Page 46 of The Last Graduate
Aadhya reached out to her, and I did, too; we put our hands on her, and Liu reached out her own slightly damp hands and gripped ours, one in each, tight. “We’re going home tomorrow,” she said, and kept hold of us determinedly: we’d both flinched. We hadn’t brokenthatrule. You didn’t say out loud,I’m going to graduate. But Liu held on and said it again. “We’re going home tomorrow. I’m going home. And my mother is going to be so happy, and for a long time, she won’t care about anything, except that I’m back. But then she’s going to want me to want the right things again. The things that the family think are the right things.” She stopped, and took a deep breath and let it out. “But I’m not going to. I’m going to want the things I want, and help them the wayIcan help them. And those are going to be the right things, too.”
I reached out to Aadhya, and the three of us made a circle together: not anything formal, but still a circle, still the three of us together, holding each other up. Liu squeezed our hands again, smiling at us, her eyes bright but not dripping tears anymore, and we smiled back.
We couldn’t keep sitting there smiling like muppets the whole night, so eventually…I went back to my room—without any side trips; I did manage to resist temptation—only to find Precious sitting in a pile of stuffing in the middle of my bed, sulking ferociously, with a substantial hole dug straight through my already thin pillow. I glared at her and said, “Oh, don’t be a sore loser.” She gave me a narrow look out of her beady eyes and then turned her back and burrowed herself into the comfortable little nest of fluff.
We still weren’t talking the next morning, although with frigid courtesy she allowed me to put her in the bandolier cup to go upstairs to breakfast. She emitted a continuous stream of what I’m fairly certain were rude remarks from the moment Orion joined me, but they didn’t dampen his spirits; he beamed at me with delight and tried to take my hand again. I might have relented and let him have it for a dim stretch of the stairs going up, before we ran into other kids, all streaming up to the cafeteria.
Breakfast wasn’t stuffed crêpes or anything, but there was unburnt French toast and griddled sardines and pickled vegetables and enough of it for everyone: the school giving us all one nice final meal. The freshmen were still wolfing down theirs when Liesel got up and climbed onto her table with the large mindphone she’d talked some artificer into making for her—the school had apparently counted that as helping, too, although I questioned its value. “It is time now to review the final order of departure,” she announced—the message reached my head mostly in English, with a few scattered words of German sneaking in and a whispery echo underneath in Marathi flavored with bits of Sanskrit and Hindi—and began to read off numbers and names as if everyone in the room wasn’t already carrying the information inscribed on their brains in letters of flame.
I wasn’t paying attention, as I really didn’t need to: I knew when my turn was. After everyone else had gone, and I’d pitched Orion through, and I’d ripped up the school’s foundations and it was teetering away into the void like a sequoia getting ready to come down. Then I’d—hopefully—have just enough time to jump before the tidal wave of mals reached me. On paper I would, assuming Orion hadn’t been overwhelmed some time before then—not a remotely safe assumption—and also assuming that Liesel hadn’t fudged the numbers or, less likely, made a mistake.
So I didn’t notice Myrthe Christopher getting up on her own table until she cast her own more straightforward amplification spell and said, “Excuse me!” so loudly she managed to drown out the mindphone even inside my head. “I’m so sorry, excuse me!” I knew her only by osmosis: she’d always ranked as one of the more important enclavers, since her parents were something high up in one of the American enclaves, but it was Santa Barbara, one of the California enclaves that aren’t quite satisfied having New York rule the roost. My uncomfortably acquired circle of enclavers didn’t overlap much with hers, and she’d never stopped by the planning sessions, either.
She waited smilingly until Liesel had lowered her clipboard, then said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t want to be rude,” in a syrupy way that suggested she’d been studying to be rude for weeks. “But, like—we’re not actually doing this?”
“Excuseme?” Liesel said, with a razor-sharp edge that translated into a prickling sensation along the bottom of my skull. It landed into total silence; even the freshmen with any breakfast left on their trays had stopped eating. My own had turned into a strange cold lump in my stomach.
Myrthe cast a wincing smile around, showing how pained she was to have this awkward yet necessary conversation. “I know it’s been really weird this whole year, and we’ve all been freaking out, but, reality check—this plan is literally insane?” She pointed down at the floor. “The graduation hall is empty right now.Empty.And you want us to go wait in line behind all the other kids, the freshmen, everybody,” hilarious, nonsense, “and hand over all our mana, so Queen Galadriel here can summon a billion mals to fill it back up and eat us?” She gave a gurgle of laughter out loud at the absurdity. “No? Just—no? I get it, we had to work on something and make it look good, or else the school was going to screw us, but it’s half an hour to graduation, so I think we’re good at this point. Please don’t get me wrong, I wish we could keep it this good for everybody. We should totally give the other kids all the stuff we can spare, extra mana,” the depths of her generosity, really, “but come on.”
