Page 13 of The Last Graduate
It had, in fact, been La Main de la Mort. She’d obviously done French at some point, assuming she hadn’t grown up bilingual anyway, and it’s not a hard spell to recognize; there’re not that many three-word killing spells. The difficulty of casting it isn’t learning thewords,it’s just got a really extreme amount of theje ne sais quoithat a lot of French spells have: you’ve got to be able to toss them off blithely, effortlessly. Since La Main de la Mort kills you instead of your target if you get it even the slightest bit wrong, very few people feel blithe about giving it a go, unless for instance they’re inside a maw-mouth where death would be a reasonably good outcome. Also you’ve got to be able to channel a truly outrageous amount of mana without displaying the slightest effort, which is tricky for most people who aren’t designed to be dark queens of sorcery et cetera.
“Look it up yourself if you want to know,” I said, taking refuge in more rudeness, and walked away from them as fast as I could towards the stairs, but even Ravi was gawking at me.
At that point it wasn’t exactly transmutation of matter to work out that I had something substantial and disturbing under the hood. When I came in at lunchtime, I saw Liesel stopping to talk to Magnus at the New York table, and he was waving a couple of his hangers-on over to open a spot for her to sit down next to him. “Well, I’m fucked,” I told Aadhya and Liu, succinctly, as soon as I reached our table and sat down with them. And how right I was.
Mum spent a lot of timein my formative years gently reminding me that people don’t think about us nearly as much as we think they do, because they’re all busy worrying what people are thinking about them. I thought that I’d listened to her, but it turned out I hadn’t. Privately I’d believed, on some deep level, that everyone was in fact thinking about me all the time, evaluating me, et cetera, when really they hadn’t been giving me much of a thought at all. I had the pleasure of uncovering this exciting truth about myself because all of a sudden, a substantial number of peopledidstart thinking about me quite a lot, and the contrast was hard to miss.
In retrospect, everyone had quickly written off the weirdness of Orion Lake falling for the class loser. He was already weird by all our usual standards. Even Magnus and the other New York enclavers, offering me a guaranteed spot: they hadn’t really thoughtIwas anything unusual; they thought Orion was choosing to be odd in yet another way. And as for my surviving the graduation hall escapade, everyone had assumed that was Orion saving me. But Liesel spreading it around that I could sling La Main de la Mort while high on eldritch vapors was one straw too many for the collective camel. And once the other New York kids did actually spend a few moments thinking about me, of course it took them less than a day to realize where all their mana was going.
That night when I left the library to go down to bed, I glanced back and saw Magnus and three friends closing in on Chloe around a couch in the reading room, the dismay on her face clear to read even from between their backs. I thought about going back, but what was the use? Was I going to ask Chloe to lie to her enclave friends, the people she’d spend the rest of her life with, just so I could keep sucking down mana from them? Was I going to beg them to keep letting me cling on? Obviously not. Was I going to threaten them? Tempting but no. There wasn’t anything else to say or do. So I just turned my back and went down, in the firm certainty that they’d insist on Chloe cutting me off first thing the next morning. Actually, that was my optimistic scenario. Really I expected Magnus to appear at my door leading a school-wide mob with not-necessarily-metaphorical pitchforks.
The thing is, I’m not actually unique in the history of wizard society; not even Orion is, really. We’re both once-in-a-generation talents, but those happen, as you might have guessed, once in a generation. Itisa bit of a coincidence that we’re in school at the same time, and that we’re both fairly extreme examples. But I’m reasonably sure that’s because there’s some violation of balance being redressed on our backs. Dad nobly walks into a maw-mouth for an eternity of pain to save me and Mum; she gives out too much healing for free; I end up with an affinity for violence and mass destruction. The year before that, twelve maleficers murdered the entire senior class, so a hero who would save hundreds of kids in school got conceived. The moral physics of the principle of balance: equal and opposite reactions totting up on both sides.
