Through supreme effort of will, I managed not to jump and yelp like an idiot. Instead, I turned calmly to meet the person.

Who turned out to be two people. The one who had spoken was very short, barely taller than me, although she was at least twice as wide. She wore her orange mage robe like a cape, arms tied around her shoulders, over faded blue jeans and a t-shirt dyed in basically every colour that wasn’t part of the Haven uniform. Her blonde hair was cut to her jawline on the right, but shaved completely off on the left to reveal a complicated mage mark on the side of her head. Behind her ear was a cigarette, which she fished out and lit by pinching the end with two fingers.

“Smoke?” she asked, offering it to me.

I shook my head. “Is that allowed?”

She shrugged. “Nobody here to stop us.”

“Mae, he’s an initiate,” the girl’s companion said. “He’s like, fourteen.” She nearly a head taller than Mae, although this might have been because she was standing up rather straighter, dressed in a fitted shirt of a more subdued orange than Mae’s cape-robe. Her long black hair fell to her waist, and probably looked amazing when there wasn’t pine twigs in it. I couldn’t see her mage mark.

“Shit,” Mae said. “Sorry. Don’t smoke, kiddo.” She took a long drag on the cigarette.

“What are you guys making?” I asked.

“A maaagic poootion,” Mae said, wiggling her fingers in a sarcastic manner.

“Vegetable soup,” the other girl corrected. “Want some?”

I tried to breathe through my mouth. “Uh, no thanks; I’m good. Don’t you guys have a cafeteria where you can get that?”

“Yeah, but not from our garden,” Mae said. “Shit, Terry, did we put those blackberries in yet?”

“I’m telling you, blackberries are a bad idea. They’ll wipe out the other food plants.”

“Survival of the Fittest, Ter-pear.”

“You really don’t get how this permaculture thing is supposed to work, do you?”

“You guys have a veggie garden out here?” I asked, trying to keep up.

“Oh, yeah. It’s right behind the creepy old crone house, over there.” Mae pointed off into the trees in the opposite direction than I’d come from. “We’re trying to set it up long-term, you know? But we know fuck all about gardening, so…”

“It’s a work in progress,” Terry finished. “Permaculture gardens tend to take years to establish, as it takes a while to be sure that all of the systems are working in harmony, but it’s worth a try.”

“Hell, by the time either of us actually graduate from this place, we’ll have the whole island permacultured. Is that the right word? Permacultured?”

Terry shrugged. “Who knows? You sure you don’t want soup, initiate?”

“Kayden. And no thanks.” I considered asking the pair whether they knew where in the world we were, but that felt kind of like cheating. Instead I asked, “Um, while I have you here, do either of you know any cursed students? You know, who went on to be mages?”

“Holy shit, Ter, he’s the little witch initiate who’s been asking around!”

“Um, no. You’re probably thinking of Kylie.”

“Two witchnitiates in one year? Ha! Score for Refujeyo, amirite?”

“Actually I think most of Refujeyo are kind of wishing they never met us. We’ve been kind of difficult.”

“Ha! I like him. We’re keeping him.”

“He can’t follow you home, Maemae.”

“To answer your question, kiddo, yeah; I think our witch was talking about trying to talk to your witch, so I guess we should tell him we met another witch and he can pass it on to – this is confusing.”

“Did you try using names, perhaps?” Terry asked.

Mae rolled her eyes. “I’ll tell Tobalt you were asking as well, and kick him in the pants about talking to your girl.”

“Kylie.”

“Right. It might be tricky to arrange, but they’ll figure it out. Look, don’t tell anyone you met us out here, okay?”

“Don’t worry, your very-definitely-allowed hidden vegetable farm is safe with me.”

“Ha! Take a smoke for the – ”

“Mae! Fourteen!”

“Uh, have a good one, kid.”

“Yeah. Enjoy your… soup.” I took off before they could try to offer any to me again.

Halfway down the corridor, I paused. ‘Don’t tell anyone you met us here’…

That raised a damn good question!

In the library, Max’s book wall had only grown taller. I didn’t even try to lean over it, instead skirting around behind him.

“Where are all the mages?” I asked.

“In their offices or teaching classes, I assume?” he muttered, not looking up. “Excuse me a moment, I have to turn my location off on the map.”

“Okay, first, you’re already off. Second, you’re in the same seat you were in when I was here two hours ago, so that wouldn’t save you from me anyway, and third, it wounds me that you think I’d need a tracker to guess where you are. And I say that as someone who finds trackers for fun. But seriously: other mages. Specifically students. Maybe my old school was just super weird or something, but we did this thing where all the students shared a cafeteria and yard and the same set of classrooms at different times. Why aren’t there any mage students around here?”

