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Walden’s office was not set up for pastoral chats. It was her workspace first and foremost. She’d almost stopped noticing how it looked. The panelled walls, the imposing desk topped with green leather, the antique clock; the dusty overloaded bookshelves, the ugly row of filing cabinets jammed in a corner; even the awkwardly retrofitted Ikea computer desk opposite, where some poor electrician had had to figure out how to wire this room without doing too much damage to the wainscotting—to Walden, this was just where she worked. Where she lived, effectively, when she wasn’t in the labs or the staffroom.

So the desk might look chaotic, but she knew what was in all the piles of paperwork. The bookshelves were not dusted often, but everything on them was valuable reference material. The filing cabinets had decades of useful stuff in them: old exam papers, worksheets with customised exercises— so hard to find secondary-appropriate magic exercises, none of the big academic publishers had come up with a financially viable textbook yet. Even the contents of the filing cabinets were GDPR compliant, since Walden had finally got around to shredding her predecessor’s decades of handwritten notes on every student he’d ever taught, along with his opinion of their parents. A bit of a shame, because some of that stuff had probably had historical value—if nothing else, as a record of how wildly unprofessional teaching had once been.

When Nikki came in, with the slight shuffling pause on the threshold of a child who really wasn’t sure if this was allowed, Walden saw the office for a moment through her eyes. Wood and leather, books and antiques, a modern desk chair with back support like a throne for Walden, and a battered repurposed Edwardian antique from the staff dining hall for whoever was unlucky enough to be sitting opposite her. No art on the walls, no photographs, no personal touches anywhere. It was not a friendly room. It had never been meant as one.

So Walden had to be the friendly one. She had to channel everything she’d ever been taught about Connecting Effectively with Young People, without shame or hesitation. She had to be welcoming and accepting and respectful and predictable and safe. She had to toss away her fairly reasonable aversion to coming off as embarrassing, try-hard, awkward, or just fundamentally uncool. If you were someone’s authority figure you were definitionally uncool. It was time to lean in to it.

It was just unfortunate that the most effective way Walden had of connecting with young people, by a long way, was to tell them about something fascinating that she was an expert on, and then show them how to do it themselves. She had good relationships with her students because she was a good teacher, not because she was a naturally warm and empathetic person. She would have been absolutely delighted to have a short academic chat with Nikki about literally any branch of magic at all. They could have gone through the bookshelves pulling out old journals and reference texts together. Walden would have sent her away energised and excited, with something new to learn. She’d even thought of trying to do it that way—leading into the topic of Oxford sideways, via a neat little stretch-and-challenge magic lesson, And this of course is the sort of thing you’d be doing in your first year . But there was a hesitation in her. She’d given Nikki her old copy of Nielle’s Arrays in just that spirit, and look what had happened.

Besides, Ebele had set this up as a serious conversation, not a casual chat. And Ebele was so much more skilled at pastoral work than Walden that if she thought formal and serious was the way to go, she was probably right.

Still, she should have thought of something like… biscuits. Custard creams on the desk for both of them to snack on. That would have been good.

“Come in, sit down,” she said, while Nikki was still hovering. “Please! Thank you for coming.”

“Hi, Dr Walden,” said Nikki, and nothing else. Well, she was under no obligation to make this easy.

“How’s it all going?” Walden tried. “You’re back in lessons tomorrow, aren’t you? How were the mocks?”

“Okay,” Nikki said. “I mean, I think it was all okay. I felt all right after. You know when you finish an exam, and it feels bad? It didn’t feel that bad.”

“That’s good,” said Walden, well aware—because she’d just checked on the big spreadsheet—that Nikki had flown through all her papers and practicals and was going to see straight A*s when the mock exams were returned next week. “I hope the whole process wasn’t too stressful. The actual A-levels in summer are honestly quite a lot easier, in my opinion.” She said this every year.

“Yeah,” said Nikki, “I mean… yeah, I’ll have more time to revise then.”

She wasn’t going to bring it up, was she. Normally, when your best pupil got an offer from a top university, she told you about it. Just a little bit of bragging was expected, even healthy. But Nikki sounded like nothing good had ever happened to her in her entire life.

