She's not at dinner either.

Yeah, he was expecting that.

He knows her room number. After dinner he cleans out her dorm room. 

He should build mana. It's not like he can get any from Briar anymore. (Maybe he should've tried harder to keep her alive— but he did try, and she was stupid about it, he saved her life and she was still trying to hurt him. What else was he supposed to do?)

He does twenty pushups. Trying to store the mana is like trying to store water in a ... in something with holes. He's pretty sure there's an expression there but he doesn't actually remember what it was. Like trying to store water in a colander.

He feels sick. This— it shouldn't be happening like this. He's been sticking to mice, he's been careful, you're not supposed to lose this all at once like that— he didn't even kill Briar—

He didn't even kill Briar but his stupid useless anima can't tell the difference, apparently, between pulling malia to save someone's life and pulling malia because you want to hurt them.

He needs a plan, a way to make it through the next four years, only right now the entire concept of a long-term plan feels out of reach.

Three-and-a-half years. Three-and-a-half years, and then he can— figure something out. He's going to need to be conservative, but maybe, maybe he can still recover from this. He doesn't have enough mice for this to be a good plan, but if he just gives up he's definitely going to die.

For the first few days, he's terrified that someone is going to come after him for Briar's death, the way they did with that maleficer at the start of the year. That doesn't happen, whether because they don't know it was him, or because there's just no one who cares about a random dead indie. 

(Three-and-a-half years.)

He spends all the time he should be able to spend mana building doing other people's homework in exchange for them handling his wards and spotting him the mana for his projects and he tries to find ways to get his mice to breed faster and he carries around mice in his bag and doesn't bother to hide it and hopes there are enough people still willing to talk to him that it doesn't matter.

(Three-and-a-half years.)

Some of his classmates won't talk to him anymore but some of them will, some of them are even willing to cut him a better deal, those ones are probably going to get picked off but maybe by that point he'll have worked something out.

(Three-and-a-half years.)

Every time he pulls malia he feels energetic and healthy and like he might actually make it through this. It wears off, eventually, and when it wears off he feels like he's going to throw up but he has to push through it, he has to, he can't just keep pulling malia just to make himself feel better.

(Three-and-a-half years.)

He's running through his mice faster than he's replacing them. Faster every week than the last.

(Three-and-a-half years. More like three-and-a-quarter, by now.)

(He was such an idiot when he got here. What, did he think that if he was just friendly and helpful that would be enough to get people on his side? No, it would've been better if he'd just threatened Briar into cooperation in the first place, or cut her off entirely, and he didn't — why? Because he was worried she'd be mad? She'd never have a chance of surviving without him, and if she'd had more than a few seconds to think about it she would have realized as much.)

(His pupils are so small they're almost invisible and his fingernails are ink-black and his hair is whiter than Briar's ever was and no one comes within a few feet of him without noticing the aura. Mals hardly ever bother him anymore, not even at night. Or groups he's travelling with, for that matter. If people knew what was good for them they'd stay close.)

About a month before the end of the term, he counts his remaining mice again and decides that he's going to need to pull from other students if he wants to make it comfortably through the school year. He has guesses about which ones will be easiest to go for, ones with no allies, no enclavers who care about them, who won't have the spine to do anything about it. He has a first target picked out, even.

It's been multiple weeks since he's been jumped by a mal. He's keeping watch anyways, obviously, he's not stupid, but he's not really expecting anything to happen.

Her dorm is on the opposite side of the floor.

By the time he sees the soul-eater, it's too late to run.

In theory, he knows the spell for unravelling them. Everyone had to memorize it for maleficaria studies. In practice, any freshman would struggle to cast it. He reaches for one of his mice and pulls with all his strength—

(It's not enough.)