Page 40 of The Last Graduate
“Okay, so—” Aadhya said after a moment. “This is all because the cleansing machinery worked. So we just need to find a way to keep it working, for good.”
That did sound promising, but Alfie said, “Oh, bugger,” half under his breath, and then said, “You can’t. The cleansing machinery can’t be preserved. You can fix it, but you can’t keep it working. Four years is the absolute most you can get. The agglos will do for it by then.”
“Theagglos?” Aadhya said. We all think of agglos as party favors rather than maleficaria. Technically, they do need mana and they can’t build it themselves, but they never hurt anyone. They just creep around very slowly and collect any stray bits of mana-infused creations that have been left out and then tack them onto their outer carapaces, like oversized caddisflies. We’d all be delighted to meet a fully grown one that’s been accumulating scraps of artifice and alchemical products for a decade or so. Which is why you neverdomeet agglos in the classroom levels, except the tiny larval ones. But there are colonies of grown ones in the graduation hall, like the group I’d seen. They hide until graduation is over, and after all the other mals are well fed and snoring, they creep out and collect up all the tidy bits that got dropped by the students who didn’t make it out.
Alfie ran a hand over his face. “They get through the outer shell and just gnaw on the machinery until it breaks.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Aadhya said. She wasn’t by any means the only artificer looking baffled. “Why don’t you throw a five-minute warding on it? They’re just agglos!”
“That’swhyyou can’t ward them out,” Alfie said. “Mortal flame is—well, it’s arguably anentity,and one that consumes mana that it doesn’t make itself. If you want to conjure a mortal flame and send itout,you can’t ward the artifice you’re doing it with against mana-consuming creatures. You have to ward it against malice. But the agglos aren’t malicious. They never take mana against resistance. They just nibble on this thing we’ve left sitting out near them, and sooner or later they make a hole in it, and then they squirm inside and take bits of it until the whole thing comes apart. London enclave’s got a laboratory with an agglo farm that’s been looking for ways to keep them out for the last century. If we could, it would be worth doing anything, spending any amount of mana, to get another team in to do a real repair. But we can’t find anything that works for longer than bloody wrapping the thing in tinfoil—the agglos like that stuff so much they’ll eat all of it before theybothergoing into the artifice. And that would get you four years.”
We stood around dumbly for some time after he finished. The cleansing was so stuck in all our heads as the obvious thing to fix that even after Alfie’s explanation, at least half a dozen people opened their mouths to suggest some other way to do it, only none of them managed more than “What if…” before they realized that whatever their clever notion was, the brightest minds of London had already thought of and tried it at some point in the last hundred years.
“What if we just fix it every year from now?” one of Aadhya’s acquaintances from Atlanta said finally, the first one to make it past the sticking point. “A crew could go down right after New Year’s, when the hall is freshly cleaned, and,” picking up enthusiasm, “we could make it the same deal as last year. Anyone who signs on for the fix gets a spot, enclave of their choice. Right? People would go for it.”
He was absolutely right; some desperate kidswouldgo for it, year after year, losing a few each time but keeping the machinery tidy, until finally one group went down only to discover that surprise! The machinery had finally broken again before they could fix it, and there was a hungry crowd of maleficaria waiting for them. I was about to put up a howl of protest, but Alfie was already shaking his head, in weary exasperation. “They’ve thought of that. Posting guards, sending in maintenance crews every month, all of it. And that would handle the agglos. But you can’t pay anyone enough to do it, because a new maw-mouthwillcome into the school, very soon. There’s a trace on the doors. Usually one or two manage it every year—they’re oozes, those are always the hardest to keep out of anywhere. And they’ll set up shop in the hall. Patience and Fortitude were protecting us, actually. They would eat the newer ones.”
Everyone’s faces had downturned into masks of appalled horror; I cringed inwardly and tried to tell myself that it wasn’t very long until graduation, and surely there wouldn’t be a new maw-mouththatsoon.
“What if we breed some mals to eat agglos?” some bright lad blurted out, I didn’t see who; I think he ducked away behind someone else as soon as he realized what he’d suggested and everyone turned to stare in his direction. Breeding maleficaria is a very popular pastimefor maleficers,because it always ends in roughly the same way, with variation only in the amounts of screaming and blood. Trying to do it with good intentions generally makes the results worse, not better.
“We could build a construct to do it,” someone else suggested, which also wasn’t going to work, since the other mals coming in would happily eat the agglo-eating constructs, but at least that was less likely to create some kind of hideous monstrosity shambling around the school devouring kids forever.
But more to the point, it wasanother suggestion,and the crowd in the reading room was breaking up into small groups along preferred language lines and starting to argue and discuss, to come up with ideas. Trying tohelp.I didn’t care that all the ideas were useless; we’d literally only just started thinking.
Aadhya came round to me and put her arm round my waist and said under her breath, “Hey, she can betaught,” with a tease in her voice that wobbled a little, and when I looked at her, her eyes were bright and wet, and I put my arm round her shoulders and hugged her.
I did begin to care that the ideas were useless after an entire week went by without any useful ones. We’d enlisted the whole school in the brainstorming project, but so many people came up to the reading room to suggest that someone go down to fix the machinery on some arbitrary day each year that by Tuesday we were all yelling, “Maw-mouth!” before they got halfway through their first sentence. All of these clever people were enclavers, I note.
A junior came up to propose our staying on an extra year to guard the other students. He called his ideapaying it forward,and it had the novelty of making literally every senior in the room squirm with a violently stifledshove it up your arseeven before Liesel said in exasperation, “And where will we besleepingduring this year? What will we eat?” He then revised it to suggest that we come back in just in time for next year’s graduation. That didn’t even merit a response beyond a flat stare: no one has ever volunteered to come back into the Scholomance, and no one ever will. Barring the one incredibly stupid glaring exception, who didn’t count.