She wasn’t using a mindphone, but she didn’t really need to. If there was anyone who hadn’t followed, they were getting a translation right now, and after all, surely most of them had thought of it. Surely most of them hadn’t been stupid enough to take the idea seriously, had at some point thought to themselves,We’re just killing time until we can leave, aren’t we?I was surprised Liesel hadn’t announced it herself, really; she wasn’t stupid. Seduced by her own spreadsheets, probably.
And I couldn’t even blame them, because the first thing that came into my head was, Icouldn’tdo it alone. Without all the seniors helping, actively channeling me their mana, I wouldn’t be able to keep the summoning spell running the whole time and break the school away at the end. That was why the seniors had to wait until last to go. So if they quit, if only all the seniors quit, if they refused to help and headed downstairs and out—there wouldn’t be anything for me to do, after all. I’d just have to walk out of the empty hall, and Orion would, too. In half an hour, I’d be hugging Mum, and this time tomorrow he’d be on a plane coming to Wales, and I’d have the whole rest of my life ahead of me, full of good work, and I wouldn’t even have to feel guilty.
I couldn’t help that greedy selfish desperate thought, and it stoppered up all the furious words I wanted to stand up and yell at her. I could feel Orion gone rigid next to me, but I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see him outraged, and I didn’t want to see him looking hopefully at me, and I didn’t want to see my own choked feelings in his face. The silence was stretching out into eternities as if Chloe had just sprayed me with the quickening spell again, except some of the younger kids had started to cry, muffled into their hands or buried facedown onto the tables. Everyone was starting to turn their heads, to look at me and Orion, at Aadhya and Liu and Chloe; others were looking at Liesel still up on her own table, all of us bloody fools who had taken the insane absurd plan seriously, much too seriously. The kids in the mezzanine were crowding the railings, peering down anxiously. They were waiting for one of us to say something, and I had to say something, I had to try, but I didn’t have any words, and I knew anyway that it wasn’t going to do any good. Myrthe would just keep smiling, and what was I going to do, threaten to kill her if she wouldn’t risk her life to help me save people from being killed? Was I going to kill everyone who said no? I certainly wouldn’t have enough mana then.
Then the next table over, Cora put her chair back, legs scraping over the floor, and stood up and just said flatly, “I’mstill in.”
It was loud in the room, hanging there. For a moment, nobody else said anything, and then abruptly a boy also from Santa Barbara at the other end of Myrthe’s table stood up and said, “Yeah. Fuck off, Myrthe. I’m in, too. Come on, guys,” and as soon as he’d prodded them, the other kids at the table were all moving, shoving back their chairs and getting up, too, until Myrthe was standing red-faced with a growing ring around her, and people all round the room were yelling that they were in, they were still in, and I could have cried—for either reason or both.
People kept piling on until Liesel put the mindphone back up and yelled painfully, “Quiet!” and everyone winced and shut up. “Enough interruptions. There is no more time to review. Everyone find your partners and go down to the senior dormitories right away.”
The whole incident had probably taken less time than Liesel had been about to spend on reading her announcements, but she’d clearly decided to get us into motion before anyone else could throw out a clever idea. It was just as well, because the Scholomance evidently agreed with her. The grinding of the gears that rotate the dormitories down—and send the senior level to the graduation hall—was picking up even as we left the cafeteria, and kids were still pouring down the stairwells when the warning bell for the cleansing started to go, at least half an hour early. The last few came flying in panicked from the landing on the hissing crackle of the mortal flames going, with their shadows huge in front of them in the brilliant blue-white light.
I ran to my room and reached it with the floor beneath me thrumming. Sudarat and three of the Bangkok sophomores were already waiting inside for me, piled onto the bed clinging to one another: we’d divvied the younger kids up among all the seniors for the trip downstairs. I slammed the door shut just in time as a xylophone chorus of pinging started up outside, metal shards and bits scraped off the walls flying through the corridor as we started our violent rattling progress downwards.
We hit some kind of blockage maybe halfway down that made the whole level lock up and start shaking wildly, and the younger kids all shrieked when the gears finally forced us through the obstruction and we lurched several meters onwards in a single violent jerk. My entire desk fell off into the void; thankfully I already had the sutras in their case strapped safely onto my back, and Precious tucked inside her cage inside her cup, also strapped down.
