Page 42 of The Last Graduate
“We’d be luring in all the mals in the world,” Chloe said nervously, and she wasn’t wrong. It was obviously insane.
However, it still didn’t get crossed off the list, because we only crossed ideas off the list when we were sure they wouldn’t work, not just because they were mad. The list wasn’t long even so. Most of them came off when Alfie said, “Yes, tried that,” often without even taking his head off his fist where he was slumped next to Liesel at the head of the table; others got crossed off because Yuyan or Gaurav from Jaipur admitted their own enclave laboratories had tried it. Surprisingly, no one in any enclave had ever explored the brilliant idea of destroying the entire school.
More seriously, it was an idea that theycouldn’thave come up with, because it needed—me. You could have cast the honeypot spell with a circle of twelve wizards, or thirty if you wanted it to keep going for half an hour, and then you could have takenanotherthirty wizards and cast a spell to break the school off from the world, but you certainly couldn’t have got them all out again in time. As it was, I’d be yelling the last syllable of what was turning out to be my surprisingly handy supervolcano spellasI was jumping through the portal, or else I’d go toppling off into the void with the school. Oh well; if that happened, hopefully the accumulated mals would eat me before I had an opportunity to experience the full existential horror of being totally severed from reality.
And no, I wasn’t nearly that blasé about the prospect.
But we hadn’t found any better ideas, other than Chloe’s solution of just running out and throwing the problem into the laps of the adults. We all liked that solution quite a lot: the only problem with it was that it didn’t provide us with any work to do, and meanwhile the Scholomance was impatiently tapping a metaphorical foot. Over the next week, Zixuan started actually tinkering around and building the speakers, and other senior artificers started asking to help him, because anyone whowasn’thelping in some way started having their already dim room lamps go completely out, or having the water shut off to the bathrooms just when they got there, or being shut out of the cafeteria or the workshop.
The school only got meaner from there. There didn’t seem to be any big dangerous mals left—if there were, Orion was undoubtedly nabbing them before anyone else caught a glimpse—but we were all shaking ratworms and cribbas out of our bedclothes and having to cast purifications every night or wake up with mallows infesting our tear ducts, and one morning we got to the cafeteria and the food line was nothing but vats of the original thin nutrient slurry until after the last senior went through.
I have to say, I have no idea how anyone survived eating it long enough to graduate. We all ended up eating mad things: full English breakfasts, waffles slathered in berries and whipped cream, shakshuka with gorgeous heaps of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers; Aadhya had this amazing thing her nani had invented, thin pancakes stuffed with a puree of cholar dal and topped with toasted meringue. Once you’re spending the extremely expensive amount of mana it takes to transmute a meal in the first place, you might as well transmute it into something you actually like. But we’d all had to spend a week’s worth of mana to do it.
After breakfast every last senior was fairly clamoring forsomething to do,and since we didn’t have anything better on offer, they all started to grab bits of Liu’s plan, because it was the only one that was far enough along to start doing work, and it began to lurch down the runway like a half-built plane that people were literally holding up and carrying while other people were still putting on the wheels and wings and seats, trying to get the steering and the engine in order, and other people were running after it carrying the luggage.
The artificers and the maintenance crews started spinning out the speaker cabling and running it through the school, and building the speakers themselves—Zixuan had got a prototype working just in time; they’d have stolen the sketchy designs and built dozens of wrong ones otherwise. We even got the first positive sign that the school was endorsing our demolition plan, because after a fight broke out in the workshop over the last coil of metal wire, one of the metal ceiling panels fell in painfully on the squabblers’ heads, like a pointed message.
After that, maintenance-track kids started ripping down less important panels throughout the school and delivering them to artificers in the workshop, who shredded them into speaker cabling and wound them onto fresh coils and handed them right back. Alchemists started brewing actual honeypot bait—seniors unexpectedly did prove willing to donate blood to this project, since, creepily, a 10ml syringeful turned out to be good enough to get you into every meal of the day—with the idea that we’d spread it in the dormitories to lure some of the mals off from the crowded main stream of the spell. Other seniors started dragging the younger kids down to the gym at regular intervals and making them pretend to queue up for the doors, so they could work out the right pacing.
