter crackers, candy, rice balls with salmon, chestnut spread, and Hobnobs—and go to Aadhya’s room to share their feast. They work on homework and mana-building, visit the bathroom together, and then make their alliance official by writing their names on the stretch of wall where alliances are recorded.

El sleeps well and thinks she talks to her mom in one of the dreams. In the morning, Orion doesn’t show up at the meeting spot for breakfast; El goes to his room and retrieves an exhausted Orion for breakfast. They go to language lab together, where she completes his French worksheet assignment and lets him sleep. Orion is confused by why El is being so nice to him. She snaps at him, and he looks relieved to have things back to normal.

In the shop, El runs a demonstration of the phase-control spell. She makes wood bendable, liquifies and then solidifies silver, and is about to attempt the manipulation of nitrogen in the air into a liquid when the school shudders and mals spill out of a canister. All of the students flee, but El spots Orion running toward the danger as everyone else is running away. She follows him and finds him battling an enormous, gelatinous, tentacled mal that’s trying to force its way through a crack in the staircase wall. A sleep-deprived Orion is trying to battle it the way he would a hydra-class mal, but El quickly realizes it’s a grogler, thus it should be frozen to death. Orion admits he doesn’t know any freezing spells, and then he distracts the mal while El readies the phase-control spell again. She executes the nitrogen-into-liquid-nitrogen spell she’d been preparing for earlier. It freezes and kills the mal.

El accuses Orion of patrolling at night instead of sleeping. Orion admits to this but says Todd wasn’t wrong about the graduation hall mals—they’re starving and trying to force their way through small cracks in the school. He says he’s mended that same wall seven times now. Orion says he feels responsible for the aggressive hunger of the mals; El tells him his partial responsibility for the situation has built over three years of “white-knighting it,” and he can’t fix it with an extra-hard push of white-knighting the week before graduation (226).