Well. When you had an elephant in the room, someone had to be the first person to say Wow, what a big elephant! “Matron tells me you’ve got your Oxford offer,” Walden said. “I wanted to be the first teacher to say congratulations. I’m not surprised, of course. I know how hard you’ve worked for this. I always had complete faith in you. But as well as the normal things, the school is very proud, all of that—I wanted to say that as your Invocation teacher I, personally, am very proud of you. This is an achievement no one can take away from you. It’s well deserved. Well done.”

“Um,” said Nikki. “Thanks.”

The silence stretched. And stretched.

“So—” began Walden, at the same moment as Nikki said, “Um—”

They both stopped. After a moment, Nikki snorted.

Awkward. Embarrassing. Uncool. Lean into it. “I know, I know,” Walden said. “You can probably tell why they mostly only let me talk about demons.”

Dropping the teacher mask worked as nothing else would have. “You’re really good at the demons,” said Nikki reassuringly. “Sorry, Dr Walden. Matron asked you to talk to me, didn’t she?”

“She did,” Walden said, “but honestly… once I found out, I would have wanted to talk to you about it anyway. So. Oxford?”

“Oxford,” agreed Nikki, rather glum.

Walden had had a little speech planned—opportunity, grasping of; challenge, rising to—but now she was actually in this conversation, she could see that Nikki was too grown up to be steamrollered that way. “Do you want to talk me through it?”

“Do I have to?”

“It’s me or Matron,” Walden said. “I think I disagree with you about this, but I’m not going to make up my mind until I’ve actually heard what you think.”

Nikki sighed. “Okay, okay. I have thought about this. Matron acted like I was just being emotional. But I thought really hard.”

“That makes sense,” Walden agreed. “You’ve always struck me as a person who thinks carefully.”

“You know how I wanted to drop Invocation?”

“I remember, yes. I was quite concerned.”

“So… obviously I let them talk me out of it,” said Nikki, “because… realistically, I need A-levels, don’t I? If I want to go to uni at all. And I do . And Dad—I mean, Reverend Ezekiel—” Matron and Dad, thought Walden; she’d learned more about the internal dynamics of School House in the last five minutes than in years of working with Ezekiel and Ebele. “—well, he said that if I really wanted to drop out completely, they’d make sure I still had somewhere to live, and I could go to college or an online school and get a job at the same time,” Nikki took a breath, “which is really nice of him, like it’s really really nice of him, but it’s not like I’m… you know. The Chetwood scholarship fund isn’t going to pay for me to live here anymore after this year. No one is.”

“Nikki,” Walden said.

“I’m just being realistic,” said Nikki. “Because I thought, after everything, back in October—I sort of thought we were going to get expelled. Me and Matty. And if that happened—well, I thought maybe I could explain that it wasn’t Matty’s fault, it was me. Because it was me, really, Dr Walden. You know that, don’t you?” And before Walden could say anything, she barrelled on. “And Matty can’t go back. He can’t. I don’t know if you know about his mum and dad, the stuff they did. They were freaks in a weird anti-magic cult, they abused him. And they still send him messages, his cousins and his mum, he has to keep blocking them.” Walden hadn’t known that; how awful. Nikki went on. “So when Matty said maybe he’d have to go back, I just. No. I started making a plan. I thought about jobs and stuff, like we’d have to find a flatshare so I made a list from the internet. But rent is really expensive. Aneeta said she’d help for a bit, she gets four hundred pounds a month and she never buys anything except tuck shop chocolate so she has savings… but actually I think her parents would probably hate that?” She hurried on. “And there’s stuff you need to be eighteen for—I was eighteen in December but Matty’s not till April—anyway if I could convince Mr Bern that it was all me really, then maybe he could stay. And I’d be okay—if I planned it all out first, you know?”

Walden could hear how nervous Nikki was. All those stops and starts, from a child who was normally more fluent and confident than most adults. More than that; she could hear that Nikki had not said any of this out loud before. Even the school counsellor must have missed it. One possible side effect of spending ten years growing up under the eagle eye of a pastoral expert was that you got very, very good at dodging pastoral expertise.

