Page 34 of A Deadly Education
“We can’t either,” I said. “What’s it going to get us? Those five kids are graduating in a week. Do you want to punish them for wanting to improve their odds at someone else’s expense? I could think of some people in our year who’d do the same.” He gawked at me, shocked that I’d even hint at a parallel.
Orion didn’t weigh in himself; he was getting up from the table. The line had just opened, and we all headed in for the reward of virtue, namely being first into the buffet loaded with fresh hot food. Orion checked the line ahead of us all, taking out a couple of mals on the way, and we all came out with our trays crammed full. Nobody talked for the rest of dinner: it was probably the best meal any of us had eaten in a year, even the enclavers, if not in the last three years.
The rest of the school came in round us. Perhaps halfway through the meal, our ambitious group of seniors even warily came back down from the library: they’d got tired of waiting for the general screaming and slaughter to begin, I suppose. They stared at us from the door and then slowly headed to the line themselves after a quick discussion. They were in for a lot of hostile looks along the way, as by then everyone knew what they’d tried to do. But Aadhya had been absolutely right: none of the hostile looks came from the other seniors. In fact, by the time they came out, room had been made for all of them at prime tables, and they ate with other seniors watching their backs, the sort of thing you do for someone who’s at least taken a shot at helping you.
“Theyaregoing to try and do something,” Magnus said, throwing a hard look at me. “If the new wall is going to hold, they’ll hit the other stairwells. And if we don’t make it hurt, all the seniors are going to help.”
“No, they won’t,” Orion said quietly. He put his hands on the table and started to stand up, but I was ready for it; I kicked him right in the back of the knee, and he gave a sharp, loud gasp and fell back into his chair clutching at it, panting. “El, that freakinghurt!” he squalled out.
“Yeah? But did it hurt like getting pasted into a wall with a steam tray?” I said through my teeth. “Just put the theatrics to rest for once, Lake. You’re not graduating early.”
The half of our table that had begun glaring at me turned to stare at Orion instead, and he was red and obvious by then. Anyone’s welcome to graduate early: you just make sure you’re in the senior dorms when the curtain comes down. It’s about as good an idea as skipping out on school entirely, but you’re welcome to do it.
Orion’s mouth had gone mulish. “I’m the one who’s set them up—”
“And you’ll also be the one who’s set us up, if you starve the mals of half this year’s graduating class,” I said. “How is that better? Even assuming you don’t just get yourself killed.”
“Look, even if the seniors don’t break the stairwells open, themalsare going to break them open. If not now, then next term, probably next quarter. If they’ve got hungry and desperate enough to start hitting the wards, they’ll keep at it. I’m not planning to just get the seniors out. I’m going to cull the graduation mals.”
“The gates are open for half an hour at most. Even if Patience and Fortitude don’t do you in, you can’t possibly kill enough mals in that time to do anything but open up some space for the little ones to grow,” I said. “Or were you planning to take up permanent residence? You’d get quite hungry living in the graduation hall, unless you want to starteatingmals instead of just sucking out their power. I know you’re just waiting for us to put your statue up, but that’s no reason to carry on like a slab of solid rock.”
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m listening,” he shot back.
“I don’t need a better idea to know yours is completely rubbish!” I said.
“I’vegot a better idea.” It wasn’t anyone at our table talking: Clarita Acevedo-Cruz had crossed over to us and was standing at the end of our table. I’d never spoken to her before, but we all recognized her anyway: she was the senior valedictorian.
In the early years, the school used to post academic rankings frequently. There are four enormous gilt-edged placards on the wall of the cafeteria, one for each class with our graduation year on top in shining letters, and at the end of each quarter, the names would march elaborately onto each one in order. However, the practice encouraged bad behavior, such as murdering the kids doing better than you. So now it’s only the very final senior ranking that’s put up, at New Year’s, and the rest of the placards stay blank. And all the kids who are going for valedictorian—and no one gets it without deliberately going for it—do their best to hide their marks. You can guess who’s trying by how much intensity they put into their schoolwork, but it’s hard to know for sure how well they’re doing. The kids who get anywhere in sniffing distance of valedictorian almost have to have massive egos as well as the drive of champion thoroughbreds, and if they aren’t also mad geniuses, they’re such brutally hard workers that they’ve made up for it.
Clarita hadn’t just made valedictorian, she’d played it so close to the vest that nobody had even suspected she was in the running. She had even picked up the occasional spare shift from maintenance-track kids who needed some free time, so most people assumed she was in maintenance track herself. Including the twenty kids who’d ended up directly below her in the rankings, having spent their own academic careers in savage and occasionally violent rivalry, snooping on each other’s exams and sabotaging each other’s projects. After the list had finally gone up with her name at the top, the news had gone buzzing round the school for days. The thing everyone had said was some variation on, “That dull girl from—” and insert a random Spanish-speaking country. She was actually from Argentina, where her mum did occasional maintenance work for the enclave in Salta, but it took about two weeks before the accurate information finally worked its way around, because hardly anyone knew anything at all about her. Until then, she’d been easy to overlook: short and thin and hard-faced, and she’d always worn—deliberately, in retrospect—dull beige and grey clothing.
It was a brilliant strategy. Even if she had only made top ten in the end, the surprise of her showing up out of nowhere would’ve made her look better than someone who’d visibly been going for the top spot the whole time. Three and a half years of hiding your light under a bushel, doing the odd maintenance shift on top of your classwork, without ever once bragging about a mark on a project or an exam—that was more discipline than most teenagers have when marks are the only thing in school you care about. Well, apart from surviving.
