Page 22 of The Last Graduate
“Well done,” I told myself in the mirror around my toothbrush. I had to rush now, since the first warning bell was going, so I scrubbed my teeth as quick as I could before dashing back out into the corridor, where I skidded right off my heels and smashed my head backwards onto the floor. Liesel had poured out the rest of her hard-brewed lip gloss into a puddle just outside the door, enough of a sacrifice to cast a clever littletrip the next person who comes alonghex. I knew what had happened even while I was on the way down: the moment I’d stepped on the slick patch, I’d felt the malicious intent of the spell, only it was too late for me to do anything about it.
I did manage to twist a bit falling, which either helped or made things worse, I don’t know. I didn’t die and I wasn’t knocked unconscious, I don’t think, but it was certainly bad enough. My whole head was a church bell someone had clanged back and forth with too much enthusiasm, and my elbow and hips would have been in screaming pain if screaming out loud wasn’t the equivalent of shouting,Dinner is served!to every mal in hearing range. Instead I curled into a ball like a child and shut my mouth tight over stifled high-pitched sobbing, both my hands wrapped around the throbbing back of my skull and my whole face screwed up with tears.
I didn’t move from there for much too long. The second warning bell went off somewhere behind a distant mountain range, and only the certain knowledge that I was about to be incinerated got me into motion. I levered myself onto my hands and knees and started lurching down the corridor in a three-legged crawl, still pressing down on the back of my skull with the hand that had got banged. Of course I should have pulled myself together and taken some kind of remedy, but at the time, I was still completely sure on some visceral level that I was keeping my brain from falling out of the back of my head.
Somewhere behind and above me, I heard a door bang shut loudly and footsteps coming, along the metal walkway and down the spiral stairs and into the corridor. I kept on creeping along, too slow but moving. I knew it wasn’t anybody I knew, and then I knew it was Liesel, but I still kept crawling because I couldn’t do anything else yet. Then she caught up and grabbed me under the arms and heaved me standing. Her face was still angry and flushed under the pink shimmer, but what she said, harshly, was, “Where is your room?” and she helped me limping on towards it.
We got about halfway before the final warning siren went off, and as it did, the door three down from where we were slid open and Orion came out. He froze like a deer caught stealing hubcaps in the headlamps of a police car, then noticed that I was there to fall down in front of a wall of mortal flame and die rather than to yell at him. Not that I didn’t do my best to combine the activities as he grabbed me under the other arm, but he ignored the violent wheeze I aimed in his direction and helped Liesel get me into his room just as the loud crackling went off behind us, accompanied by the first panicked scrabbling of mals starting to run. Orion paused in the door to throw a last longing look down the corridor, then slid it shut with an unhappy bang as Liesel heaved me onto the bed.
“What happened?” Orion asked, coming over.
“She fell coming out of the bathroom,” Liesel said shortly.
I didn’t fill in the additional details. Knowing she got furious enough to commit murder but also couldn’t go through with it in the end gave me rather a fellow feeling for her. “Give me a glass of water,” I muttered, and when Orion gave it to me, I took a few deep breaths to temporarily keep from vomiting and then sat up and cast the simplest of my mum’s healing charms on the water. Then I took out the little plastic bottle I keep on hand for exciting emergencies like this one, downed it, and drank the whole glass of water as fast as I could. I managed to keep it down for a count of fifteen, and then I lurched over to the floor drain and did vomit, energetically. Afterwards I rolled away and curled on my other side with a groan, but it was a conscious protest, not whimpering; I was already better.
“What is that?” Liesel said, picking up the bottle from where I’d dropped it, and giving it a wary sniff.
“Tabasco and butterscotch,” I said. That isn’t actually part of Mum’s charm; it’s my own addition, of which I’m sure she’d disapprove quite a lot, but something about forcing the horrible mixture down makes the healing charm work lots quicker. I think there’s even some kind of science behind that, worse-tasting medicine works better or whatever, but it might just be the mana from deliberately making myself swallow something that awful. It doesn’t actually have to be Tabasco and butterscotch, it just has to be absolutely vile and yet still technically edible, so you don’t waste the healing charm on being poisoned.
Anyway, after that I wasn’t concussed or in howling pain anymore, but I still felt extremely sorry for myself. I climbed back onto Orion’s bed and just lay there for a bit to recover. Liesel started talking to Orion like a normal and civilized person, getting back only mumbled and distracted answers. “If he tries to open the door, brain him with the chair,” I muttered after the third time.
“I’m not going to open the door,” Orion said sulkily.
“Shut up, you lunatic, you’d absolutely open the door,” I said. “What if the wall down by Aadhya’s had gone this time?”
