Two things could be true at once: Benji could discover that he possessed at least some aptitude for metalworking, and simultaneously feel his life was in immediate danger just sitting in the metalworking class. The professor hadn’t bothered with the basic lectures about safety or how to use magic to shape metal, instead having the students start by melting down alloys and trying to add new elements in the portable kilns on their desks. The professor, a short, extensively bearded man named Mason, cackled when one of the kilns shot a rain of sparks and smoke out of its chimney when two reactive elements met. One would’ve thought that basic information about which metals not to combine would’ve been a prerequisite to experimentation, but apparently Mason believed that nearly being incinerated was part of the learning process.

  Benji had reached class slightly late after his trip to OPMI. By the time he arrived, the seat next to Jurni was occupied, and he ended up stuck in the back row, an empty seat next to him. Jurni had smiled regretfully as he walked by. Any impulse to stop and chat was overwhelmed by the lingering awkwardness between them.

  Only after the incident with the kiln did the final student show up. Mason seemed unperturbed that she was entering almost twenty minutes late, or that she came in trailing her usual blots of soil across the gray stone floor. Nella was as out of place as possible amid the fire and clamor of the metalworks. She found the only open seat, beside Benji.

  She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry I’m late, did I miss any explosions?”

  “One, actually,” Benji said.

  “Arren save us, I hate metalworking,” Nella said. “At least plants have the decency to just poison you rather than spraying molten bits all over you.”

  “Plants are certainly less dramatic.”

  The professor approached their table to set up the next task, which involved keeping a single piece of metal suspended as a spherical liquid. Benji, wearing huge gloves that looked like a cross between oven mitts and some kind of armor, fed a piece of metal wire into the kiln, allowing it to settle on the plate in the center, while Nella turned the knob on the kiln’s side to reduce the heat. The liquid nature of metal was key to the whole discipline. Experienced metalworkers could bend solid metal without heating it first, but early training usually involved speeding up the process with heat. Once it had melted onto the plate and started to bubble, Benji tried to shape it into a sphere. Strange. As rare as it was to see metal in this state, the spreading pool made a certain amount of sense. Benji thought he could predict exactly where the metal would run if tipped, or given more heat.

  The metal responded. Mason clapped embarrassingly loudly as it formed, not into a sphere, but into a rough disc that spun in a wobbly circle.

  “Fantastic work!” Mason said. “We’ll have you working in the forge yet.”

  Benji couldn’t imagine anything sounding less pleasant. He felt his ears redden at the compliment nonetheless.

  “That was incredible,” Nella said as Mason sauntered away to put out a fire another student had started on their desk.

  “I’m as surprised as you are.”

  “I wasn’t surprised! You seem like you’ve got a knack.”

  “You should see me in languageworking. The professor said I was the first student to ever actually make the meaning of words less clear by attempting languageworking magic.”

  Nella laughed. “We all have different skills.”

  “I still think I like plantworking better,” Benji said.

  “Are you trying to butter up the classroom assistant? I won’t give you a better grade just because you suck up to my discipline.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Benji let his influence on the metal wane. He’d held it for no more than a minute, and yet found himself unaccountably tired. Steam billowed overhead. Benji leaned back in his chair, his gaze on the curling iron rafters. The metalworks had high ceilings inlaid with complex fireworkings to prevent students from accidentally melting, incinerating, or otherwise obliterating the building.

  “I was sort of surprised you were in this class,” Benji admitted as Nella tried her hand at shaping the metal. She probably would’ve had better luck blowing on it, as all it did was shake a little more than it had before.

  “I need distribution credits, just like everyone else,” Nella said. “This is my last non-plantworking class before graduation. Gotta love the secondary course track.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Is it weird being practically the professor of one secondary course, and being a student in another?”

  Nella shrugged. She didn’t look particularly concerned by her lack of success. “That’s life as a classroom assistant. Sometimes you’re grading your peers, sometimes you’re the peer being graded. It’s only weird if you let it be.”

  “So you’re saying I should stop making it weird?”

  Nella laughed again, and Benji was surprised to find that he’d been hoping she would.

  “How about this,” Nella said. She removed her safety gloves, and extended her hand across the desk. “Hi Benji, nice to meet you. I’m Nella, the way below average metalworking student. I believe you already met my alter ego. She’s also called Nella and happens to be an assistant in plantworking.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Benji said, removing his own glove and taking her hand. It was warm, a little damp from the glove, and still had the slight grit of the garden on it. He felt something in his stomach churn when he met her eyes, felt her smile reflected on his face.

