Page 2 of The Last Graduate
“But not…more than that,” Liu said softly, looking across the room at her cousins, who were at their own table now, along with Aaron and Pamyla, the girl who’d brought in Aadhya’s letter, and a good, solid crowd of other freshmen kids clustered around them: the kind of group that mostly only enclave kids got. Which surprised me, until I realized they’d picked up some glow-by-association from getting that close to Orion, hero of the hour. And then it occurred to me, possibly even a bit of glow might have come from me, since to all of the freshmen I was now a lofty senior who’d also been on the run down to the hall, and not the creepy outcast of my year.
And—I wasn’t the creepy outcast by anyone’s standards anymore. I had a graduation alliance with Aadhya and Liu, one of the first formed in our year. I’d been invited to sit at one of the safest tables in the cafeteria, by someone who had other choices. I hadfriends.Which felt even more unreal than surviving long enough to become a senior, and I owed that, I owed every last bit of it, to Orion Lake, and I didn’t care, actually, what the price tag was going to be. There’d be one, no question. Mum hadn’t warned me for no reason. But I didn’t care. I’d pay it back, whatever it was.
As soon as I put it in those terms inside my head, I stopped worrying over my note. I didn’t even have to wish anymore that Mum hadn’t sent it. Mum had to send it, because she loved me and she didn’t know Orion from a cold welshcake; she couldn’t help but warn me off if she knew I was on a bad road for his sake. And I could hold her love close to me and feel it, and still decide I was ready to pay. I put my fingers into my pocket to touch the last scrap I’d saved, the piece that saidcourage,and I ate it that night before I went to sleep, lying in my narrow bed on the lowest floor of the Scholomance, and I dreamed of being small again, running in a wide-open field of overgrown grass and tall purple-belled flowers around me, knowing Mum was nearby and watching me and glad that I was happy.
The lovely warm feeling lasted five seconds into the next morning, which is how long it took me to finish waking up. In most schools, you get holidays after term-end. Here, it’s graduation in the morning, induction in the evening, you congratulate yourself and your surviving friends that you’ve all lived that long, and the next day it’s the start of the new term. The Scholomance isn’t really conducive to holiday-making, to be fair.
On the first day of term, we have to go to our new homeroom and get our schedules lined up before breakfast. I was still feeling like moldy bread: it tends to slightly aggravate a half-healed gut wound when you get yourself bungeed around by yanker spells et cetera. I’d deliberately set an alarm to wake me five minutes before the end of morning curfew, because I was absolutely sure that wherever I was assigned for homeroom, it was going to take forever getting there. And sure enough, when the slip of paper with my assignment slid under my door at 5:59a.m.,it was for room 5013. I glared at it. Seniors hardly ever get any classroom assignments above the third floor, so you might think I should have been pleased, except it was only homeroom, and I was sure I’d never get arealclass assigned that high. As far as I knew, thereweren’tany classrooms on that floor—fifth floor is the library. Probably I was being sent to some filing closet deep in the stacks with a handful of other luckless strangers.
I didn’t even clean my teeth. I just swished my mouth out with water from my jug and started off on the slog while the first other seniors up were still shambling off to the loo. I didn’t bother asking round to see if anyone else was going the same way: I was sure nobody I knew well enough to speak to would be. I just waved to Aadhya in passing as she came out of her room with her bathroom bag, and she nodded back in immediate understanding and gave me a thumbs-up for encouragement as she continued on to collect up Liu: we’re all sadly familiar with the hazard of a long slog to a classroom, and our year now had the longest slogs of all.
There was no moredownfor us: yesterday, just as the seniors’ res hall went rotating down to the graduation hall, ours had followed to take their place, at the lowest level of the school. I had to trot round to the stairway landing, then make my extremely cautious way through the workshop level—yes, it was the day after the cleansing, but it’s never a good thing to be first onto a classroom floor in the morning—and then begin on the five steep double flights of stairs straight up.
