Page 33 of A Deadly Education
We couldn’t do anything but keep working. Aadhya yelled, “Ready!” She levitated the crucible to the top of the opening and tipped it over, and as the liquid metal came pouring out, I called out the phase-change spell again and shoved the metal back into a single massive sheet, seamlessly stretched from one edge of the remaining wall to the other.
One shrike just managed to poke a big enough hole in Liu’s shield to wriggle itself through, and it darted through the final gap as I sealed up the wall, leaving a tail feather stuck in the seam. Aadhya was panting for breath, but she started to gasp out a shield spell of her own that would probably have been too late to keep one of us from losing at least a pound of flesh, but the shrike was flying so fast that it didn’t bother to backwing to come at us: instead it kept on going right up the stairs towards the open buffet above, chirping with excitement.
That was a bad choice: brief seconds after it had vanished, while we were gaping after it, still shaking with adrenaline, its fading chirps suddenly broke off in a loud shrilling cry and then stopped. A really awful scraping and rattling noise was coming back in its place, getting louder and louder. Before we could pull ourselves together to do anything, Orion came whipping around the corner, surfing down the stairs on a steam tray, and took all of us out like ninepins.
On the bright side, the new steel wall held up very nicely. It had taken on the faintly soapy feeling of warded artifice: the repair had integrated into the school’s overall protection spells and the damage was fixed. I could say so with great confidence, because my cheek was squashed up against the metal so hard that I could literally feel the shrieks and wails fading away as the rest of the waiting mals got chased back down, and the lowgronk-chunk-gronk–noise of some kind of protective mechanism going down below.
“Ow,” Liu said, next to me.
“Yeah,” Aadhya groaned, and flopped off us. She’d had to fling herself in our direction to avoid getting knocked into her own still-hot crucible and burnt to a crisp. She sat up and looked at it in dismay: the right corner had been completely accordioned against the wall. “Ohman.”
“Um, sorry,” Orion said, standing over us. He was clutching the dead shrike in one hand and the badly dented steam tray in the other.Hehad been on top. “I got here as fast as I could.”
“Lake, one of these days I’m going to kill you,” I said, out of the side of my mouth that wasn’t jammed into the wall.
“So,” Liu said to me, a little tentatively, as we limped up the stairs. Orion was behind us lugging the full-sized crucible—it couldn’t be folded up again—and continuously apologizing to Aadhya, who knew how to milk an advantage and was undoubtedly going to come out of this with more than enough supplies to repair her crucible, as well as the shrike corpse, which Orion had already given to her. The beak would likely go into her sirenspider lute, and I’d already given her the argonet tooth for the tuning pegs. It was going to be monstrously powerful by the time she was done. “Your affinity—”
“Just think about the ‘love me and despair’ version,” I said.
“What?” Liu said.
“ ‘All shall love me and despair,’ ” I said. She was eyeing me very dubiously. “Galadriel? In Lord of the Rings?”
“Is that the movie with the hobbits? I’ve never seen that. Is that where your name is from?”
“Liu, I’m so glad we’re friends,” I said, partly because it felt like a safe opportunity to say the word out loud. If she didn’t want it to be true, it could just be a joke. But actually I meant it with great sincerity on both fronts. I’ve never seen the films, either. Mum read me the books out loud from beginning to end once a year from when I was born, but she was disappointed by the violence of the movies and wouldn’t let me see them. Everyoneelsein the commune has, though. I’ve heard a lot of clever remarks on the contrast.
But Liu gave me a brief, shy smile. “I have the idea,” she said. “But…no malia.” It wasn’t really a question.
“No,” I said, with a deep, gusty sigh. “No malia. At all. I can’t…do it just a little.” I looked over at her, meaningfully.
Her eyes widened a moment, and then she looked down and put her arms around herself, rubbing her upper arms. “No one can,” she said, low. “Not really.”