The point is, wizards like us do come along every so often: a single individual powerful enough to shift the balance of power among the enclaves depending on where they land. Roughly forty years ago, a hugely powerful artificer with an affinity for large-scale construction came through the school. Every major enclave made him offers. He turned them all down and went home to Shanghai, where his family’s ancient former enclave had been occupied by a maw-mouth. He organized a circle of independent wizards to help him, personally spearheaded the effort to take out the maw-mouth, and as you might imagine was immediately acclaimed as the new Dominus, not three years out of school. It still looked like a bad deal for him: the enclave he rescued was ancient and had soaked up magic for centuries, but it was small and poky by modern standards, and at the time most of the really talented Chinese wizards headed straight to New York, to London, to the California enclaves. Even Guangzhou and Beijing had to recruit from the second string.
Well, after four decades of Li Shan Feng’s rule, Shanghai’s got six towers and a monorailinsidethe enclave, they just opened their seventh gateway, and lately they’ve been signaling that they’re thinking of splitting off the Asian enclaves and building a new school themselves. And that’s part of what makes Orion so important, so important that New York was willing to throw a priceless guaranteed enclave spot at some loser girl just because Orion liked her. Everyone knows there’s a power struggle coming, and Orion’s not just a top student inside the Scholomance; he’s a game-changer on the outside. No one’s going to go to outright war with an enclave that has an invincible fighter, and that’s not even touching on the resource he represents if he can convertmalsintomana.And he belongs really securely to New York: son of the very likely future Domina, no less, and I’m sure he’s at least partly responsible for her being in that position. All the kids from Shanghai in here probably came in with instructions to keep a close eye on him, and gather as much information as they could. They haven’t got any less anxious about him over the last three years, while he’s been busy building a substantial fan club of all the kids he’s saved.
What I hadn’t realized, as I went down to bed, was that I was about to be promoted to game-changer status alongside him.
Chloe didn’t try to lie to Magnus—she’s a terrible liar anyway. She fell back on desperately arguing that they had to keep giving me manaor else,and went into a lot of detail about the grisly potential else, with a vivid description of my dismemberment of her cushion mals. A normal person would have been terrified to find out about nuclear bomb me waiting to go off. Magnus decided that he quite fancied bringing a tidy nuclear bomb home to his parents.
By breakfast the next morning, I’d gladly have faced any number of pitchforks instead of having to see his smug rubbish dump of a face smirking at the Shanghai kids across the cafeteria, like he’d done something clever or recruited me by hand, instead of having done his level best just last term tokillme. The Shanghai kids all looked grim and worried back, for that matter. By that afternoon, I knew for a fact that they were offering stuff to people fordetailsabout me, because they had another go at questioning Sudarat: one of them had actually offered her a power-sharer for the rest of the year, which was almost guaranteed to keep her alive that long. “Take it,” I told her bitterly. “Someone ought to do well out of this.”
I suppose I didn’t have the right to complain: New York wasn’t cutting me off after all, so I still had lovely torrents of mana coming. If anything, the other New York kids had all gotmoreenthusiastic about building mana now that they knew where it was going. Because of course they expected to get a handsome return on investment, namelyme,a massive gun tucked neatly in their enclave’s back pocket, ready for use in case of emergencies. They were all delightedly hoping to give me exactly the post-Scholomance life I’d dreamed of for years. The bastards.
Two days later, Orion said to me, of all things, “Hey, after graduation, what do you think of taking a road trip?”
I stared at him. “What?”
“The guys were talking about our doing a group road trip,” he said earnestly. “The enclave has this really great customized RV, they’d let us take it, we were thinking…” He trailed off, possibly alerted by my expression of total incredulity that there was something odd about this conversation. It wasn’t just that he had actually out-loud attempted to makeconcrete plansset in the future that required making the assumption that we’d all survive to appear for these plans—horribly taboo among all but the richest enclavers, and even they have the tact to avoid the topic in mixed company—but he was trying to suggest that I voluntarily spend time with the rest of the New York enclavers.
I knew he hadn’t come up with the idea on his own. Chloe had once told me with a perfectly straight face that Orion didn’t want anything except to kill mals, which was absolute bollocks, but it was the kind of absolute bollocks that I’m certain everyone around him his entire life had so strongly encouraged that it had got lodged in his own head. And the power-sharer he wore only went one way, so hehadto go round killing them if he wanted mana, which all of us do. They’d programmed him really thoroughly to spend all his time thinking about hunting. The only other thing I’d ever heard him actually express wanting was me, which I choose to believe meant anyone at all who’d treat him like a person instead of a mal-killing automaton.