They all felt at least twice as long as usual. Distances in the Scholomance are extremely flexible. They can be long, agonizingly long, or approaching the infinite, depending largely on how much you’d like them to be otherwise. It also didn’t help that I was so early. I didn’t even see another kid until I was panting my way up past the sophomore res hall, where the early risers had started trickling onto the stairs in small groups, mostly alchemy and artifice students hoping to nab better seats in the workshop and the labs. By the time I reached the freshman floor, the regular morning exodus was in full swing, but since they were all freshmen on their first day with no real idea where they were going, that didn’t speed the stairs up at all.
The only saving grace of the whole painful trip was that I kept my storing crystal tightly clenched in my fist the whole time, concentrating on pushing mana into it. By the end of the final flight, where my gut was throbbing and my thighs were burning in counterpoint, every single deliberate step made a noticeable increase in the glow coming from between my fingers, and I had filled a good quarter of it by the time I came up into the completely empty reading room.
I badly needed to catch my breath, but as soon as I stopped moving, the five-minute warning bell rang from below. Stumbling around through the stacks looking for a classroom I had never even glimpsed before was a recipe for arriving late, not a good idea, so I grudgingly spent a bit of my hard-won mana on a finding spell. It cheerfully pointed me straight into a completely dark section of the stacks. I looked back without much hope at the stairs, but no one else was showing up to join me.
The reason for that became clear when I finally got to the classroom, which was behind a single dark wooden door almost invisible between two big cabinets full of ancient yellowing maps. I opened the door expecting to find something really horrible inside, and I did: eight freshmen, all of whom turned and stared at me like a herd of small and especially pitiful deer about to be mown down by a massive lorry. There wasn’t so much as a sophomore among the lot. “You’ve got to be joking,” I said with revulsion, and then I stalked to the front row and sat down in the best seat in the place, fourth from the near end. Which I could get without even a nudge, because they’d left the front row nearly wide open like they were still in primary school and worried about looking like teacher’s pets. The only teachers in here are the maleficaria, and they don’t have pets, they have lunch.
The desks were charming Edwardian originals, by which I mean ancient, too small for five-foot-ten me, and incredibly uncomfortable. They were made of wrought iron and would be hard to move in an emergency; the attached desk on mine, slightly too small to hold a sheet of normal-sized writing paper, had been very nicely polished and smooth roughly 120 years ago. It had since been scarified so thoroughly that kids had started writing on top of other kids’ graffiti just to have room for their messages of despair. One had writtenLET ME OUTover and over in a neat red ink border all around the entire L-shaped surface, and another had done a highlighter pass over it in yellow.
There was only one other kid in the front row, and she’d taken what would have been the best seat, sixth from the far end—smarter to get a bit more distance from the door—except for the air vent in the floor just two seats behind it. Which was currently covered by a stupider kid’s bookbag, so you couldn’t know it was there unless you spotted that the other three air vents in the floor were laid out in a square pattern that needed a fourth one there. She watched me coming in as if she expected me to kick her out of her seat: age hath its prerogatives, and seniors are rarely shy about taking them. When I took the real best seat, she looked behind herself, realized her mistake, then hurriedly collected up her bag and moved down the row and said, “Is this seat taken?” gesturing to the one next to me, with a sort of anxious air.
“No,” I said back to her irritably. I was annoyed because it made sense for me to let her sit next to me, since that only improved my odds by upping the nearby targets, and yet I didn’t particularly want to. She was an enclave kid, no question. That was a shield holder of some kind on her wrist, the deceptively dull-looking ring on her finger was almost certainly a power-sharer, and she’d come in actively drilled on Scholomance strategy, such as how to identify the best seats in a room, even on the first day of class when you’re too dazed to remember all the advice your parents gave you and instead just huddle with the other little kids like a zebra trying to hide in the herd. Also, the maths textbook in her bag was in Chinese, but she had good old Introductory Alchemy in English, and her notebooks were labeled in Thai script, meaning she was fluent enough to take magic coursework in not one but two foreign languages. Given the consequences of making even minor mistakes, that’s a tall order for a fourteen year old. Likely she’d been in the most expensive language classes enclave wealth could buy from the age of two. She’d probably been planning to turn round in a moment and tell the other kids they were sitting in bad and dangerous seats, so they’d understand where they all stood in the pecking order: beneath her. I was only surprised she hadn’t already made it clear.
