Page 28 of The Last Graduate
The other team weren’t as good as mine—or at least they weren’t as good as we’d become after six weeks of running the course together—but I got them all out again still alive. I did have to turn one of them to stone at one point to save her from being bitten in half, but I turned her back afterwards, so I don’t see what the problem was.
Everyone but me was waiting with enormous anticipation for that course to be swapped out, but on Monday, the next one was just as bad. All three of our cleanup-crew teams were waiting by the open doors when we came out, with their faces blankly appalled. I turned right round and did another run with them, and when we got out, there was a new team waiting—Liesel’s team. After New Year’s, she’d apparently crossed Magnus off and had instead settled for allying with Alfie, from London. I didn’t know what she had against the Munich enclave, which had three strapping senior boys to choose from if that was really one of her primary criteria, but there was presumablysomething, since these days Munich was a better choice than London for a German girl who was apparently viciously determined to get a seat on a top-tier enclave council before she was thirty. Unless there was something especiallyrightwith Alfie, but I hadn’t seen any notable signs of that in the last three years and change.
“El, how are you?” he said, exactly as if we hadn’t seen each other for ages and he was delightfully surprised to find me here.
I ignored him and said to Liesel, “Right, let’s go.” She nodded back coldly and we went. A woman after my own heart.
Also, she was really good. She wasn’t Orion, but she was miles better than anyone else I’d run with, even though I tried not to notice out of loyalty. Her whole team was better, actually. Even Alfie wasn’t remotely a weak link: he’d taken the middle, obviously, but he wasn’t sitting there cowering; he was using the position to throw complicated defensive spells to all sides to cover everyone else, and he was really good at it. He had fast reflexes and what must have been an encyclopedic defensive collection that he knew backwards and forward: he kept steadily pitching exactly the right spell at exactly the right time to exactly the right place, so the rest of us could just trust him and go totally on the offensive. We made it through in eleven minutes; it had taken me twenty-two on the first run with my team.
Of course, twenty-two was better than never, which is what it would’ve been for Liesel and company if they hadn’t had me along. They all flinched when we got to the homestretch and the icy ground we’d been running over abruptly folded itself up round us into towering slabs toothed with jagged spikes the size of tyrannosaur femurs, and seething with ectoplasmic vapors that suggested they had psychic form and not just physical. Alfie threw up what was the very best group shield I’d ever seen, which might have held for one or two hits, but there literally wasn’t anywhere to go.
Until I spoke the seventh spell of binding fromThe Fruitful Vine,which was the very first Marathi-language spellbook ever written. It was put together by a group of poet-incanters from the Pune area who wanted more spells in their own vernacular—the better you know a language and understand its nuances, the better your spellcasting is going to be—so they gathered for a writing and spell-trading session. It went so well that they formed a long-term circle and kept going, their spells went on getting more and more powerful, and eventually the collection was so valuable they were able to trade just the one book to Jaipur for enclave-building spells.
Immediately after which, their group imploded into a massive internecine fight. Most of them died and a few went to Jaipur and a couple of others renounced magic and purged all their mana and went to live in the wilderness as ascetics, and that’s why there’s no enclave in Pune. Butbeforethat, they wrote some real corkers, including this series of increasingly complex binding spells, the hardest of which really only ever gets hunted up by the sort of maleficer who wants to bind one of the more nasty mals in the manifestation category as a personal servant. Well, or by a circle of decent wizards trying to get rid of one of those mals, but you can guess why the school gavemea copy. The soles had started to come off my trainers halfway through my freshman year, and I thought I was being adequately specific when I asked the void for a spell to securely bind them back up, but no. You’d be amazed at how little call I’ve had in the last four years for a pet benibel that would need to be fed on a steady diet of human corpses, although I suppose you could accuse me of a lack of imagination.
But it was just the spell you wanted when facing a possessed entity the size of a glacier. This was my third time through this course, and I’d got the hang of doing it, so it was fairly painless as an experience; I just banged out the spell, commanded the gnashing ice peaks to lie flat, and off to the doors we went. But that didn’t make it less maddening for Liesel and her crew. The problem was, no one other than myself, no matter how brilliant or hardworking, could have done much of anything in the situation. Even if you’d got hold of the binding spell, it normally calls for a circle of twelve wizards chanting for an hour. Her face was rigid with fury when we got out the doors. I didn’t even blame her for stalking off without so much as a thank-you. Alfie was better programmed, so he did say, “Thanks, El, fair play,” before going after her, but even for him it was mechanical.