“I’d just—have come back here,” Orion said, as if it were that simple to deal with being caught between two walls of mortal flame sweeping towards each other, each with a leading wave of frenzied mals, and no exit anywhere in between. Nobody would open the door in a cleansing, not even if they heard Orion Lake or for that matter their own mum calling on the other side. Anybody stupid enough to do that died during freshman year when theydidopen the door and got eaten by the myna grabber on the other side. “I wasn’t planning to go anywhere.”
I opened my eyes to glare at him. “That just means you didn’t have aplan,not that you weren’tgoing.”
He scowled at me and stomped off to his desk and pretended he was working on something in a notebook. Liesel made a faint snort and sat down on the bed in an open spot near my midsection. I eyed her. “What?”
She looked at me pointedly, but I still didn’t follow until she said, “Andyourroom?” and I realized she thought Orion had actually been planning to creep down the corridor to spend the day with me. I was about to explain that Orion wasn’t enough of a moron to risk going out in a cleansing to spend the day sitting in my room getting yelled at for having gone out in a cleansing, he was in fact muchmoreof a moron, only then it occurred to me that she was half right: if he had got caught between two walls of flame before reaching the main stairs, he would indeed have come and banged on my door for safety. And yes, I’m stupid enough that I would have opened it when he banged, even if I’d have kept a jar of leftover etching acid handy. Which meant spending the day with me had been hisbackupplan.
I even got confirmation: he was sitting with his back to us, but he’d got his hair buzzed lately at my insistence—let’s not talk about the state it had got into—and the tops of his ears were visible and bright red.
“Lake, if you’ve ever for a second entertained a lurid fantasy that you might possibly have it off on some occasion and that I might in any way be involved, I want you to erase even the memory of having the thought from your brain,” I said deeply and earnestly.
“El!” he squalled in protest, turning to dart a mortified look at Liesel. But it was nothing more than he deserved.
Anyway, so that was loads of fun, spending the day in Orion’s room with him and the girl who’d tried to kill me. Actually, Liesel was all right. She and I ended up playing card games; she had a deck of tarot cards she’d made herself that she carried around with her, and she taught me canasta using all the major arcana as jokers. She got a bit narrow-eyed when I kept getting the Tower and Death, but it wasn’t my fault; she was the one carrying them around and imbuing them with divinatory power.
Orion joined us a couple of times, but he kept getting distracted and going to the door to listen to the crackling as the wall rolled back and forth through the hall. On New Year’s they go several times, which in theory and not in practice makes up for the reduced number. We did hear the dying shrieks of mals a few times, and there was a scrabble at the drain at one point that made him jump up hopefully and scatter the cards all over, but it didn’t come through even when the mad muppet actually pulled off the drain cover and stuck his head close to peer inside it.
Liesel flinched away from him with her expression somewhere between horrified and just disgusted. I took the chance to scoop all the cards back into a facedown pile before she noticed that the TowerandDeath had both landed faceup in my lap that time, along with the Eight of Swords, which in Liesel’s illustration was a woman sitting cross-legged and blindfolded half caught in a thicket of eight massive silver thorns in a circle pointing in at her. How encouraging.
“Why don’t you try putting out milk?” I said to Orion snidely. That technique did actually work in the olden days, when there were more minor mals that don’t need much mana to survive, and more mundanes who sincerely believed in them and were therefore vulnerable to them. If you deliberately put out a bowl of milk for the little people, or whatever equivalent gesture, they’d come and suck up the tiny bit of mana that came from your intent, and then they’d leave your house alone in order to preserve the regular supply. But most of those mals are gone now; they got eaten up by more powerful mals who consider a mundane person the equivalent of an already open packet left on the side of the road with suspicious stains and two stale crisps in it.
Orion didn’t bother looking abashed. He just sighed and put the drain cover back on and slunk back to the game, for lack of anything better to kill than time, but he didn’t even notice that I didn’t deal him in for the new round. Liesel and I played several more games, until the sixth time I turned over the Tower, and she grabbed it out of my hand and shook it in my face. “You are cheating!”
“WhywouldI?” I snapped at her. “Just take it out of play if you’re going to be so fussed about it.”
“Idid!” she snapped back, and grabbed her case and opened it up in front of me to display its entirely empty innards to us both, and after staring into it for a moment, she collected up all the other cards and put them into the case and stashed it away in her pocket without saying another word.
After that it was awkward silence all round. I shoved aside enough of Orion’s dirty laundry to clear a rectangle of floor and did push-ups for mana, spiced up by the faint throbbing still going in my head. I was tired and sore and hungry enough that the exercise was highly productive as long as I could do it, but I ran out of steam sooner than I ran out of time and then I just flopped myself back onto Orion’s bed and lay there even more tired and sore and hungry and now sweaty, too. Liesel was sitting at Orion’s desk working on something, which I only realized washiswork when he did and said, “Hey, you don’t have to…” in the most halfhearted way those words had been spoken ever.
“I have nothing else to do now,” Liesel said. “Later you can pay me back.”
“He’s guarding the room, isn’t he?” I said.