I’m not really—family.

I’d be okay—on my own.

A job and a flat at eighteen. No safety net. No time to spare for anything but survival. No friends or family, no A-levels, nothing to fall back on but a set of perfect GCSE grades that would never come to anything more. Of course, people did it every day. The vision of grinding, isolated, dead-end poverty that Nikki Conway had quietly planned for herself was a life that millions of people had to live. It was a life a long way removed from Chetwood School, and yet its ghost haunted the ancient halls that shone in the sunshine among the green fields. Fifty thousand pounds a year per child, less whatever scholarships and bursaries a family could argue out of the endowment. People paid it. Some of them were rich—well, all of them were rich, really. Most of them did not feel that way. They knew about the future that Nikki had imagined for herself. They felt its chilly spectre breathing on the backs of their necks.

Almost no one was paying for magical boarding school because of the magic. The magic was an interesting quirk, a historical curiosity, in a few cases a genuine passion being indulged by a loving parent—but you didn’t pay fifty thousand pounds a year for magic tricks, any more than you paid it for Shakespeare or the respiratory system or the ability to solve quadratic equations. No: Chetwood’s school fees were insurance money, a policy taken out against the future. Let my child be safe. Let my child be happy. Let my child have every single possible chance at freedom, joy, hope, power .

Because an elite education was an investment in power. Magic was the least of what you gained at Chetwood. What mattered was the power to walk the walk and talk the talk, to have your résumé picked out of the pile and the interviewer already speaking your language. It was the power to know the people you ought to know, to befriend them easily over a you too? or to laugh together about how ridiculous the whole theme park experience of childhood had been. A few could afford that power. Most could not. Plenty of parents who loved their children worked appalling hours and then remortgaged their homes to pay for it. They did it for love, and for terror. You could never completely future-proof your children. But power would keep them safe from the bitter grind of survival in a way that nothing else could.

“Nikki,” Walden said, trying to sound neutral, and not viscerally horrified, at how much power, freedom and possibility this child wanted to throw away.

“I could have killed someone,” Nikki said.

Walden paused.

“Mr Bern said that to me in the disciplinary meeting. I could have killed someone. Like I didn’t know. But I already knew. I could have killed Matty. He wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t asked. I knew I needed him, I couldn’t do the summoning without him, he just puts so much more magic into everything than I can—but he was scared, he was only there for me.” Nikki took a breath. “And I could have killed him. I could have killed Matron, and Reverend Ezekiel, and everyone in School House, all the younger ones. That demon wouldn’t have stopped once it was loose, would it? It would have killed you, and Marshal Kenning, and then it would have just kept going. It would have eaten the whole school, and everyone it ate would just make it stronger. It was already so strong. I could feel how strong it was. Like—I went on the Geography field trip in Year Ten for the rivers topic, and we were just in the shallow bit, but you could still feel the current round your legs. It was like that, but huge . I read an article once that said when people go into the Thames, they don’t ever find the bodies.”

“Nikki,” Walden said again.

“And it wouldn’t even be the first time,” Nikki said. “Mum and Dad and Dewey—they all died because of me. Because I’m magic, and I was stupid, and I couldn’t control it.”

Dewey . Walden didn’t think she’d ever heard the name of Nikki’s younger brother spoken out loud before. “Nikki,” she said, “you were seven.”

“It was still my fault! And I’m still magic, and I still can’t control it, and I’m still so—so—stupid!”

Nikki stopped talking. She took a deep breath. Walden watched her compose her expression. She’d taught Nikki that trick, in interview prep. Don’t speak too fast. Pace it, stop and breathe, don’t apologise or try to fill the gap. Give yourself a moment to think. It feels much longer to you than it does to the person you’re talking to.