Then one of the other kids behind us said tentatively, “Hello, El?” and I realized he was one of Liu’s cousins. “It’s Guo Yi Zheng,” he added, which was helpful, as I’d gone out of induction day in perfect confidence that I wouldn’t be seeing any of the freshmen I’d met ever again except by pure accident, and I hadn’t tried to remember their names. There’s not a lot of cross-year mingling in here. Our schedules make sure of that. Seniors spend almost all of our time on the lower levels, and freshmen get the safer classrooms higher up. If you’re a freshman who regularly spends time hanging round the places where seniors are, you’re asking to get eaten, and some maleficaria will grant your request.
But on the other hand, if you are somewhere with an upperclassman in range, you’d rather be closer to them than not. Zheng was already collecting up his bag and hustling over, which was just as well, because he’d been nearest the door until then. “May I sit with you?”
“Yeah, fine,” I said. I didn’t mindhim. Liu being my ally didn’t give her freshman cousin a claim on me, but he didn’t need it to. She was myfriend.“Watch out for air vents, even on the library level,” I added. “And you were too close to the door.”
“Oh. Yes, of course, I was just—” he said, looking over at the other kids, but I cut him off.
“I’m not yourmum,” I said, deliberately rude: you do freshmen no favors by letting them imagine there are heroes in here, Orion Lake notwithstanding. I couldn’t be his savior; I had enough to do saving myself. “I don’t need an excuse. I’ve just told you. Listen or don’t.” He shut it and sat down, a bit abashed.
Of course, he was right to stick close to the other kids: there’s a reason zebras hang out in herds. But it isn’t worth letting the other zebras put you in a really bad position. If you were unlucky, you learned that lesson when the lion ate you instead of them. If you were me, you learned it when you saw the lion eat someone else, one of the loser kids who wasn’t quite as much a loser as you were, and who therefore had been allowed to sit on the end of the row, between the door and the kids who mattered.
And he had no business letting them put him on the end of the row, because hewasone of the kids who mattered, or closer to it than anyone else here but the enclave girl. It’s widely known that Liu’s family are really close to founding an enclave of their own. They’re already a big enough group that Liu got a box of hand-me-downs from an extended family member when she came in, and she’d given Zheng and his twin brother Min each a bag of stuff out of it, with the rest to come at the end of this year. They weren’t enclavers, but they weren’t losers either. But for the moment, he was still behaving as though he were an ordinary human being, instead of a student in the Scholomance.
A buzz of noise went up from the other kids. While we’d been talking, the draft schedules had just appeared on our desks, in the usual way: you look away for a second, and then they’re there when you look back, as if they’d always been there. If you try to be cheeky and stare at your desk unblinkingly so the school can’t slip it in, something bad is likely to happen to create an opportunity, like the lights going out, so other kids will shove you or put a hand over your eyes if they catch you at it. It’s a lot more expensive, mana-wise, to let people see magic happening in a way they instinctively disbelieve, because that means you have to force it ontothemas well as the universe. It’s one of the reasons that people don’t often do real magic round mundanes. It’s loads harder, unless you dress it up as some sort of performance, or do it round people who aggressively work to believe in whatever magic you’re doing, like Mum and her natural healing stuff with all her crunchy friends out in the woods.
And even though we’re wizards, we still don’t reallyexpectthings to appear out of thin air. We know it can be done, so it’s not as hard to persuade us, but on the other hand, we’ve got more mana of our own to fight that persuasion with. It costs the school much less to just slip something onto the desk while we’re looking away, as if someone had just put it there, than it does to let us watch it coming into existence.