For variation, one pale and bedraggled-looking freshman girl came up with the notion that all of the underclassmen should graduate with us, instead. I think she just couldn’t stand school any longer and wanted to go home to her mum, and fair enough, except that her plan wouldn’t have protected and sheltered her at all. She’d just be snapped up in a few months by some mal on the outside, like ninety-five percent of the wizard kids who aren’t lucky enough to get into the school. We more or less gave her a bracing pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way, and that was all the time we alloted to her suggestion.
But that afternoon as I was leaving lunch I saw her slumped in the freshman queue, standing alone, and on an impulse, I stopped by Sudarat, who was alone in the queue just a little further back. “Come on,” I said. “You’ve got someone holding a place for you.”
She trailed after me uncertainly, and I took her over to the other girl: she was an American, but just an indie, and I vaguely thought she was from Kansas, or one of those other states you never hear about on the BBC news, far from any enclaves. The point being, she didn’t have a smidge of a reason to care about what had or hadn’t happened to Bangkok. “Right, what’s your name?” I demanded, and the girl said warily, “Leigh?” as if she wasn’t quite willing to commit.
“Right, this is Sudarat, she was from Bangkok before it went pear-shaped; you’re Leigh, and you’re so miserable in this place that you’d rather trade for the odds outside; that’s introductions sorted,” I said, getting the worst bits out in front, for the both of them. “See if you can bear to sit together; it’s best to have company for meals.”
I sailed away and left them to it as quickly as I could, so none of us including me could think too hard about what the bloody hell I was doing. I don’t think I could have done it, even a week before. I wouldn’t have imagined doing it, I wouldn’t have imagined either one of themlettingme do it: a senior putting two underclassmen together, why? I’d need to have an angle, and if I hadn’t an obvious one, they would have made one up for me, and more likely than not actively avoided each other afterwards.
Maybe they still would: Sudarat had more reason than most to be wary, and I didn’t know a thing about the Kansas girl beyond her being as miserable as I’d once been, which might mean anything. Maybe she, too, was secretly a proto-maleficer of unimaginable dark power, or maybe she was such a reflexively nasty person that everyone avoided her for good reason—I immediately thought of dear old Philippa Wax, back in the commune, who almost certainly hadn’t got any nicer just because I wasn’t there, although she’d often implied shewould—or maybe Leigh from Kansas was just a loser kid who was shy and bad at making friends, and who had nothing going for her, so no one had bothered to make a friend of her. She wasn’t an actual maleficer, because a maleficer wouldn’t have been that desperate to get out.
Anyway, Sudarat could decide for herself if it was worth enduring her company. At least it wassomeone, someone who wasn’t going to be suspicious of her, or even just hesitant to make a friend of her becauseotherpeople were suspicious of her. And I could imagine trying to help her, and help the other girl into the bargain, because that was now a thing that could happen in the Scholomance.
Assuming that they actually did sit together for at least that one meal, it was also the most successful example of help that entire week, at least that I knew of.
There were any number of charming additional proposals for maleficaria-breeding, some of which got so far as to include detailed specs. One alchemy-track kid actually had the gall to suggest to Liu that he could do it withour mice:enchant them and leave them all living forever in the pipes of the Scholomance to breed and eat agglo larvae. Liu didn’t get angry very easily, but she did get angry then, to the point that Precious woke me up out of a nap and sent me racing to her room just in time to collide with Mr. Animal Cruelty, who beat an even more enthusiastic retreat when he saw me outside the door with Precious poking a quivering-whiskered nose out of the bandolier cup on my chest.
People also generated some less obviously bad ideas, like plans for installing some kind of major weaponry in the dead space under the workshop floor, which would be used to blast the graduation hall mals more directly. The problem was that anything you installed outside the graduation hall would require openings in the extremely powerful wards that keep the malsinthe graduation hall andoutof the classroom levels.
We were a fairly glum group as we gathered in the reading room the next Saturday. The obstacle course had reversed itself full-bore: instead of being impossible to survive, it had suddenly got so easy that even freshmen could manage it, so nowtheywere doing runs instead of us. The schoolhadin fact started randomly locking seniors out of the cafeteria, and the only way to get in was to give something useful to one of the younger kids. Small things like individual spare socks or pencils were working this week, but you could see the writing on the wall perfectly well. And grotesquely, of course most seniors were giving the things toenclavekids, in exchange for nothing more than the promise of putting a good word in with the enclave council when they graduated.
“All of the proposals are still trying to repair the cleansing,” Yuyan said, spreading the papers out over the tables. She’d taken over gathering them, because she could read so many languages so fluently, and because unlike Liesel she didn’t traumatize people with her comments, so we’d got a lot more submitted after she put out the word that people should bring them to her. “I think we have to accept that the cleansing approach to graduation is just a failure. We need somethingdifferent.”
“Yeah, well, we’re trying,” Aadhya said grimly. I knew she’d been in the shop almost all week with Zixuan and a bunch of the other top artificers of our year, trying to come up with things. “We’ve experimented with making a corridor to the gates—like a tunnel of safety. But…” She shook her head. She didn’t really need to say what the problems with that strategy were: you’d be offering a single irresistible target to every last one of the mals, and how did you decide who went first? “Anyway, it still feels too obvious. The grown-ups would have tried something like that before.”
“Hey—here’s a thought. What if wedidall graduate?” Chloe said. “What if we bring all the younger kids out with us. When we graduate back to the New York induction point, Orion’s mom will be there—she can get the board of governors to cancel induction. If we did that, the school really would stay clear, because no mals would try to come in if there weren’t any of us inside. And then instead of just us trying to come up with something, we could have every wizard in the world thinking about a better solution.”
