Page 18 of The Last Graduate
“No!”
“Oh, come on, seriously, look me in the face and tell me you didn’t kiss at least once up there,” Aadhya said.
“We didn’t!” I said, in glad and perfect honesty, and at dinner I grudgingly gave Precious the three ripe red grapes out of the fruit cup I’d bagged that was otherwise only full of tired-looking honeydew and pale underripe pineapple chunks that stung in my mouth. “Don’t take this as encouragement,” I told her. She accepted them with smug graciousness and ate all three one after another and went to sleep in her cup with her tiny belly distended.
There’re almost no holidays in the Scholomance. They’d be a pointless fiction, but that’s not why we don’t have them; we don’t have them because we—and the school—can’t afford them. We need to beworking, all the time, just to keep the lights on. So there’s only graduation and induction day, on the second of July, and the semesters are divided around the first of January, which is also when the senior class rankings get posted and the winter cleansing happens. But that leaves one extra day in the first semester, which the Americans decided was a terrible problem that obviously had to be addressed. So one day each fall, after the last of the remedial post-midterms work has been turned in—or not—we have Field Day.
Itisa notable milestone in the year: it marks the start of the killing season. By then, all the mals that go into hibernation or reproductive phases after graduation have woken up and are finding ways back upstairs, or their adorable new babies have squirmed their own way up, and the competition among them gets more aggressive. Roughly one in seven freshmen die between Field Day and New Year’s, as I’d loudly and repeatedly informed all of mine, whose nameshadall got into my head at this point despite my best efforts. It’s never a good idea to get attached to freshmen, and doing it this early in the year was an invitation to misery, but after they’d saved me and Orion from blundering around almost choking ourselves to death, it had worn off enough of the cold-aloof-senior mystique I’d cultivated that they’d startedtalkingto me. Even my most aggressive snappishness wasn’t discouraging them sufficiently anymore.
I gather that the usual purpose of a Field Day is to build school spirit by letting people run around doing sport in the fresh air and cheering each other on in their achievements. We don’t have any fresh air or school spirit, so instead we all gather together down in the gymnasium and cheer each other on for having stayed alive long enough to experience another Field Day. Attendance is mandatory, and enforced by the cafeteria being closed all day, so the only place to get food is the buffet that gets laid on in the gym in an enormous bank of antique Automat-style cases that are trundled out for the occasion. I have no idea where they go the rest of the time. You can only unlock them by feeding in tokens, which you can only get by participating in the various delightful games like relay races and dodgeball. To add to the festive atmosphere, normally at least one or two kids get eaten on the way down to the gym, since there are enough mals out there who can remember dates and know there’s going to be a buffet laid on forthemalong the stairs and corridors.
When the Scholomance first opened back in 1880, there were several really complex multilayered spells on the gym to give students the illusion of being outside in nature, complete with trees and open skies above that would go from day to night. It was the masterpiece of a crack team of artificers from Kyoto. Even at the time, Kyoto was powerful enough that Manchester couldn’t afford to just blow them off completely when the school was being constructed, so instead Manchester fobbed them off with the gym. Kyoto took revenge by making it so spectacular that everyone who got to tour the place couldn’t talk of anything else. There are several raving accounts framed up on the walls amid the blueprints, with antique photos that are supposedly of the gymnasium but look exactly like photos from a guidebook to the Japanese countryside.
No one’s seen the illusions working in more than a hundred years. After Patience and Fortitude, our resident maw-mouths, first made themselves at home in the graduation hall, and all the maintenance started being done by students, the whole thing fell apart. The plants all died so long ago that there’s not even dirt left, just the empty ironwork planters, and the color has faded out of the distant shifting murals of hills and mountains, so now they look like a landscape out of the afterlife. There’s one week in springtime when a scattering of bleached-white ghostly scraps come drifting down mysteriously—all that’s left of the cherry blossom experience. Occasionally stark bare trees sprout up, and there’s a small pagoda that occasionally appears and vanishes again. I don’t think anyone’s ever been mad enough to go inside, but if they have, they’ve never come out again to report.