Her discipline had paid off with a guaranteed spot in New York. Nobody cared if you were dull if you could cast six major arcana workings in a row, which she’d done for the final project in her senior seminar. We all knew about that, too, because after the rankings finally went up, she’d mounted a binder on the wall next to her door with literally every mark she’d received in the past three and a half years, so anyone could come and look through it and see them in detail, possibly to make up for all the bragging she hadn’t done before then.
Too bad for her that she was now also stuck with Todd on her team. Orion hadn’t wanted to talk about it much, but I’d gathered that Todd’s dad was indeed high up on the enclave council, and despite what Chloe had promised me in the library, the other New York seniors on his team were apparently reluctant to ditch his darling boy. Very likely he had control of at least one or two of the better defensive artifacts they were planning to use. And Clarita didn’t get a vote, unless she wanted to ditch the entire alliance herself—along with her guaranteed spot, which she wasn’t going to be able to replace this close to graduation.
But being saddled with Todd wasn’t her fault, and none of us needed any incentive to take her seriously. Everyone at the tables nearby had stopped whispering and was straining over to listen to her. “I’ve worked out the numbers,” she said to Orion. “There’re records in the library of inducted students and graduated students. You’ve saved six hundred lives since you started school.” The quiet spread further out, followed by a ripple of whispers as people repeated the information. I’d known he was saving ridiculous numbers of us, but I hadn’t known it wasthatmuch. “More than three hundred just this one year. That’s whywe’reall hungry, not just the maleficaria. The food trays aren’t supposed to be empty if you get here before the bell rings.”
Orion stood up and faced her, his jaw tight. “I’m not sorry.”
“I’m notsorry,either,” she said. “Only a bastard would be sorry. But that is the mana we have to pay back. There are nine hundred seniors left. An ordinary year, half of us can expect to get out. But if we alone have to pay back all the lives you’ve saved this year on top of that, we’re talking less than a hundred survivors. It’s not fair for our class to bear that burden.”
“So we should let the mals into the school?” Chloe said. “Then you all make it out, the freshmen all die, and theykeepdying until the school gets shut down completely so they can do a full extermination on the place, if they even can. How is that fair, either?”
“Of course it’s not,” Clarita said cuttingly. “If we got out that way, over your bodies, that’s malia whether or not we took the hit for it directly.Mostof us don’t want that.” She didn’t actually turn and glare at Todd across the room, but the emphasis didn’t escape any of us. I would’ve been furiously angry with him in her place: three and a half years slogging to the very top of the mountain, and this was what she’d got for it. Not only did she have to worry about just how expendable Todd was going to considerher,she was going to come out with her reputation attached to him. Everyone would always think of her as the valedictorian who’d chosen to stick with a poacher, however little choice she really had.
“Idon’t want it,” she added. “But we also don’t want to let you buy your lives with ours. That’s what I hear seniors saying. Not, let’s rip open the school, but why don’t we make you, your class, graduate with us. Your class are the ones Orion has saved the most.” Chloe flinched visibly, and a lot of the other kids at our table tensed. “So? Are you all willing to do that, graduate early, to save the poor little freshmen? If not, you can stop”—she waved a hand in a spiraling circle, making a gesture of drama—“about how evil we are because we don’t want to die. It doesn’t help anyone. We know what we have to do, if we don’t want to pay it back with blood. We have to pay it back withwork.”
Clarita turned back to Orion. “There’re more than four thousand of us in here right now. Ten times more wizards than built the Scholomance in the first place. We’ve got a little more than a week. All of us put in work, build all the mana we can, and you go down into the graduation hall and use it to fix the scouring machinery down there. And that will clear the hall before we graduate, enough that our class doesn’t all have to die. Because we’ll have paid back the debt together.” She had to raise her voice to finish: a wild babbling of conversation had erupted throughout the entire room.
Her plan certainly had a nice sound to it. If you put aside the challenge ofgettingto the cleansing equipment downstairs, the challenge of repairing it wasn’t insurmountable at all. We wouldn’t have to invent anything new. The detailed blueprints for the whole school that are on display everywhere include the engines that generate the walls of mortal flame for cleansing. The best artificers would be easily good enough to create replacement parts, and the best maintenance-track kids would be easily good enough to install them.
You could really hear in the changing pitch of voices in the room that everyone was beginning to getexcitedabout the idea. If we did get the cleansing fires running in the graduation hall, it wouldn’t just be the seniors this year who saw the benefits. There would be fewer mals in the school for years, and the cleansing might run again for our graduation, and the sophomores, too.
Unfortunately, you can’t, in fact, put aside the challenge of getting to the equipment. It broke for the first time back in 1886. The first repair crew—the original idea the enclaves had for school maintenance was that paid crews of grown wizards would pop in through the graduation gates every so often and come up, ha ha—anyway, the first crew sent in didn’t come back out again and also didn’t repair a thing. The second and much larger crew did manage to get the equipment repaired, but only two of them made it back out, with quite the alarming tale to tell. By then, the graduation hall was already home to our senior resident maw-mouths and several hundred exceptional horrors—the kind smart enough to realize that once they wriggled in through the gates, they could just lie around the hall and wait for an annual feast of tender young wizardlings. And the cleansing failed again in 1888. There were wards protecting the machinery, but somehow the mals kept getting through. They didn’t have anything to do all year but sit around down there bashing on things, I suppose.
There were enough recriminations flying among the enclaves by then that Sir Alfred himself personally led in a large crew of heroic volunteers to install what he insisted would be a permanent repair. He was the Dominus of Manchester—he’d won the position for having built the school—and was generally agreed to be the most powerful wizard alive at the time. He was last seen going screaming into Patience or possibly Fortitude—witness accounts differ about which side of the gate the maw-mouth in question was on—along with about half of his crew. His “permanent” repair got dismantled again three years later.