Another roaring started to go, of monstrous fans somewhere, and a hurricane-violent air current began to tear away the outer edges of the room into jagged puzzle pieces, sending them flying upwards where they’d be reassembled into a new, hopefully never-to-be-used freshman dormitory. The floor was crumbling away at an alarming clip, actually, and we still hadn’t reached the bottom. “Get off the bed!” I yelled, but Sudarat and the others hadn’t waited for me to tell them the obvious and were already scrambling off; fortunately, since a moment later my bed tipped off, too. I had to yank the door open again and we all spilled out into the corridor even as it came to a thumping, jaw-rattling halt.
Kids were pouring out of rooms all over, running towards the landing as the rooms kept breaking up around us. The bathrooms were already gaping holes of void, and the tops of the corridor walls were starting to go as well. “Keep together!” I yelled at Sudarat and the other Bangkok kids, and then they were swept away by the current, and a moment later so was I. The corridor floors got in on it and began sliding us all along towards the landing like moving walkways gone mad, dumping us all efficiently into the still-steaming and freshly cleansed graduation hall, all of us in our thousands still dwarfed inside the cavernous space.
Actually this was a sedate graduation by Scholomance standards: normally we’d all have been fighting our way through the first wave of maleficaria to get to our allies by now. And I’d known, I’d literally seen it for myself, but I hadn’t quite believed my own memory until I got my feet under me and was standing there in the empty hall, not a single mal in sight.
The doors weren’t even open yet, so we really were early. It was just as well, since several hundred people would probably have instinctively made a run for it even if they hadn’tintendedto. We were all milling round in confusion; people were vomiting—efficiently, we were practiced at that—and sobbing and yelling out names all over, trying to find their friends, and then Liesel was bellowing through the mindphone, “Back! Everyone back! Clear space in front of the doors!”
A gaggle of artificers emerged from the general mass, lugging several big square contraptions I hadn’t even seen before, which fired out a volley of thin colorful streamers that fell to the ground and then attached themselves there and lit up like runways. The artificers kept firing them off over and over, crisscrossing one another to create small sections covering the floor, all color-coded and marked with the numbers Liesel had assigned the teams; everyone started running to their places and lining up.
Alchemists were painting wider stripes on the outside of the queue area, imbued with spells of protection and warding that threw up hazy shimmery walls. Zixuan already had a team helping him check over the speaker cables that had been rigged from the ceiling, doing tests from the mouthpiece and making sure the sound was coming out again from the massive first speaker dangling down in front of the doors. Another large group were going over the massive barricades that they’d built around the second shaft, the one comingdown,and Orion was there near them just tossing his whip-sword in his hand lightly.
He looked over and caught me watching him and smiled so blithely that I immediately wanted to run over just to punch him in the mouth, or just possibly kiss him one last time, but before I could put either plan into action, Precious knocked open the top of her protective egg and gave an urgent squeak. I jumped and looked round to see Aadhya and Liu beckoning to me wildly from the raised platform set up to one side of the doors, where the wide mouthpiece of the speaker system had been mounted onto a stand. Liu was saying something to her own familiar Xiao Xing in his cup on her chest, presumablyTell Precious to get her stupid mistress over here.
I ran over, dodging the other kids racing to their places in all directions, and as soon as I reached them, training took over, and we were just working, the same routine we’d practiced for weeks. Aadhya quickly tuned up the lute, and Liu and I ran through a few scales together. Chloe joined us with three prepared dropper vials nestled in a small velvet-lined case: I sang warm-ups while she mixed them carefully together into a small silver cup, stirring with a narrow stick of diamond glowing with mana, and gave the shimmering pink liquid to me. I gargled with it twice and then swallowed it, and all the raspy adrenaline tightness in my throat smoothed away, my lungs swelling with air as if someone had put a bellows into my mouth. I sang out a few more practice notes and they echoed around the room in an ominous ringing way, like the tolling of a bell, and everyone in their places shuffled back from the platform a bit. Probably just as well, in case anyone had thought of having a dash at the gates in the last minute.
“Ready?” I said to Liu. She nodded, and we stepped up to the mouthpiece together. Aadhya and Chloe had already run to their own places in the queue; everyone else was there, too. I took a deep breath, and Liu picked out the opening line, and then I started singing.
I was immediately glad for every last second we’d spent practicing, because I hadn’t quite realized until that very moment that we wouldn’t be able tohearourselves. The speaker system grabbed the sound and sucked it completely in, and then carried it off through the miles and miles of speaker cable wound through the school.
Which obviously was what we wanted, of course—if the song was audibly coming from me, the mals would just stay right here and come at me; we needed the sound to come out of that last speaker right in front of the gates, and from there lead the mals to chase it down that long, long line, so they’d fill the school up before they ended up back down at the gates Orion was guarding. But it was just as well that I had every word and phrase deeply embedded in my brain and my throat and lungs, as otherwise I would have bungled the incantation completely a minute later when the first notes I’d made finally boomed out of the speaker in front of the actual doors.
