Page 30 of The Last Graduate
I knew what she was doing, and what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to ask what happened, and then I was supposed to let Aadhya tell me about her sister who’d died in here, maybe during graduation, and then Aadhya was going to tell me she understood I had to try and save as many people as I could, and then I was supposed to come downstairs and if I couldn’t get my head out of my arse long enough to make everyone a nice cup of tea, Chloe would probably do it for me, and we’d all go back to work on our strategy this afternoon as if nothing had changed. And I knew why: because that was the only sensible, practical thing for her to do, even if what she really wanted was to yell at me twice as loud as ever Khamis had.
“I can’t do this,” I said, my voice as quavery as if I’d been crying, even though I hadn’t been, I’d just been sitting there alone. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
I fumbled for the power-sharer, and Aadhya reached out and grabbed it down around my wrist, pinning it to the desk. “Again? All I actually need is for you to put aside the drama in your own head and shut up and sit there and listen to me for like five minutes. I think youcando that much.”
I couldn’t exactly say no. Anyway, she’d have been in her rights to smack me into next week, because what good would it do her for me to pull out? Liesel had Alfie’s buckets of mana, and brains and ruthlessness and a team totally dedicated to getting the hell out, and it hadn’t been worth two shits when the Himalayas attacked. Everyone else was still on board for exactly the same reason everyone was ever on board with anything in here, which was exactly the same reason everyone ever put themselves into this hellpit of a school, and that’s because it was better than the alternatives. That was all I could be: the lesser evil.
Aadhya gave it a few narrow-eyed moments, until she was sure I’d been cowed, before she took her hand off and sat back. “Okay, so, let’s pretend after I told you about Udaya, you said,What happened to her?like a normal person.”
“She died in here,” I said, dully.
“This is not a guessing game, and no,” Aadhya said. “My parents were really young when Udaya was born. They were living with my dad’s parents, and his dad was incredibly old-school. He insisted that my mom homeschool, and we were never allowed to go anywhere, not even the playground down the block. We couldn’t even play in the yard without a grown-up right there. I actually do remember that; he put a ward on the back door that zapped us if we tried to go through it alone. Udaya got sick of it. When she was eight, she climbed out the window and headed to the playground. A clothworm got her before she made it halfway down the block. They would come around our house sometimes to lay eggs, so their babies could sneak in through the wards and chew on my mom’s weaving. It just got lucky.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the wayI’m sorryalways feels stupid when you mean it.
Aadhya just shrugged back. “Mom asked her parents to stay in the States after the funeral. My aunt had married into Kolkata by then, so they could. She took me to live with them in a one-bedroom and put me in a mundie preschool next door. Dad joined us after a month. A couple of years later, they took everything they’d been saving to buy into an enclave, turned it into cash, and got our house across the street from a good school, and they made sure it was always full of tons of food and toys so all my school friends would want to come over to my place, even though it meant they couldn’t do magic when my friends were around. Daadi came to live with us when I was in kindergarten. Daduji was dead by then. Nobody’s ever told me for sure, but I’m pretty sure it was suicide.”
I was, too; there aren’t that many causes of death for wizards between the ages of eighteen and a hundred. Cancer and dementia eventually get too aggressive to stave off with magic, and if you live outside an enclave, sooner or later you become the slow-moving wildebeest and a mal picks you off the end of the pack, but not until then.
“I yelled at my mom for hiding it from me,” Aadhya said. “She told me she didn’t want me to be afraid. Daduji loved us, he wanted so bad to protect us, that’s all he was trying to do, but he couldn’t. And Mom wanted to protect me, too, but she also wanted me to live as much as I could while I had the chance, because Udaya never got to live at all.”
Really, it wasn’t a shocker or anything. It was just maths. Have two wizard kids, odds are you’re not going to see them both grow up. Possibly not either. Udaya had only got a little more unlucky than the average. Or a lot more unlucky, if you considered she’d spent every scarce minute of her entire life shut up in a nicer version of the Scholomance itself.
“Anyway, that’s how long I’ve known that I was probably going to die before I was old enough to vote,” Aadhya said. “And I don’t want to die, I want to get out of here, but I’m not going to put off being a person until I make it. So I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t know. I knew when I asked you to team up, I knew that I’d just gotten lucky. It wasn’t anything I did. I was just a loser girl like you and a desi girl like you, and I wasn’t a complete jerk to you, so you let me get close enough to figure out that you were a rocket and I could grab on.”
“Aad,” I said, but I didn’t have anywhere to go from there, and I don’t even know if she heard me. It came out as thin and crackly as broken glass, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was staring down at the desk and tracing back and forth over the graffiti on the edge with her thumb,LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT,and her mouth was turned down.
“Somebody always gets lucky, right?” she said. “Why not me? Why shouldn’t I be the one who wins the lottery? I told myself that, but I didn’t believe it, because it wastoolucky. I knew I had to do something to deserve it. Like I knew you’d had to do something to deserve that book you got. And I hadn’t. So first I kept waiting for you to ditch me, and then I kept waiting to have to do something, but I didn’t. And I’m telling you about Udaya because, in my head, at some point, I think I decided, okay, it was like a trade. I didn’t get to have my sister, so I got you.”