“Sorry, Dr Walden,” Nikki said, almost calmly, a moment later. “Obviously I am a bit emotional about this. Sorry.” As if feeling something about your dead family was an embarrassing social error. “Look, I know I’ve been lucky, really lucky. Loads of people aren’t as lucky as me. A Chetwood education is a privilege, and I’m grateful for all the opportunities I’ve had at school.” She had hit her stride again; the quick recovery was another interview-prep special. Now she sounded measured, confident, grown-up: like she was delivering a student assembly, or talking into a camera for the video prospectus. “I do love magic. I really love magic. I’ve loved our Invocation lessons, and everything I’ve learned here. But in the end, I think I have to take responsibility for my own actions. I know I would learn a lot at Oxford. But I don’t think I’m a good person—I mean, a safe person—to be a magician. I don’t think I deserve this. So I’ll finish my A-levels, obviously, so I haven’t wasted everyone’s time and the school’s money. After that I can get a job. And maybe reapply to a different uni for something else later. I don’t know.”

Nikki might be measured and confident but she hadn’t been doing this nearly as long as Walden had. Walden was absolutely certain that none of her real feelings were showing when she asked, “What do you think you’d like to apply for?”

A slight pause. “I did all magic A-levels,” Nikki said. “So that makes it a bit harder.”

“Not really,” Walden said. “It’s the grades that count, unless you’re applying for something with very specific entry requirements. You couldn’t do medicine, or engineering, but for almost everything else, your A-levels are proof of the kind of student you are regardless of what subject you’re going on to study. Any university would be lucky to have you. And, of course, the school would support you in reapplying. It’s a lot simpler if you already have your grades. The Careers Department handles a few post-qualification applications every year.” Take her seriously, she was thinking, don’t overreact, let her think it through herself. Be understanding. Be safe.

“I don’t know,” Nikki confessed after a moment. “I tried to think about it but I couldn’t really picture anything. It’s just always been magic. Right back to Year Seven, I knew. I suppose… it would probably be intelligent to do something with a career at the end, right? Not medicine, obviously, I don’t know, law or something.”

“A lot of my Sorcery cohort at Oxford ended up doing law conversion courses,” Walden said. “I’m told there’s some overlap, in terms of the sort of brain you need, though it depends a bit on what parts of magic you actually enjoy. Of course, the Careers Department can help you more than I can.”

“So you agree?” Nikki said. “You’ll support me? Do you—could you help me talk to Matron about it?”

“Nikki,” said Walden, “do you want my honest opinion?”

A pause. A nod.

“Well, then. I don’t agree with you at all. I’m very concerned. I think this is a terrible idea.” She held up a hand before Nikki could speak. “Not because I think it’s stupid, to be clear. Dropping out with no A-levels would have been stupid—a pointless, self-destructive waste of all the opportunities you’ve had, and the last thing anyone who cared about your future would want for you. But it sounds to me like you realised that already. You thought about it carefully, reconsidered, and decided on a more sensible course. And what you’ve come up with now is perfectly sensible, and yes, the school would support you, and it would probably work, and I’m sure you’d make a very good lawyer.”

“Then—”

“But it’s a terrible idea,” Walden said, “not because it’s stupid or ill-considered, but because I don’t believe for a moment that this is what you actually want .”

There was a little silence.

“You can’t get a job at Oxford,” Nikki said, which was not a denial. “I read that, it’s the uni rules or something.”

“Not in term time, no,” Walden agreed. “There isn’t time. The terms are only eight weeks and they make you work flat out. We used to joke—‘sleep, study, socialise, pick two.’ There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to add work and still get your degree. But that’s what maintenance loans are for. I’d be astonished if you weren’t eligible for additional grants on top of that.”

“You have to pay back the loans, though.”

Surely Careers went through this with them. “Yes,” said Walden patiently, “at minimal interest, as a graduate tax, if you have a job that earns over the threshold. I promise you, the main financial effect it has on your life long term is that you become much more able to get that well-paid job. It’s by no means a perfect system, but we’re not American . You might find yourself on a tighter budget than some of your peers, yes.” Were Aneeta’s parents giving both their teenage daughters four hundred pounds a month in pocket money? Even Walden hadn’t had that kind of fun money until she’d been gainfully employed for a few years. “You certainly wouldn’t be the only one. It’s a long summer vacation, as well, with plenty of time to work and save up for the next academic year. Truly, Nikki, this part isn’t something you need to worry about. You’ll be all right. You can make it work.”

