They arranged the Scholomance spots in better times. Miguel's mother outright told Miguel's grandfather that he wouldn't get a single grandchild unless he arranged them spots, all of them, none of that 'the most promising three can go', none of that 'if the enclave has a spare'. Miguel's grandfather had been well-off, well-connected, and Venezuela, while no one would say it was the beneficiary of generosity from the American enclaves, was not one of the places with two children for every opening. It took him fifteen years to get them all guaranteed. True to her word, Miguel's mother did not get pregnant until the agreements were all signed.

After that she made up for lost time. By then she was past forty, but there's magic for that.  It's him, Maria in the next year, Daniela after that, an empty year because Edgar took longer than planned, and then Edgar and Carmen at once. And slots for all of them. 

"We could sell mine," Miguel says, when he's twelve. Really what they should do is sell Carmen's, because then they'd have six years in which to try to get into a better situation and buy it back, but he can't propose that and doesn't even want his mother to accept so what he says to her is "we could sell mine."

Things have gone downhill in Venezuela. Miguel's mother had lived in a crowded part of Caracas, known all her neighbors, let the younger kids wander so long as there were enough mundanes around to doubt anything that might bother with a little kid - which there always were, because all the neighbors had lots of children too. They were under the impression Mama and Papa had been infertile and then God had blessed them with a miracle in their old age.

These days no one let their children wander, in Caracas, because the odds are pretty excellent they'd never come back. Miguel has been robbed at gunpoint twice, and he doesn't even look like a particularly soft target, and he doesn't wear or carry anything worth taking. Miguel stopped going to school a couple of years ago but he knows his school friends, he knows they're all in gangs because the alternative is worse. The supermarkets are empty. There's not electricity very often and there's water only because Papa has an affinity. Before things got bad Papa had a job - not even a pretend one arranged using mind control, a real job as a plumber - but now it's not safe to take work like that, even for Papa who could kill all these people with barely a twitch of his fingers, because he can't do it if they don't believe he can. 

Miguel's grandfather is ninety-five, and wizards often live much longer than that but he's not all there, and when Miguel's mother very reluctantly asks him for money he calls her by her sister's name, her sister who never came back from school, and rants about debts she owes him, and then later they find out that his caretaker's been siphoning off all his resources anyway, and he hasn't got money he could lend them. 

The older kids aren't allowed out of the apartment so Miguel rips DVDs off the internet when there's internet and has Edgar and Carmen trade them at school for lunch. The rest of them don't eat lunch. "It'll help being a little smaller, in the Scholomance," says his mother stubbornly. "You'll be able to carry more."

"Carry what," says Miguel. "We haven't got anything. If we sold my slot, we could have enough money to send Maria and Daniela equipped."

"Equipment doesn't matter," says his mother, who was just reassuring herself about how his losing weight was a good thing because it meant he could carry more in, and no, that doesn't escape him. "Once you're in, you have the same chance as everyone else. Maybe they have nicer clothes, maybe they have fancy crystals, but you can store mana in anything, and you can sew yourself clothes, and the mals don't care about any of that anyway. You'll bring some nice things they forgot from the outside world and they'll trade you for whatever you most need to have. A knife doesn't need to be enchanted to kill mals. It'll be fine."

Miguel doesn't really believe her but what's the alternative, not believing her?

Most of their neighbors have moved, but it's not safe to travel with a fourteen year old and a thirteen year old and a twelve year old. It's barely safe to stay at home. It's a full time job for both his parents, working up the mana to protect them, driving things off when they attack, which they're doing more and more frequently. His lessons and preparations for the Scholomance fall by the wayside, and he doesn't say anything about it, just tries to watch them and help them work up mana (this is approximately useless, he's too young to get them much of anything even if he tries all day.) A month before induction they're attacked by a whole swarm of kvenlicks and when he rushes upstairs once the fighting is over it's to find one of them eating Daniela, bowels first. He flings himself at it with his tiny useless not-enchanted knife and loses three fingers and needs eighteen stitches across his face and chest but it's worth it, because Daniela's not yet dead, and his father's not far behind him up the stairs and his mother's got some healing, enough to hold on to her while his father calls some distant cousins in America, begging for help.

They sell Daniela's slot for the magic to save her. Doesn't make sense for her to have a slot anyway, since she's probably going to need dialysis for life. 

"We can handle it, we've been doing it all these years anyway," says Miguel's mother. 

Miguel spends the month before school in bed, healing, and learning to write with his other hand. "I'm screwed," he says to his father, when his mother's out of earshot. 

"Now, now, none of that," his father says. "You're clever and you're determined and you're brave and you're studious. It's not about what you bring with you; it's about what you bring inside you."

What he brings with him is a girl's backpack that Daniela wore to school back when the younger kids went to school, which contains a rosary for mana-building and a pound of cocaine the source of which he did not ask his father. "You'll be able to trade it to seniors for everything else you need," his father says, and Miguel nods.

There are a lot of hugs and kisses and prayers and last-minute mending of the backpack straps and his pants and his mother tells him, very firmly, that he's as prepared as anyone, and certainly if he were unprepared that would imply something they could have done differently, but they did everything right, so he nods and agrees and off he goes.