"Is she still on his team, then?"

"Yep." 

"I suppose it is a bit late to break stride."

"I'm judging her less than the other New York seniors." 

"They could give Todd your power sharer," snorts El. "But that would rather screw over Clarita."

Snort. "I wish Clarita all the best. May she go live in New York and do whatever she wants there." She mimes washing her hands. "Not my circus, not my monkeys." 

"No, your monkeys are swarming ravenously down below," snorts El. "Do you think if you carried multiple crystals and I drew on them more generously through the network while we were killing stuff we could avoid overloading anything?"

“Worth trying. I keep thinking it would be really useful if we had power sharers, like, not connected to any enclave, just the four of us—they are useful. Pity they’re so entangled with the whole system.”

"We'd need a really good power sink to hook them up to - no smaller than an enclave's, really, since you were powering New York by your lonesome. I don't think that's feasible in here...?" She looks over at Aadhya.

"If you give me a diamond the size of my head and a kilo of moon dust and six months with no other responsibilities."

"I'll keep my eyes peeled."

“Would a diamond really be the thing, with your affinity?”

"A diamond the size of my head would very much be an unusual material."

“You know, that’s fair. Obviously this isn’t going to come to anything while we’re still in here, but I wonder if a mundane laboratory could synthesize one that big…”

"They couldn't last time I heard, but who knows, maybe they've cracked it in the last couple years."

“Well, we’ll see. —Actually come to think of it, El, I bet we could do something neat with that crushing spell you used for the mirror? Isn’t that how diamonds happen, with coal?”

"...maybe but you'd need a ludicrous lake of mana we have nowhere to put."

“And so the problem cycles. Ah well.”

The first time they do the killbox properly, on purpose, Clarita alone of those not directly involved shows up. 

She stands behind the three seniors wearing shield holders holding up the rear, watching as Lucia and El put up the maintenance hatch, as Lucia lowers the honeypot into the darkness and activates it. 

Watches without flinching as the mals come roaring up the maintenance shaft, ravenous and desperate and bloodthirsty. 

Watches as El crushes a chayena to paste against the side of the wall, as Lucia bisects a suckerworm the long way, as mals pause to attempt to devour the bodies of their fallen kin and are incinerated by mortal flame. 

Lucia feeds as much mana as she can into the crystals without overloading them, dripping in more whenever El pulls for some beautifully terrifying spell of destruction, but it's still not more than fifteen minutes before she's glowing, nor as much as twenty minutes after that that her chin-length silver hair is rising from her head like she was clinging to a van der graaf generator for dear life. 

At half an hour until the dinner bell, Lucia turns off the honeypot; at a little more than twenty minutes 'till, El dispatches the last mal between them and the hatch, and Lucia slams it shut and yanks it off the wall before anything else can take advantage. There are some mildly alarming impact noises, as disappointed mals attempt to disagree with the shiny new wall about whether it is allowed to stop them, but the wall holds up fine. 

El isn't glowing but she looks rather exhilarated! Like she went on the most intense roller coaster ever or something. She shakes her shoulders in a little mini dance as they give the all clear to take the shields down.

Lucia hugs El impulsively because that is the kind of person she is. 

El giggles and hugs her back. "You're a million watts, there, holding up all right?"

"A little bit floaty, but fine!" 

She fills the remaining empty crystals--a couple that El has on her, the rest in her room--and that brings her down a handful of lumens, but she's still very dramatic when they enter the cafeteria. People stare and whisper. New York looks like they collectively bit a lemon. 

They have a dinner. There are so many whispers and stares.

The next morning Todd Quayle shows up to breakfast looking even more sulky than usual, wrist bare of power-sharer.