That was the scale of things for which he could express desire: friendship, love, humanity. But he didn’t care where in the cafeteria he sat, he didn’t care what shirt he wore, he didn’t care what classes he was in or what books he read. He did his work more or less dutifully, was polite, and preferred to avoid hero-worshippers while feeling guilty about it, and if I said, “Let’s go stand on our heads on the cafeteria mezzanine stairs,” he’d probably shrug and say, “If you want to.” He certainly hadn’t come up with the sudden desire to go on a road trip away from his enclave. He’d beenfedthe idea, and the idea was very clearly to getmeinto the New York crowd. Before they’d been worrying about someone else using me to get Orion; now they were trying to use Orion to getme.
“Lake,” I said in measured tones, “why don’t you tell Magnus actually you’d like to go backpacking in Europe with me instead. See what he thinks of that. We could do the Grand Tour! Start in Edinburgh, visit Manchester and London, go on to Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Pisa—” I was rattling off the names of every city with an enclave I could think of, and Orion got the point, scowled at me, and sloped off.
I felt pretty pleased with myself afterwards, until that evening when I went on a snack bar run with Aadhya, and Scott and Jermaine from New York passed us on the stairs and said a cheery, “Hey, El, how’s it going? Hey, Aad,” with a friendly wave.
She waved back and said, “Hey, guys,” like a civilized human being, while I delivered the coldest possible, “Hi,” in return. As soon as they were out of sight, she looked at me and said, “Whatnow?”
I hadn’t ranted about the charming road-trip scheme to her because I couldn’t without breaking the horrible taboo myself, and being tactless into the bargain. Aadhya’s family lived in New Jersey, and while she hadn’t said outright that she’d have liked a New York enclave spot herself, it was what virtually every wizard for three hundred miles around the city aspired to, since they were all more or less working for the place anyway. “They’d like to make plans for my future,” I said, shortly.
She sighed, but once we were back in her room and eating our makeshift parfaits—strawberry yogurt out of slightly aged tubes, topped with fruit-and-nut mix and whipped cream out of a can; we’d regretfully discarded the tin of vienna sausages, which had been not merely dented but slightly punctured, with a bit of greenish ooze round the edges of the hole—she said, “El, they’re not that bad.”
I knew she wasn’t talking about the parfaits, which were fairly ambrosial by our standards. “They are, though,” I said, revolted.
“I’m not saying they’re sterling examples of grace and nobility,” Aadhya said. “They’re all kind of dickish, but they’re the same kind of dickish that anyone is when you put them in an enclave. Magnus, okay, that boy is trying way too hard to be big man on campus. But Jermaine’s a nice guy! Scott is a nice guy! Chloe is practicallytoonice. And you actuallylikeOrion, who is kind of creepy—”
“He’s not!”
“Excuse you, he totally is,” Aadhya said. “Half the time he can’t recognize me unless I’mwithyou. He pretends to when I say hi to him in shop, but every time his brain goes into this panicky loop likewho is she oh no I’m supposed to know her oh no I’m failing at human.And it’s not just me, he does it to everyone. He could probably tell you every last mal he’s killed in the entire time he’s been at school, but us human beings all get filed under the generic category of future potential rescue. I don’t know why hecansee you, I think it’s because you’re some crazy super-maleficer in waiting.Creepy.”
I glared at her indignantly, but she just huffed and added, “Andyouhave a hard time accepting that anyone has a right to exist if theywon’tjump three lab tables to save the life of a total stranger, so you guys are totally perfect for each other. But sorry to break it to you, you both still need toeatandsleepsomewhere and, even worse, occasionally interact with other humans. Why are you setting every available bridge on fire?”
I put down my empty yogurt cup and pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms round them. “I’m going to start thinking Magnus put you up to this.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, he tried. I told him thatIwasn’t a crazy person and I’d take a place in New York in a hot second if he offered it to me, but he wasn’t going to get any closer to bagging you. My point is—look, El, what are you even going todo?”