Liu and Aadhya and I didn’t have to look far for work: we spent our mornings up in the library trying to find some better alternative plan, and our afternoons down in the workshop with Zixuan, tweaking the lute and the speakers and the mouthpiece—he was building that crucial bit himself—to work best with the honeypot spell. Yuyan migrated along with us. She was also a musician, and had offered to be backup for Liu on the lute, in case anything happened to stop her playing; they were practicing the song-spell together most nights. No one was going to be backup for me.
The furnaces were going full blast with all the other artificers frantically trying to dosomething, so it was hot and tedious work, and my voice was ragged and croaky by dinnertime every day. For consolation, it was quite good fun wagging eyebrows at Liu, who kept turning red with confusion—Zixuan was clearly running a determined campaign on that front alongside the engineering work; he found time during the process to make her a set of tidy little metal egg-shaped protective cages for the mice that would lock into the bandolier cups, for graduation, with a tiny little spell-extension hook on the top that would attach into our shield spells.
Chloe started spending her own afternoons brewing throat-cooler for me, and salve for Liu and Yuyan’s fingers, and invited other alchemists to join her. She ended up with more hands than the work needed, so she took the best of them and started working on developing a second recipe meant specifically to enhance the honeypot song-spell, which I hadn’t even known you could do with alchemy.
A few days later, she gave me the first tiny thimbleful to try. The honeypot spellhadstill been doing a wonderful job of summoning larval mals, by the way, and in case you were wondering what we did about it, the answer was that for the first week, we cast it from inside a ring of mortal flame I summoned, all the while pouring out buckets of sweat. But we gratefully stopped doing that after the first week, because the swarms stopped coming. By the time Chloe gave me the sample, we were pretty sure we’d completely cleared the workshop environs of every last living mal.
And we had, only an isk had apparently laid a batch of eggs in the workshop furnaces some time ago. They weren’t due to hatch for a decade or so yet, but after I drank Chloe’s potion, the enhanced song managed to persuade them to break their shells and come out anyway. Their exoskeletons hadn’t hardened yet, so they were just floppy and slow-moving squiggles of molten metal, not a direct threat, except as they came out of the furnace they fell to the floor, melted through, and vanished away into the void below. By the time we managed to smother the rest of them, the floor of the shop was looking like one of those tin cans someone had punched full of holes with an awl for decoration. We spent the rest of that day repairing it, very gingerly.
By the end of May, we were far enough along with all the pieces of the project that when Liesel chivvied us all up to the library for a review of all the various planning ventures, the one major practical issue left with Liu’s plan was how to get the horde of mals up from the graduation hall and into the main levels of the school.
Which was quite an issue, as the entire school was designed from the beginning to make that journey as difficult as possible for even a single mal. The maintenance shaft was going to be a tight fit for an entire horde, even if a juvenile argonet had managed to squish itself up that way last year, and what about when the first mals circled all the way around through the school and then tried to come backdownthe maintenance shaft? As soon as a bottleneck developed, a mass of them would build up in the hall and eventually they’d start eating us after all.
No one had any good ideas, but we hauled out the big official school blueprints and spread them out onto the table to try to find a solution, and discovered to our confusion that there were two enormous shafts in the blueprints, right there on opposite sides of the graduation hall, each one wide enough for seven argonets to climb up and come down again on the other side if they liked.
I assure you that there had absolutely never been two enormous shafts on the blueprints before, or for that matter in the school.
But when we grabbed another set of blueprints off one of the walls, the shafts were there, too, and after we got a third and still they were there, one of the maintenance-track kids said suddenly, “There are pieces of machinery that weren’t here when the school was built, but they’re too big to have come up the maintenance shaft. The school must have bigger shafts that only get opened for major installations.”
Chloe sat up. “Wait, that’s right, I remember this! All the new cafeteria equipment—when they were ready to install it, New York built like a hundred golems to deliver it. The golems opened the gates from outside, blasted the whole hall with mortal flame from flamethrowers, and then charged in with the new equipment. They shoved it into a shaft and closed it again before they got ripped apart. And then the kids inside installed it.”