“We’re in the initiate area. The other grades do have some overlap, but non-mages are separate.”

“Why?”

“My guess would be that the staff thought it was a bad idea to unleash a bunch of teenagers with magical powers on defenseless initiates?”

“No, that can’t be right. They put Kylie and me in with you guys, and we must be more dangerous than mage students, right?”

“More dangerous to my study schedule, certainly. Shouldn’t you be doing homework or something?”

“I have heard of this homework…”

“Are you being extra distracting today on purpose or are you just really bored?”

“Please. Max. I’m extra distracting every day.”

But I took his advice, heading back to the dorm to get stuck into some work.

Fifteen minutes later, I announced to the room at large, “They’re cowards!”

“Who?” asked Kylie, the only other person in the room at large, from behind her bedcurtain.

“The ones who walk away from Omelas. You know, from English class?”

“I read the story, but what the hell are you on about?”

“The ones who walk away from Omelas are cowards. See, you’ve got this city called Omelas, right?”

“Yes, I know.”

“And it’s a paradise city. Very happy, very prosperous, everything is great for everyone.”

“Yes, I read the story.”

“Except that the fortune of the city depends on this one kid, who’s locked up and neglected, and if they were ever shown any bit of human kindness, the city’s fortunes would turn.”

“I know!”

“And most citizens, when they’re shown this, they live with it; they rationalise it away, or justify it by seeing how much happiness comes from a small amount of misery, or reason that they don’t have the right to destroy everyone’s livelihood over a single child. But some of them – ”

“Kayden, we’re in the same English class!”

“ – Some of them walk away. Just leave Omelas, leave paradise behind, and never return. And they are fucking cowards.”

Kylie peeked around her curtain. “You’re saying that the people who don’t profit off child torture are the cowards?”

“Admittedly when you put it like that, it doesn’t sound like the strongest position, but… yeah, I guess that is what I’m saying.”

“You’re a lunatic.”

“No, think about it! The people who stay are trying to do the right thing. I mean, their right thing is pretty awful because it involves torturing a child for personal gain, but they’re running the numbers and owning their own complicity. The people who leave, what are they doing?”

“Um, not being complicit?”

“But they are! They are complicit! Because the child is still suffering! If they really cared, they’d show the child kindness, break the system, rescue them if they could! Walking away doesn’t help; it’s not some good, charitable act; it’s not them choosing between the welfare of the kid and the welfare of the town. At least everyone else made that choice, but those who walk away from Omelas are choosing between paradise and their own guilt. They’re deciding that their guilt is more damaging to their personal happiness than losing paradise is, and bowing out – and the child still suffers. The kid suffers in the dark and they abandon it, and they’re the heroes of the story?”

“Are they?”

“It’s called ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think they’re the heroes. The narration treats them more like it’s puzzled or confused by the behaviour.”

“It read more like admiration to me. Admiration for cowardice.”

“Well, your English report is going to be delightfully off-topic.”

“That’s what English reports are for!”

“And by your logic, wouldn’t vegetarians and pacifists and people who don’t buy from sweatshops also be cowards? Seems like an aggressive stance on trying to do the right thing to me.”

“No, no, they’re not. Because most of the people I know who do that for, you know, activist reasons, aren’t walking away, they’re trying to do the right thing. Like vegetarians who do it because they don’t believe it’s right to eat meat? They say that by not buying meat, they’re reducing demand, so the meat industry will suffer and less animals will be slaughtered. I don’t know whether or not they have an effect, but the point is, they are ‘showing the child kindness’, not just walking away. They’re trying to do good.”

“This analogy is getting weird. Are you at a magic school, with magic homework, and choosing to do your English homework first?”

“Well, have you done your magic homework?”

“Of course not. I haven’t done any homework. But if you’re doing it, starting with English is weird.”

“You mean, a subject I might still actually use after we get out of here?”

Kylie rolled her eyes. “You’re such a nerd.”

“I believe we’ve had this discussion and agreed that you are, in fact, the nerd.”

“I remember no such agreement. Why would I agree to that when it’s so obvious that you’re the nerd?”

“Both of you are wrong!” Max kicked open the door. He had to do this because both arms were occupied by the biggest roll of butcher paper I’d ever seen and, balanced on top of it, several books. I had no idea how he’d put his palm to the doorlock. “I am the nerd!”

He dropped the butcher paper dramatically to the floor, somehow holding onto the books, and kicked it so that it rolled down the middle of the room like an unfurling carpet. “I am the nerd, and I’ll prove it!”

“How?” Kylie asked.

Without dropping anything, Max raised a book in one hand and a small box of pencils in the other. The book was called “Techniques in Transdimensional Mapping of Limited Space”.

“I… shall map the impossible!”