Chloe actually met us coming down. She had run up to the alchemy floor and got Magnus and two other New York kids out of their lab section and they’d recruited basically the entire class to come and help. Either that or they’d bet on having a big crowd around them for trying to get to the gates and escape. Her total astonishment when she saw us and blurted, “Oh my God, you’re alive!” would have been insulting if she hadn’t sounded half glad about it.
The crowd, all of whom desperately wanted to know what had happened, was so big that none of them found out anything for a while, as they couldn’t hear our explanations over the babble of other voices asking the very same questions. I finally had to cup my hands over my mouth and shout, “The stairwell issealed.Nothing is coming up!” which answered the most urgent one for most people and calmed things down.
“What happened with the argonet?” Chloe said to me, as we all started moving back upstairs en masse: nobody was going back to their lessons at this point, and it was almost dinnertime by now. She swallowed and added, in a rush, “I’m sorry that—I figured I should get help—” without actually meeting my eyes.
“Liu put a shield up, and Aadhya and I got the wall fixed in time,” I said, and didn’t tell Chloe it was okay, which I’m sure she wanted me to. I’d been right about her not wanting the deal. She’d run away exactly the way that every enclave kid ran away when bad things showed up, letting their entourages take the hit. That was why they had the entourages, and the kids in those entourages were doing it because they were desperate for a way out at graduation, and they had nothing else to offer that would get an enclaver to recruit them. So they made shields out of their bodies, and if they lasted all the way to graduation, at least the most dedicated of them would be offered filler spots in enclave kids’ alliances. And that wasn’t okay, and she could work out for herself it wasn’t okay.
She didn’t ask me for the comforting lie again. She just said, “I’m really glad you’re all right,” quietly, and then fell back in with Magnus.
THE BELL FOR DINNERhadn’t rung yet; the line wasn’t open. But we were such a big crowd that we didn’t even need to worry the way you normally would if you tried to go to the cafeteria alone while classes were still in session. We got six tables together and did perimeters and checks on all of them, and sat down to wait for the food to be served, sharing gossip instead.
“What happened to our senior friends?” I asked Orion.
“Hiding out somewhere in the library, I guess,” Orion said. “I managed to get out of the yanker spell on the landing on this level, but they kept going up the stairs.”
“They’ll be back downstairs trying to bash through your work ten minutes after dinner,” Magnus said. He and Chloe had taken seats at our table. He was talking to Orion only, though; English might inconveniently leave the pronoun ambiguous, but in this case theyourinyour workwas very clearly intended to be singular. “We should call a tribunal on them.”
However many literature classes might try to sell you onLord of the Flies,that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another. People do lose it all the time, but if you lose it for any length of time, something hungry finds it and you, too. If anyone tries to organize anything especially alarming, like a gang of maleficers, and other kids find out about it but don’t have the firepower to stop it on their own, they can call a tribunal, which is just a pretentious word for standing on a table in the cafeteria at mealtime and yelling out that Tom, Dick, or Kylo has gone over to the dark side and asking everyone to help take them down.
But that’s notjustice.There’s no hand of the law that comes down to ceremonially spank you if you’ve been bad. Todd was still around, going to classes, eating; presumably sleeping, although hopefully not very well. If someone’s giving you a hard time, that’s your problem; if you’re giving someone a hard time, that’s their problem. And everyone else will ignore any situation that’s remotely ignorable, because they’ve all got problems of their own. It’s only worth calling a tribunal if you can reasonably expect that everyone else in the school is going to instantly agree that there’s a very clear, very imminent threat to their lives from the person you’re accusing.
Which wasn’t the case in this situation. “The seniors will be ontheirside,” Aadhya said, since Magnus apparently needed it said.
He didn’t like it at all. I imagine he had always blithely operated on the assumption that he could call a tribunal if ever he saw an imminent threat tohislife, and naturally everyone would agree: like Chloe and her maintenance requests. “The seniors can’t take the whole rest of the school,” he said defensively. “And they can’t afford a fight the week before graduation anyway.”
