Page 31 of A Deadly Education
Orion shrugged a little without meeting anyone’s eyes. “Everyone puts in mana. It’s not a big deal. I can get some whenever I need it.”
“But,” Ibrahim said.
“Later,” I told him, and he looked over at me and I assume gathered from my expression that yeah, it was an absolute mountain of rubbish that I wasn’t going to let stand five seconds longer than it needed to, once we weren’t all a few days away from even more sudden and unpleasant death than normal. He subsided, and I said to Orion, “Not Magnus. We’ll ask Chloe.”
CHLOE’S BRILLIANT INPUTon our plan was, “But wait, why don’t we just put in a maintenance request?”
She said it as if that was a completely reasonable and obvious suggestion, and Orion actually rubbed his face and looked over at me a bit sheepishly, like oh, he hadn’t considered that option, he really should have had more sleep. We went in for a round of staring around at each other with equal degrees ofwhat sort of moron are youexpressions, and then I said, “Does that ever actually work for you?”
“What do you mean?” Chloe said. “Of course it does. I put in requests all the time.”
It shouldn’t’ve been a surprise. The maintenance request form, which I haven’t bothered filling out since second half of freshman year, has a box for your name. I had assumed they were all just going straight into a bin, and we got assigned to repair work by random and malicious chance, but now I realized of course the forms went into a box instead, somewhere in the hidden janitorial rooms that only the maintenance-track kids know about, and they fished out requests made by, for instance, New York enclavers, and saw to it that those got handled. In fact, after a brief moment, itwasn’ta surprise, and I went right on past it. “Right, have you ever put in one at graduation time?”
“No!” Chloe said, like I’d insulted her. “I know we’re not supposed to put in unnecessary maintenance requests at midterms and finals. But I think this qualifies as life-threatening damage!”
“It certainly does qualify,” I said. “It’s especially life-threatening to anyone who goes down there to fix it, which is why you won’t get any maintenance-track kids to do it for you. They’ll give you half an hour of their time to patch your desk lamp, Rasmussen; they won’t face down the graduation horde on your behalf just because you ask nicely. Not to mention theseniorsare probably the ones who dole out the shift assignments. So are you going to help us or not?”
Chloe did come round, especially after I made several very sharp and pointy remarks about Orion’s contributions to the New York mana supply, which I suppose conveyed the extent of my desire to take Orion’s power-sharer and throw it with great force at her head. She did have one useful suggestion, namely, “Shouldn’t we try this out first?” even if it came from the unflattering direction of doubting that we were competent enough to actually manage the process.
What she really wanted to do was to ask in a half-dozen other New York kids, including Magnus, all of whom had many close senior friends. She only agreed to hold off temporarily after we agreed to do a practice run. I think she expected it wasn’t going to work, and we’d have to give in to her afterwards. Whatever her reasons, I was just as glad for the practice, as long as she was putting up the mana.
We got together in the shop the next day, during work period, and Chloe gave me and Aadhya each a power-sharer. When I clasped it round my wrist, I tugged experimentally and got a line of mana that felt roughly like a hose being fed by the Atlantic. I’d already known that the enclavers had access to gobs of mana, loads more than the rest of us, but I hadn’t realized howmuchmore. I could’ve razed a city or two without even making a dent. I had to work really hard not to just start pulling it down as wildly as if I didn’t have any basic mana control of my own. I couldn’t help but tell that I could’ve filled every crystal I had, twice over, with a few good gulps.
Orion trotted round the supply bins to collect up all the materials for us, with about as much hesitation as usual. He was less exhausted this morning; I’d made him go to bed early last night, on the grounds that whoever was going to get munched during the night was going to get munched just as much along with everyone else in the school on Sunday if he couldn’t keep the mals off us while we worked.
“I still think it would be a really good idea for us to get some more people in on this,” Chloe said, looking around nervously. The shop was completely deserted: after yesterday’s excitement, no one was risking it down here unless they absolutely had to go to class, and anyway, I doubt she’d ever been in the shop with less than ten kids around her. Ibrahim and Liu had come along with us to stand watch—well, Liu was standing watch, and Ibrahim was trailing Orion around the room trying to chat with him—but that was it.