But the sunlamps still work, and at least there’s wide-open room to run around and move, with an enormously high ceiling that lets you see mals dropping on you with plenty of warning. Most kids love the gym. I’ve avoided the place for virtually my entire Scholomance career. Mals come to the gym all the time; it’s on the lowest floor, so it’s the first stop for any of them who have managed to squirm past the wards from below. It’s a bad place to be a solitary zebra. And if I ever tried to join anything as casual as a game of tag, within a few minutes everyone else in the group had mysteriously decided they were moving on to something else that involved picking teams, and I’d always be odd one out. I did try to go running on my own instead, but that made me just a bit of an appealing target, and the other kids would make things worse. They’d deliberately move their game or some piece of equipment they’d cobbled together so that I’d have to run through a narrow lane near the walls, or cross some convoluted bit of greyish landscaping just right for mals to hide in. It wasn’t simply out of pure dislike. Not that they didn’t dislike me, but anything that got me would be something that didn’t get them.
So I don’t go to the gym. Instead I exercise alone in my room to build mana, and it’s always good for a boost if I first dwell onwhyI’ve got to do it alone in my room, and being rejected and outcast. That’s the kind of thing that makes you really not want to exercise and just lie on your bed and eat ice cream, except there’s no ice cream to be had in the Scholomance, which makes you feel worse, and if you can force yourself to exercise anyway despite being miserable and not wanting to, voilà, extra mana.
But I’ve gone to every Field Day. I could never afford to miss a day of eating, much less one of the best days of eating we get each year. At least on Field Day, the activities are set and you just queue up to do each one, so I couldn’t be left out comprehensively. And because of all that exercise I do alone in my room, I usually come out with a fair haul of tokens. And an even larger haul of resentment, since I’m clearly a good choice for teams and still never get picked.
Even this year, going into the gym I was ready, automatically, for Aadhya and Liu to ditch me. I don’t mean I expected that to happen—it would’ve been a horrid surprise—but some part of my brain was planning for it anyway, working out the kind of strategy I’ve always needed to have for Field Day. First I’d go for the rope climb, because everyone avoids it early on, when there still might be some mals hiding in the ceiling panels or camouflaged against the dingy mottled grey that was once the sky. So the queue is short and you can get the tickets quick, and while you’re up there, you take a look round and see which other activities have the short queues, because if you don’t have allies watching your back, overall your best odds are to take a few risks up front and get enough tickets to spend the rest of the day eating and performing perfunctory cheers until people start to head back to their rooms.
So I was primed and ready to be abandoned and left on the sidelines. What I wasn’t ready for was Magnus. Oh, I’d have reacted at speed if he’d tried to slip me some kind of contact poison or if he’d sent some minor gnawing construct to chew through a rope while I was on it. I was, however, completely unprepared for what he actually did.
A shoving match started while I was queued up with Aadhya and Liu and Chloe for the relay race, and a bunch of big senior boys went tumbling across the queue, cutting me and Chloe off. It turned into everyone shoving angrily, trying to keep their places or get better ones in the confusion, and we ended up pushed out of the queue and staring at Aadhya and Liu across a messy knot of people. We’d already been queuing for twenty minutes, and the line had grown a lot longer in that time. If Aadhya and Liu gave up the spot and came back to us, we’d all end up losing the time for a full activity or two. But everyone in the queue was keyed up, and no one was going to let us get back to our original places without a fight.
“Chloe!” Magnus yelled from the nearest queue, where he was about to go into the tug-of-war. “That’s Jaclyn and Sung behind your allies, let them have your spots and come over here!” Aadhya was already waving a thumbs-up at us from over the sea of heads, and Chloe grabbed my hand and ran with me over to where Magnus and Jermaine had stiff-armed a couple of juniors in the queue behind them, who weren’t brave enough to start arguing when they let us in.