I didn’t ask how many of those kids had been slaughtered by the minor horde of mals that would surely have got upstairs in the time it took for a gang of golems to load equipment into a shaft. New York’s golems do have a reputation for being quicker than usual, but that means they could go thundering across the graduation hall in six minutes instead of twenty. I didn’t ask ifallthe kids in the school had been warned to expect the sudden influx. I’m sure Chloe wouldn’t have been told those parts of the story. You wouldn’t trouble a nice, warmhearted girl with that kind of information.
I didn’t ask, I just seethed about it while stomping all the way downstairs to the workshop level with a handful of volunteers—kids I didn’t know very well who’d only been hanging round the library looking for work because they hadn’t done very much that day and were anxious about getting into dinner—to confirm that yes, these helpful shafts were in fact there, one ending in the workshop and one in the gym, and both were wide open. They looked a lot more impressive in person than on the blueprints. It’s hard to remember just how bloodybigthis place is until you’re standing on the edge of a shaft, easily big enough for a jet plane, that just goes plummeting down for half a mile. An army of mals could sail up no bother.
“I don’t suppose it occurred toyouto keep them shut until the enclavers bothered to give everyone a warning?” I demanded of the nearest framed blueprints—the shafts were showing on there now as well—while my company all nervously took their own peeks down to help make sure that the shafts were there. “Not very much for fairness, are you?”
The school didn’t answer me. But I already knew the answer. It didn’t weigh people up one after another and even the score. It would do its best to protect an enclaver kid as much as a loser, and it wouldn’t care that the enclavers had come in with a basketful of advantages. They still hadn’t beensafe,after all. That was the only line it drew, the line betweensafeandnot safe,before it doled out its help with an implacable unjust evenhandedness. And it expected me to do the same, and it made me angry even while I couldn’t see any way to do it better.
I seethed all the way back upstairs to the library—my mood wasn’t improved by having to climb back up all those stairs—and announced, “The shafts are open,” before I threw myself sullenly into a chair.
After that, Liu’s plan wastheplan, the only one we were working on, which was just as well, since it took every last minute of the last weeks—of what might be the last term ever—to get it into shape. Almost everything we’d done already had to be done again. Half of the first round of hastily built speakers broke and had to be replaced; we had to redo a quarter of the cabling, and then we had to make nearly a hundred new coils just to go up and down the shafts. We weren’t sure where to safely get the materials until someone suggested the walls of the gigantic auditorium where we take Maleficaria Studies, which are plastered all over with a horrible educational mural of all the mals which are normally waiting below to eat us.
I hadn’t been inside since last year, and I hadn’t missed it, but I took a day off from singing practice to join in for the festival of destruction. I wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of kids showed up; the younger kids were actually still going to lessons, but a lot of them skived off to join in and help as much as they could. We tore the place completely apart. Alchemists were there pouring precious etching fluids onto the bolts; incanters heated and cooled the panels to warp them until they fell off. Kids were flying themselves to the ceiling and prying panels off there, yelling out warnings below as they dropped. Even the freshmen—dramatically more gangly than they’d been at the start of the year—were there just whacking away at the seats with ordinary hammers in a frenzy. By the time the lunch bell rang, the room was gutted down to the girders and pipes.
Liu’s plan had that one significant advantage over any other: we allwantedto destroy the Scholomance. I’m not even joking; the fact that we all loved the idea on a deeply visceral level would almost certainly help carry it off. And it wasn’t just resentment and spite working in us, although that would have been enough: I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here. And every last one of us, from the most blithe freshman to the most crumpled senior, was longing more violently with every passing day to getout, out, out.
Well, except for our one special loony. Orion got increasingly sullen as July 2 crept closer. If he’d been resentful over the task he’d been assigned in our delightful scheme—he was going to be guarding the shaft that camedown,facing the entire horde of mals at once—I would have considered it entirely justified. Since he didn’t mind his assignment in the slightest and in fact seemed to be looking forward to it in some weird demented anticipation, I had no idea what was bothering him.