“Ready?” I asked Aadhya, ignoring Chloe; then I spoke the phase-change incantation and pushed the first few inches of the bar of wrought iron we were testing with—left over from some failed project, presumably—into liquid form. Aadhya had the crucible heated and waiting, right underneath it, and as soon as the metal ran in, she sprinkled in the soot with her free hand, in a smooth pattern, frowning in concentration as she made them merge. Then she gave me a quick nod, tipped the crucible over the edge of the rod where the iron had been, and I shoved the metal back into a solid form.
It did go solid. However, only justbarelysolid. The blob of metal plonked down on the workbench surface, sizzled violently, melted a hole straight through and fell down towards the shelf underneath, smashed a hole through a stack of panes of glass, set the tarp that was covering them on fire, melted through the second shelf, fell to the floor, melted straight throughthat,and was gone.
There was some yelling and flailing—I may have done some myself—before Aadhya grabbed four of the powders she’d asked Orion for, clapped them together, and threw them onto the cheerfully spreading fire. Once that was out, we all gathered and peered down at the hole nervously. It went all the way through what turned out to be an uncomfortably thin floor. All I could make out in the darkness down there, at least from a cautious distance, was one very rusty pipe running past, with a circle of five antique vials, the kind of artifice you only see anymore in museum pieces, turning round and steadily doling out drops of different alchemical substances into an opening in the top of the pipe.
“Do you think any of the mals will try and get in throughthere?” Ibrahim said.
“Let’s fix it and not find out,” Aadhya said. “Orion, can you get some more—” and then we all belatedly noticed that Orion couldn’t get anything, because he wasn’t standing with us: he was at the doorway busy killing a slipslider that had come to investigate our yelling with a dream in its heart, or at least its digestion.
“Yeah?” he said, coming back, breathing only a little hard, after tossing what was left of the slipslider back out into the hall: when it had tried to squirm out of his grip by dumping its outer layer, he’d grabbed the half-shed skin, pulled it back over the head, and tied it in a knot and kept it that way until it strangled. That wasn’t how you weresupposedto kill them, but it seemed to have worked fine.
It was just as well that we were practicing. It took me several tries to learn how to convince the metal to go back into areallysolid form, not to mention back into the specific shape that it had started in, but even once I had, it still wasn’t coming out right. I didn’t melt any more holes through the floor, but I left a dozen contorted lumps of metal that didn’t really look like steel stuck firmly to the surface of the table.
Chloe said suddenly, “Hey, if it’s steel, don’t you need to fold it?”
It turned out her dad was an artificer, too: that’s how he and Orion’s dad knew each other. Aadhya looked it up in the metallurgy textbook she’d brought and discovered she was right. “Right, okay, you need to envision the final shape being made up of like one thin layer folded back and forth on itself, like puff pastry or something, instead of a solid block.”
Using that mental image got me a substance that seemed approximately right. But it became even harder to work out the right pace for me and Aadhya to go so that we could convert the iron in a continuous process. About half of the iron rod ended up in tidy one- or two-inch separate sections scattered around the table.
And then we hit our stride, swapped out six inches in a row without stopping, and suddenly it was easy, as easy as the wood, as easy as the silver. Aadhya actually laughed out loud. “Oh my God, this is amazing!” she said, holding up the rod, half of it new steel bright and shining, patterned with wavy lines, right up to the hard edge where it met the old blackened iron. “Just look at this, this isso cool.”
I couldn’t help smiling myself, and even Chloe looked a little reluctantly impressed when we all passed around the rod. “All right, we’ll do the wall repair in work period tomorrow,” I said. We packed up a huge sack of soot, which is one ingredient not at all in short supply around here, and headed back upstairs.
But as soon as we got into the stairwell, we heard voices coming from below. It made even less sense for anyone to be down there in the middle of the day after yesterday’s festivities. Orion paused and turned down the stairs, going quietly, and when I followed him, everyone else did, too, even Chloe, who threw a half-desperate look at the stairs going sensibly up, but wasn’t going to go it on her own.
Footsteps started coming back upstairs towards us as we reached the senior dorm level. I grabbed Orion and pulled him off the landing; everyone followed. We all huddled in the dark of the res hall corridor as three seniors went past going up: kids I didn’t know at all, talking in low voices, “…one really good hit to those repairs,” floating out to us as they went. We didn’t really need to hear any more of the conversation.
“Or, hey, I just had an idea, we could fix the wall right now,” Aadhya said, as soon as their steps faded out of earshot.
“Yes. Now would be good,” Ibrahim agreed, hushed, as we all nodded. “Now is an excellent time.”