I had a horrible gargled noise stuffed up in my throat, because I couldn’t ask her to stop. I couldn’t want her to stop, even if I had my hands pressed over my mouth, and there were tears building up along the ledge of my fingers.
Aadhya just kept talking. “I knew that was bullshit, but it made me feel better about not doing anything. So all these months, I’ve been letting that sit in my head, and that was stupid of me, because if you’re who I get instead of my sister—I can’t just leave you behind and still be a person.” She looked up then, and it turned out she was also crying, tears trickling down her face and just starting to drip off her chin, even though her voice didn’t sound any different. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
I really wanted to be blubbing like a child, but instead I had to pull myself together and stop her. “I don’t want that! I’m not asking you or anyone else to stay behind with me.”
“Right, obviously.” Aadhya swiped her sleeve across her face and sucked in a snuffle. “You’d rather run away and wallow in angst thanaskforhelpor anything else extremely horrible like that.”
“If you want to help me, you’ll get out the gates as fast as you can. That’s the whole point! Whatever Khamis thinks, I’m going to get you there—”
“Not all on your own you’re not,” Aadhya said. “Khamis is a bag of wieners, but he’s not wrong. I don’t care if you get your biggest superhero cape on, you can’t just carry a thousand people out the door on your back.”
“So what are you going to do? If you turn round at the gates and make a stand with me, you’ll just be another target for me to cover. I’m not going to stand by and let people die, but that doesn’t mean I’m going totradeyou for them. I’mnot.”
“Uh, not telling you to?” Aadhya shook her head and pushed herself up out of the chair. “Come on. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know I can come up with something better thanBook it out the gates without giving you a second thoughtorDie tragically and pointlessly at your side,neither of which sound genius to me. Since that’s all you’ve got so far, pull your head out of wherever you’ve shoved it and consider the crazy idea that maybe us pathetic little people could help you solve this problem. I know it’s against your most sacred principles to ask anyone for anything, and obviously we don’t have any reason to care about figuring out how you could save everybody’s lives, but maybe some of us are really bored and don’t have anything better to do.”
It still sucked. Maybe Aadhya didn’t want to leave me behind, but Khamis would’ve been just fine with it, and I was pretty sure that the difference between him and everyone else was, he had either the nerve or the guts to let it show. Of course they didn’t want me saving anyone else’s lives if it meant I didn’t have as much time to save their lives. That didn’t make them grotesquely selfish; it just made thempeople.It was even fair, when they were the ones I’d actually made a deal with, the ones who were planning to have my back. That deal meant I was supposed to have their backs, too. And yeah, Aadhya had given me an out, saying she hadn’t done anything to deserve me, but they’d all done more to deserve me than anyone else had, if I even did call for beingdeserved.
The only thing that helped was Aadhya had done more than any of the rest of them. If she wasn’t demanding that I put her first, nobody else had the right to demand it, either. But that didn’t give her or me the right to volunteer them to save everyone. I didn’t have the right, but I had the power, because their only alternative was to quit our alliance, or maybe open up one of the floor drains and jump in, which looked roughly as good a survival plan. And they all knew it, and I knew it, and that meant I wasmakingthem do it, just as much as Khamis taking the nice safe center position in his team.
But my only alternative was to tell them never mind, I wasn’t going to save everyone, I was just going to concentrate on getting our group to the gates, and after that I’d help whoever was left. Which wouldn’t be very many. No long tedious graduation ceremonies for us. Historically, according to the graduation handbook, about half the deaths happen before the first person reaches the gates, and the time between when that first lucky survivor gets out and when the last lucky survivor does is close to ten minutes, year after year. I’d be tenderly shepherding my own little flock to safety past a few hundred kids screaming as they were butchered. By the time we got to the gates and I turned back, most of them would already be dead.
I couldn’t stand it either way, which was too bad for me, since there wasn’t a third option as far as I could tell. The way I attempted to make one appear was sitting at the library table like a plank without looking anyone in the face, staring fixedly at the bread roll that Chloe had brought me without eating it. I pretended the stabbing pains in my stomach were hunger, and left it to Aadhya to say, “Okay, let’s figure this out,” to everyone else sitting round the table in the depths of awkward silence.
“What is there to figure out?” Khamis said coldly; he was sitting with his arms folded over his chest, glaring at me so hard that I could tell he was doing it even without looking anywhere near his face. “Arewesupposed to be worrying about how to save Magnus, now, too? I don’t think he’s returning the favor.”
Everyone shifted awkwardly, and then Liu said, “Well, he should.”
“What?” Khamis said, but Liu wasn’t talking to him; she’d turned to Chloe. “What if we invited Magnus and his team to join up with us? Wouldn’t they say yes?”