By lunchtime word had got round, and everyone started to panic. Aside from the very real danger of dying for basic lack of practice, the new course made no sense in a particularly alarming way. There are some mals as big as mountains out there in the world, but you might as well say there are blue whales in the world. If a blue whale happened to appear smack in the middle of the graduation hall, it would certainly present a challenge to us all, but it wouldn’t have got there on its own initiative. So why was something like that suddenly showing up in the obstacle course? Either the school was just throwing it at us out of nastiness, on the justification that at leastonestudent could get past it, even if that made the course totally useless to everyone who didn’t have me along—which would be bad enough—or therewassomething on that scale down below.
No one else could think of any other reason why it was happening; as far as they knew, nothing had changed. I was the only one who knew what had changed.I’dchanged. And the brutal courses were too obviously a response. You want to save everybody, you silly girl? Right, let’s make that harder for you: nobody gets any practice the rest of the term, so they’ll all be panicking and fumbling around down in the hall. Good luck saving them then.
I wasn’t sharing my grand plan, though, so everyone else kept laboring onward in ignorance and spreading alarm. That afternoon in the library, a couple other teams got up the desperation to ask me to do a run, and the next morning, Ibrahim did them one worse: he cornered me on my bleary way to the girls’ and sidled round the subject for nearly five minutes before I finally understood that he was trying to work out if I had any sort of opinion about him kissing Yaakov.
He hadn’t done anything wrong by Scholomance standards, not telling me. Youdohave to disclose any conflict of interest like that to your potential allies before you ask them to go with you and your significant other—it clearly wasn’t an accident that in his team, he was in the lead and Yaakov was bringing up the rear, the two most dangerous positions and the most separated, where they wouldn’t have a chance to ditch the others and take off together. But Iwasn’tone of his allies. My name wasn’t written up on the wall with him and Yaakov, so he hadn’t owed me a thing, my opinion shouldn’t have made a difference. But here he was trying to find it out, as though it should havemattered.
It was horrible, and I couldn’t even howl at him, because itdidmatter, now, by the standard operating procedure of Scholomance losers. Aadhya had made a tactical deal for us with their alliance, but it’s always understood in those deals that either side has the right to jettison the other and trade up if the opportunity permits. And the opportunity did permit, now that I had become an extremely scarce and valuable resource. If we took the chance to, oh, upgrade to running with Liesel and Alfie, Ibrahim and his team would suddenly be just as stuck as everyone else who didn’t have me to run with.
And it wasn’t an accident that he and Yaakov hadn’t let on that they weren’t just friends, all those nights we were sitting together studying in Chloe’s room. We’re all fairly nose-to-grindstone in here, but one of the most reliable topics of conversation was nevertheless gossip about who was dating who or wanted to. It was second only to gossip about who was getting allied with who.
There wasn’t actually very much of the gossip to be had, because oddly enough constantly being on the verge of malnourishment, exhaustion, and mortal terror isn’t really conducive to romance, but we extracted all the entertainment we could from the couples that managed to have the energy—most of which involved at least one enclaver, unsurprisingly. We knew when Jamaal started coordinating his snack runs at the same time as a girl from Cairo—her with a group of girls, him with a group of boys, all very by the book. We knew that Jermaine from New York had spent the last year in a competitive love triangle with a boy from Atlanta over one of the top alchemists, and we all knew when in a perfect storm of gossipy delight it turned into a trioandan alliance, halfway through the first month of term. Everyone else also had the fun of pesteringmeabout Orion while they were at it. Ibrahim and Yaakov had decided not to share the information. They’d decided it was a risk they couldn’t afford to take.
Lots of enclavers, especially from the most powerful Western enclaves, like to go on about how enlightened wizard society is, relative to the masses of the mundanes. From their rarefied perspective, I suppose it’s true. Spend decades recruiting the most brilliant wizards from all round the world, because they’re the ones who can best save your kids’ lives and make your enclave even richer and more powerful, then you can look round your diverse and tolerant international enclave and pat yourself on the back in a congratulatory way. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any bigots among us. It only means that we’ve got this one additional dividing line of our own that stops right at the enclave doors, and it’s sharp enough to cut your throat.
And Ibrahim wasn’t on the safe side of that line. He’s not an enclaver; he’s not one of the top students, who could count on getting an alliance with one. His primary gift, the one talent that he’d marshaled to get himself all the way through school and into his alliance with Jamaal—the boy from Dubai who was going with his team—was that he was a really determined and enthusiastic suck-up. If you liked a tidy bit of flattery and someone who’d cheer you on and comfort you when you were down, pat you on the back and tell you that you were brilliant and in the right even if you were really quite blatantly in the wrong, help you talk your way through any inconvenient fits of guilt or conscience, then he was your lad, and loads of enclavers did indeed like that.