  Uh oh, he thought. Don’t be awkward about this. By the time he had this thought, he realized he’d been holding onto her hand for so long that it already was awkward.

  As class wore on, Benji tried to focus on the metalworking exercises rather than the woman next to him. The bulky safety gear they had to wear made it a little easier. Just a little.

  In their final exercise, they had to push the metal into a ring around the edge of the kiln. Benji’s took off and began spinning, threatening to fire out of the kiln and sending smoke pouring out of the chimney. Nella yelped and cranked the heat way down. The metal kept spinning.

  “What do we do?” Benji whispered in panic.

  There was a thwomp as a large rubber cup attached to the top of the chimney. The person holding it was dressed in the same heavy safety gear, but Jurni’s face and nose ring were visible behind safety glasses and above the protective smock.

  The metal instantly stopped, falling into shapeless pools at the sides of the kiln.

  “Dampener,” Jurni explained. “It removes any spellwork from the environment. Turning the kiln down doesn’t regulate the magical process, only the physical one.”

  “Good to know,” Benji said. “Thank you.”

  He was about to introduce the two women, before realizing there was no possibility they hadn’t met. Nella confirmed this, and exactly what she thought of Jurni, with a scowl.

  “Hey Nel,” Jurni said.

  “Hey,” Nella said. Her coldness came out of nowhere, a stark contrast to the smiling person who had been sitting next to Benji just seconds ago.

  “This is the first secondary track course we’ve had together,” Jurni said. “Hopefully it goes better for me than first-year plantworking did.”

  “We all have different strengths.”

  Jurni snorted at the cliché. “I always thought it was strange that bioworking came so easily to me, yet I couldn’t get the hang of plantworking at all.”

  “It’s not that surprising. Plants and animals have fundamentally different structures. Different ways of expressing the will of their existence.”

  “That was always way over my head,” Jurni said. Benji sensed she was being self-effacing—not much got past Jurni. “You know the Completists don’t require expertise in more than one area of magic. Our invitation is still on the table.”

  “I told you, I have no interest in your club.”

  “It’s not my club, it’s the Preeminent Mage’s club,” Jurni replied.

  “Back up,” Benji said, feeling that if he was missing the personal context, he may as well be caught up on the basic terms. “Who are the Completists?”

  “They’re an organization devoted to developing outstanding mages during their time at Thelspoint University, to sharing knowledge and bettering society.” Jurni sounded as if she was reading off a pamphlet.

  “I’ve told you before, I have nothing against your goals,” Nella said. “I just don’t want to sit in dark rooms and make up secret handshakes and have meetings all the time and do all the other things pseudo-secret societies do.”

  “We’ve never aspired to secrecy.”

  “Fine, notorious societies,” Nella said.

  “Why notorious?” Benji asked.

  Jurni’s smile had a touch of malice in it. “We may have gotten a couple tenured professors fired when it was revealed their magical credentials were not as real as they should have been in order to be teaching here.”

  Benji didn’t know whether this made the society horrible elitists, or genuine protectors of the sanctity of scholarship. He sensed the gap between those two positions accounted for the degree of frostiness between Nella and Jurni. Nella turned her attention back to the kiln, seemingly inclined to let it go.

  “Anyway, as I said, the invitation is always open,” Jurni said. “At least until you graduate and we lose our best plantworker. Have you figured out what you’re doing after school yet?”

  “All I can tell you is that it will involve actual plantworking rather than sitting in rooms talking about how to achieve magical greatness.”

  “Fair enough.” Jurni handed the dampener across the table to Benji. Almost a peace offering. “Here, my partner has a spare.”

  As she left, Nella groaned and planted her forehead on the table as if the conversation had physically exhausted her.

  “She’s such a nice person, isn’t she?” Nella asked.

  “Yeah, she is,” Benji replied, hoping that agreeing with her somehow didn’t mean picking a side.

  “She’s been hounding me for two years about joining. I wish I could hate her for it, but she keeps complimenting my plantworking.”

  “Doesn’t give her a license to keep bothering you about it.”

  Nella stared at him with a confused expression that told him he didn’t understand both something important about this woman, and something fundamental to the way the university worked. “But Benji, I’m really good at plantworking.”