I was so completely bewildered by Magnus going out of his way to be helpful that I had my hands on the big rope before I worked out that the whole thing had been a setup: his ally Sung had definitely been one of the kids in the shoving match, and I was sure a couple of the others had also been New York hangers-on. I craned over for a look at the other queue: Aadhya and Liu were still another five minutes back from the start of the relay races, which meant that when we had finished here, in order to hook back up with them, Chloe and I would have to waste that time just standing around like target mannequins. It would make much more obvious sense for them to stick with Jaclyn and Sung and for us to go on to something else—withMagnus,who apparently nowwanted my company. Or rather wanted to cut me away from Aadhya and Liu, and make sure I was firmly embedded in the New York crowd.
“Tebow, if no one’s ever told you, you’re a soggy dishcloth,” I told Magnus when we got off the tug-of-war—our side had won; I’d yanked with a lot of vengeful fury involved. He stopped open-mouthed in the start of whatever hurrah-go-team speech he’d been about to deliver, so likely no one ever had, even though the resemblance was uncanny in my opinion: cold, useless, clings when all you want is to shake it off. “Sorry, Rasmussen, I’m not spending all day with this wanker,” I told Chloe, and marched off towards the long line for the egg-and-spoon races. Those are always popular, despite being possibly the stupidest activity a human being could engage in, since even if a spoon turns out to be a mimic or an egg hatches something unpleasant halfway through the race, they usually can’t be very terrible if they’re only the size of a spoon.
Chloe joined me on the line a moment later, with a beleaguered expression that annoyed me by reminding me of the similar look Mum occasionally gets when she’s been trying to make peace between me and the most recently irritated commune-dweller. At least Chloe didn’t try to persuade me that I ought to try and see things from Magnus’s side, and call forth his understanding by offering my own, et cetera. She was still trying to think of what shedidwant to say—I don’t know why Americans won’t just talk about the weather like reasonable people—when Mistoffeles suddenly put his head out of the little cup on her chest and emitted a few alarmed squeaks, at which point I noticed that eight kids from Shanghai enclave had casually been drifting off the lines on either side of ours and were now very-not-casually closing in around us. And one of them was already muttering away at an incantation for something unpleasant that he was about to throw in our faces.
Chloe darted a scared look over towards Aadhya and Liu—deep in the relay race and not even glancing our way—and then looked around for anyone else from New York, except Orion wasn’t anywhere to be seen, I presume too busy hunting the mals in the stairways and corridors, and of course Magnus the Magnificent had flounced off with the rest of his pals to huddle on the other side of the gym and discuss what to do about my refusal to accept their wide-armed welcome.
“Afilthysoggy dishcloth,” I said, trying to vent enough of my fury to think through the situation. It wasn’t the numbers: I can handle a thousand enemies as easily as seven, as long as byhandleyou mean “kill in a grisly fashion.” I hadn’t any idea what to do about them otherwise. I do have a top-notch spell to seize total control over the minds of a group of people, only there isn’t a constraint on the size of the crowd: you have to cast it on a defined physical space isolated by things like walls, and then it grabs everyone in it. In this case, we were inside the gym that was holding literally every kid in the school. Also, the spell was quite vague on the aftereffects on the minds in question.
I could just have waited until the other kid threw his spell, and then caught it and thrown it back at him. It’s hard to describe how that works, and in fact it doesn’t work for most people; the first-year incantations textbook informed us firmly that you’re much better off either doing a defensive spell or trying to get your own offensive spell out before the other wizard fires off theirs. But I’m brilliant at reflecting as long as the spell being thrown at me is malicious or destructive enough, and I had a strong presentiment that wasn’t going to be a problem in this case.
And then I would have the pleasure of watching up-close whilehisskin flew off his body, or his intestines exploded out of his mouth or his brains dribbled out his ears or whatever horrible thing he meant to do to us, and it would just be the purest self-defense; no one would even criticize me for it. Not to my face, at any rate.