But Nikki’s expression was closed. “What if I am the only one?” she said. “What if I don’t want to be the only one?”

Walden hesitated.

“Sorry, Dr Walden. I just—the more I think about it, the more I think… what if it’s just Chetwood again? Like this.” Her hand gesture took in the panelled walls, the antique furniture, all the ancient institutional elegance. It also took in Walden herself. “And everyone there will be like Will, or—I mean, I like Will, I think.” A brief look of confused horror: Oh no I mentioned my sort-of-boyfriend situation to my teacher. Walden pretended not to notice. Nikki squared her shoulders and pressed on. “He’s got all these plans already, like we’re both going to row and he’s going to take me to formal every week—I didn’t even know that was a thing, formal —and he’ll get his Blue and I’ll get a First and we’ll get a travel grant and go to Italy together next summer. He just thinks everything’s so easy. I think it’s probably not that easy to get a First, actually?”

It wasn’t, though Walden had, and she was professionally certain that Nikki could. Possibly not at the same time as keeping up with Will Daubery’s intended social schedule.

“He just doesn’t get it,” Nikki said. “He doesn’t get it at all. I don’t think anyone really—even Aneeta was just like. You know. ‘I think you could do something really powerful for women of colour, Nikki, I’m so proud of you!’ And like—obviously I agree with her and I think it’s important and it matters! But Aneeta’s not the same as me. She’s just not. Because Aneeta’s mum is a neurosurgeon, and my mum worked in a Tesco.”

She looked at Walden defiantly, as if to say: You don’t get it either, I know you don’t . There is no way you can possibly know what it feels like to be me.

And she was right, of course.

Of course she was right.

The silence went on a little too long. It was Walden’s duty to fill it. She had no platitudes that answered Nikki’s defiant honesty. She owed Nikki better than platitudes anyway. She owed her the truth.

“I had a conversation with my mentor in my first week of teacher training,” she said. “She told me… you must try to really know your students. You must try to understand their point of view, the way their lives feel from the inside. You must connect.”

Nikki was silent, neutral, and, Walden thought, probably not impressed.

“And then she told me: of course, you will be fooling yourself. All teachers do. We convince ourselves we have enough in common with our students to understand them, so that we can teach them. But every single person faces their own challenges, in their own world, in their own way. I’m not even that much older than you, in the grand scheme of things, but you already have generational challenges I never had to deal with. No one in my year had their own phone in the middle school. That alone—the expectation to keep complex technology with you at all times—puts you and all your peers in the middle of an ongoing demonic threat that didn’t exist twenty years ago. And that’s only one of the differences between your experience and mine, and by no means the most meaningful.” What did a white woman in her thirties from a comfortably upper-middle-class background have to say that was really useful to a Black teenage girl in foster care? What could Dr Sapphire Walden meaningfully give to Nicola Conway, out of her adulthood, her expertise, and her enormous, unearned good luck?

Nikki, expressionless, still silent. Still unimpressed.

“So I admit it,” said Walden. “You are completely correct. You are the person who best knows the context when you make your choices for your life. No amount of pushing from well-intentioned outsiders changes the fact that you have your own mountains to climb. It is absolutely your right to look at the scale of the slope in front of you and say: ‘This one doesn’t look worth it to me; I don’t want to be the only one.’ But, Nikki—”

Walden stumbled, because she’d talked herself into a corner, and the corner was being too personal . You can’t connect if you’re not human, that same mentor had told her once. You have to be willing to be real and honest, if you want them to believe that you actually care. At the same time, you have to keep something back. You will lose your mind otherwise. There must be a part of you that your students know nothing about. There must be boundaries.

But Walden had already come to the edge of her hardest boundary with Nikki Conway. They’d reached it together months ago, deep inside the incursion at the heart of School House, staring at the demon that smiled at them all from a dead boy’s face. Why is it a person? Nikki had whispered.

They’d never discussed it. But she was such a good student. Walden had no doubt that she’d worked out the answer long ago.

“Mr Bern was right,” she said. “What you did in October was very dangerous, very stupid, and very irresponsible. When you summoned a demon far beyond your ability to banish or control, you could have killed someone.” She made herself say it. “I did.”