Julian Chan Hei-Lei hasn't left his apartment in two and a half years. Most mals are too lazy to climb all twenty-seven flights of stairs of their building in Kowloon, and Mama or Baba always stay home to take care of the ones that might. Once when he was twelve he snuck out onto the roof and almost got eaten by something that looked like a vulture crossed with a bad case of chicken pox and almost gave them both heart attacks and ever since then he's been very responsible. It's not like he has time to go out, anyway. He's too busy studying. 

His baba works for the Hong Kong enclave, who bought twenty years of his life in exchange for the right of one of his children to take the Scholomance entrance exam. It's a common deal and usually a sucker's bet – the enclave kids have the best books, the best tutors, parents who track how the test changes year to year and what all the best strategies are. But Julian tests well, and failing simply wasn't an option. So he didn't. Mama and Baba seemed surprised when he came out with a perfect score, so he hugged them, and let them convince him to cheat his diet just this once, and wondered for the hundredth time what could possibly have possessed them to have children when they're both obviously smart enough to know better. 

Julian speaks Cantonese and English and Mandarin and German and French and Sanskrit and can compose poetry in Classical Chinese in the style of any dynasty you care to name. He's a good artificer and he's warded all his own clothes and can brew a healing potion and stitch up a wound mundane-style and he runs for an hour every morning around their tiny living room both with and without shoes. For the past few years he's been dividing his days – mornings studying for the test, afternoons and evenings on everything else he's going to need once he's inside – but these last months it's all about basic survival. He's his parents oldest child, which means they haven't lost anyone yet. Sometimes he thinks he's taking it more seriously than they are. He knows why they chose him for the exam slot, and he thinks they made the right call, but if he doesn't make it it's like the little ones will die for nothing. Not very rational of him, but it does help him keep his eyes on his books long after everyone else is asleep.  He always takes an hour off in the afternoon to watch dramas with little Ching-hsia, age 12, his favorite sister, who he's almost certainly never going to see again. 

There's another reason Julian can't die just yet. When he was 10 and still showing no signs of an affinity, his parents brought him to a diviner, who told them that his talent was for enclave magic. That just felt right. He has an intuitive sense for how space folds and fits together and bends just the way he expects it. One day, he'll be able to make enclaves bigger, and more cheaply, and then – he holds the dream in his secret heart – he'll tell everyone in the whole world how to do it. No one will ever have to suck up to the big enclaves for the chance to make their children just a little bit safer, never not ever again. Maybe he'll even be able to expand the Scholomance itself. He's nothing if not ambitious. 

And he won't have enough mana to touch it until he's grown, which means it's all totally useless for the immediate task of surviving high school. 

The morning of the induction, he sits with his family while they eat breakfast and readjusts his drug stash and weighs himself and slips in a couple extra batteries for his walkman. He drills his wards, again. He hugs Ching-hsia extra tight, and then he's gone.