I would really have liked to be angry at them right then. I often haven’t any difficulty in contemplating extreme violence and even murder when I’m angry, and I can get angry at an enclaver at the drop of a hat. But I couldn’t be angry at them, not that way, not with that helpful burning righteous rage, because I’m really very good at knowing the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, and picking a fight to the death with a wizard who’s capable of killing with a wave of her hand isn’t it. If I was dangerous enough to warrant killing, the smart selfish enclaver thing forthemto do was to keep the bloody hell away from me, as far as possible. They ought to have kept their heads down, got out safely as they were all sure to do, and then gone home to tell their parents about me. They were teenagers; they had every right to let me be the grown-ups’ problem.
Instead here they were, all of them gambling with their safe, sheltered lives—they had to assume I’d take out at leastoneof them, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t even have loser allies along with them to take that mortal blow. The boy in front getting ready to cast was an enclaver: his face was vaguely familiar from the language lab, round and spotty with a mustache he’d valiantly been trying to grow for the last two years. We’d never studied any of the same languages; I didn’t know his name. But Liu might: her mum and dad had worked for the enclave a few times. Their parents might know each other.
And I did know the girl backing him up, Wang Yuyan, because everyone in languages track knew her: she was doing twelve languages, which no enclave kid needed to do. Either she was ambitious or she loved languages madly or maybe she was just a tremendous masochist, I had no idea. I didn’t really know her, we’d never had a conversation or anything. But we’d been in the same Sanskrit section sophomore year, and one time I’d had a dictionary she needed—when you’re trying to get the meaning of a more obscure word, you often need to chase it down through three or four dictionaries until you end up in a language you’re fluent in—and she’d asked me to look the word up for her in a perfectly civil way, and offered to look one up for me in return.
That might not sound like much, but for comparison’s sake, in freshman year an enclave kid from Sydney glanced down at the really good French–English dictionary I’d found that week in the library and said, “Let’s have that, there’s a good girl,” not even asking. And because I told him exactly where he could hop off, at the end of class he had two of his minion-friends trip me going out of the room while another grabbed my entire bag and ran down the corridor shaking all my things out, yelling, “Free supplies!” while everyone laughed and grabbed.
I got up in the doorway with my lip bleeding and my forehead bruised. He was standing right there with two more of his pals to enjoy the show, all of them grinning, and then I turned and looked him in the face and thought in a red haze of all the things I could have done to him, so he stopped grinning and they fled the other way. Ever since, he’s firmly ignored my existence. Ah, the advantages of being a monstrous dark sorceress in embryonic form.
But he wouldn’t have stopped on his own. That’s what enclavers are like, most of them. Like Magnus, who was the reason we were exposed and also the reason the Shanghai kids were putting themselves on the line to take me out. Because they could imagine what someone like that would do with the kind of power I had.
And probably, maybe, at least half of those enclaver kids closing in round us were like Magnus themselves, but Yuyan wasn’t. I knew that much about her, and I also knew what she was casting, because I’d overheard people talking about this fantastic spell she’d got in her languages seminar that allowed you to get behind someone else’s spell andpush,meaning that whatever spotty mustache boy was about to throw at us, she’d double it. That meant that when I flung it back, she’d get hit with the reflection, too. And maybe she deserved it, but I didn’t want to give it to her, to any of those kids getting ready to kill us for no reason other than being absolutely terrified of me and what I might do. It felt like making themrightto have come after me.
But I even less wanted to let them kill me and Chloe, so I was just steeling my gut to go ahead and reflect the spell back anyway, when Chloe pulled a tiny plastic spray bottle filled with blue sparkling stuff from her pocket and spritzed it in the air all round us. On the other side of the glimmering, the whole room slowed down like everyone but the two of us was moving through mud—which meant of course she’d sped the two of us up; much easier.