Zheng was already trying to crane out around me to peek at the enclave girl’s sheet; I sighed and said to him, “Go and sit next to her,” grudgingly. I didn’t like it, but my not liking it didn’t change the reality that it was an obviously good idea for him to make up to her. He twitched a bit, probably more guilt: I expect his mum had lectured him on that subject as well. Then he did get up and went over to the Thai girl and introduced himself.
To be fair, she made him a polite wai, and invited him to sit down next to her with a gesture; usually you have to suck up a little more energetically to get in with an enclave kid. But I suppose he didn’t have competition yet. After he sat down, a few other kids got up and moved into the seats behind them and they all started comparing schedules. The enclaver girl was already working on her own, with the speed that meant she knew exactly what she was going for, and she started showing the others hers and pointing out issues on theirs. I made a note to have a look at Zheng’s after he was done, just in case she was a bit too helpful to her own benefit.
But first I had to take care of myownschedule, and one look told me I was in for it. I’d known going in that I’d have to take two seminars in my senior year: that’s the price you pay for going incantations track and getting to minimize your time on the lower floors your first three years. But I’d been put intofourof them—or five if you counted twice for the monstrous double course, meeting first thing every single day, that was simply titled Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, instruction in English. The note indicated that it would count as coursework for SanskritandArabic, which made suspiciously little sense except for instance if we’d be studying medieval Islamic reproductions of Sanskrit manuscripts—such as the one I’d acquired in the library just two weeks before. That made for a really narrow field. I’d be lucky if there were three other kids in the bloody room with me. I glared at it sitting there like a lead bar across the top of my schedule sheet. I’d been counting on getting the standard Sanskrit seminar led in English, which should have meant being lumped into one of the larger seminar classrooms on the alchemy lab floor with the dozen or so artifice- and alchemy-track kids from India who were doing Sanskrit for their language requirement.
And I couldn’t easily manufacture a conflict for it, since I didn’t have so much as a single other senior in the room to compare schedules with. Usually at least one or two of the other outcast kids would grudgingly let me have a look, in exchange for getting to see mine, and that would give me at least one or two classes I could put in to try and force the school to shift the worst of my assignments around. You’re allowed to specify up to three classes, and as long as you’ve met all your requirements, the Scholomance has to rework the rest of your schedule around them, but if you don’t know what other classes there actually are or when they’re scheduled, it’s just a gambling game that you’re sure to lose.
The Advanced Readings seminar would have been more than enough to make my schedule unusually lousy, but on top of that, I also had a really magnificent seminar on Development of Algebra and Applications to Invocation, which was going to count for languages, unspecified—a bad sign that I’d be getting loads of different primary sources to translate—as well as honors history and maths. I hadn’t been assigned any other maths courses, so my odds of getting out of that one were very slim. Then there was the rotten seminar I’d actually been expecting to get, on Shared Proto-Indo-European Roots in Modern Spellcasting, which shouldn’t have been myeasiestclass, and last but very much not least, The Myrddin Tradition, which was supposed to count for honors literature, Latin, modern French, modern Welsh, and Old and Middle English. And I knew right now that by the third week of class, I’d be getting nothing but straight-up Old French and Middle Welsh spells.
The rest of the slots were filled with shop—which I should have had a claim to be let out of entirely, since last term I’d done a magic mirror which still muttered gloomily at me every so often even though I had it hung up facing the wall—andI’d been put in honors alchemy, both meeting on mixed-up schedules: Mondays and Thursdays for the one, and Tuesdays and Fridays for the other. I’d be with different kids each day of the week, so I’d have it twice as hard as I already do finding anyone to do things like hold something I need to weld or watch my bag while I go and get supplies.
Up to that point, it was possibly the single worst senior schedule I’d ever heard of. Not even the kids aiming for class valedictorian were going to takefourseminars. Except, as if the school was pretending to make up for all that, the entire afternoon on Wednesdays was literally unassigned to anything. It just said “Work,” exactly like the work period we all get right after lunch, only it had an assigned room. Namelythisone.