Which is hardly a unique approach. Roughly half of the indie kids are at least partly on the minion track: some of them offer up labor or muscle; the more desperate ones offer themselves up more or less explicitly as human shields. They take the worst seats at the cafeteria tables and in the classrooms; they fetch supplies and drop off homework; they walk the enclaver kids to their dorm rooms at night and keep watch for them in the showers without even asking for turnabout. Because almost all enclavers except the very richest ones will end up with a few filler positions in their alliances, open to average kids who can do four or five decent castings in ten minutes and have built a modest sum of mana on top of their schoolwork, and have been lucky enough to stay able-bodied and in solid physical condition through years in the Scholomance.
That was the kind of opening Ibrahim was aiming for, his whole time here. He didn’t have other options. He was perfectly competent, but that didn’t make him anything special, not by the standards of the graduation hall. And if you’re on the minion track, you can’t afford to prioritize anything as unimportant as your most passionately held beliefs or your deepest emotional needs. You don’t even get to prioritize your own bloody life when you’re going down the stairs first with your heart in your throat, just so if thereissomething waiting, it’ll get you instead of the enclaver seven steps behind you, who you’re both pretending really hard is being such a good friend for letting you have the chance.
That was why he’d kept it quiet. He wanted to keep the option to glom on to an enclaver who was the kind of rusty hinge who cared about other people’s business, and now he was asking me if Iwasone of those—because his life depended on it.
I wanted to yell at him in a fury and stomp away, but I couldn’t. He looked ready to cry, the way you would if you had to desperately beg some girl you’d been rude to on the regular for your life and the life of someone you loved. He’d have been a complete nutter not to lie to me in any way I wanted him to, if that got me to keep running with his alliance. For that matter, if he were really clever, he’d know I didn’t care and have the conversation anyway, as an excuse to exhibit his commitment to servility.
But I knew Ibrahim wasn’t that kind of clever. He was so good at sucking up because he was sincere about it. I think he really liked people to begin with—a foreign concept to me—and he wasearnestlystarry-eyed. He’d kept on sucking up to Orion long after it’d become clear that Orion wasn’t in the market for minions. For that matter, Ibrahim had been stupid enough to fall in love inside school; and it really had to be love, because hooking up with Yaakov for an alliance was an obviously bad idea that had put them both in those more dangerous spots.
So instead I muttered, “I’m not a wanker, Haddad. Have your own fun. See you tomorrow morning,” ungraciously, andthenstomped away.
That same day at lunchtime, Magnus had the bald-faced cheek to ask Chloe to pass along aninvitationto join his team if I still wanted more practice, which I suppose in his mind was the equivalent of Ibrahim’s desperate begging. I gritted my teeth and did a run with them that afternoon. They were just as good as Liesel’s team, and they would have been just as dead without me.
When I went down with my own team again on Wednesday morning, there were roughly thirty people downstairs waiting even before we got there, and they were all angry—furiously angry. They still didn’t know I meant to help them. What they did know was, if they wanted any practice, they had to go to me hat-in-hand for help that they weren’t going to have on graduation day, because of course I wasn’t going to help them then, and when they saw thirty other kids lined up to ask, they knew that today was the day I’d start charging for my help, and I’d want things they couldn’t afford to give away.
I don’t know if I could have fixed the situation by telling them I was going to save them all. I don’t think they’d have believed me. But I can’t say for certain, because I didn’t even try. They were looking at my friends; they were looking at Aadhya and Liu and all the people who’d taken a chance on me; and they were losers looking at enclavers, except fifteen minutes ago they’dbeenthe enclavers, the ones who were going to live. Alfie with Liesel and the brilliant team she’d built, Magnus and his wolf pack; they hadn’t spent four years being slowly taught over and over that another kid had the right to live and they hadn’t.
And I could see in their faces that if they could havetakenme, if I’d been a piece of artifice they could wrestle away or steal, they would have: they’d have used every unfair advantage they had and gone after my friends, and at this very moment probably most of them were trying to think of some way to do it, just like Magnus with his Field Day stunt.
“Lots of us up for first run today,” Alfie said, in the bright sort of way that someone might say,Well, looks like rain, doesn’t it!when it’s sheeting down and you’ve taken shelter under an awning with five people who’ve all got knives drawn, and you’re quietly reaching into your pocket for a handgun.
So I didn’t say anything reassuring like,You can stop fretting already, Orion and I are going to get all of you useless gits out.I didn’t even say anything sensible about going with everyone in turn. Chloe glanced at me and I could see her getting ready to say something sensible for me, play peacemaker with the enclave boys, and before she could, I said, “No sense waiting for any more to show,” and I marched for the doors, flung them open, and sailed in. There was a confused scramble behind me, and then everyone reached the same conclusion at the same time: if they wanted to be sure of getting in a run with me, they had to gonow.They all poured in after me together.
