Page 6 of The Last Graduate
And if the Wednesday mals didn’t work—it would try something else. And something else after that. The Scholomance isn’t exactly a living thing, but it isn’t exactlynot,either. You can’t put this much mana and this much thinking into a place without it starting to develop a mind of its own. And theoretically it’s been built to protect us, so it won’t just start snacking on kids on its own—not to mention enrollment would drop substantially when that began happening—but of course it still wants enough mana to keep going; it’s meant to keep going. And I’ve put myself in the way, so the school is coming after me, and that means anyone round me is going to be in for it.
“The kids have got to start making mana for you,” Aadhya said.
“They’re just freshmen,” I said, dully. “All eight of them together make less mana in an hour than I can build in ten minutes.”
“They could reset your dead crystals, though,” Liu said. “You said you don’t need a lot of mana to wake those up, just a steady stream. They could each carry one around.”
Liu wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t actually going to solve the real problem. “I won’tneedthe dead crystals. I’m not going to have enough mana to fill my other empties, at this rate.”
“Then we can trade them,” Aadhya said. “They’re loads better than most storage. Or you know, I could try building them into the lute—”
“Do you want out?” I said, breaking in, harshly, because I really couldn’t handle sitting there while they worked through all the options I’d spent the last three weeks clawing through, trying to find a way out myself, until I’d realized there wasn’t going to be one for me. There was only the one forthem.
Aadhya stopped talking. But Liu didn’t even pause; she just said, “No.”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t think you’ve thought—”
“No,” Liu said, strangely hard, and after a pause, she went on more quietly, “I used to take Zheng and Min around all day on a leading string when they were little. At school, if one of the other boys was hurting something like a frog or a stray kitten, they would stop it and bring the animal to me, even though they got teased for ‘being girls’ because of it.” She looked down at Xiao Xing in her hands, stroking her thumb over his head. “No,” she repeated, softly. “I don’t want out.”
I looked at Aadhya, my feelings in a confused knotted mess: I didn’t know what I wanted her to say. My practical friend, whose mum had told her it was a good idea to be decent to losers, and so had been decent tome, all the years while everyone else treated me like a piece of used kitchen roll no one wanted to pick up even long enough to put in the bin. I’d liked herbecauseshe was practical, and hard-nosed: she’d always driven a solid hard bargain, the kind you could believe in, without ever cheating me, even though she’d more often than not been the only person who would have traded with me. She hadn’t any reason to care about the freshmen in the library, and she hadchoices: she was one of the best practical artificers in our year, with a magical lute in the finishing stages that was going to be worth somethingoutside, and not just among students. Any enclaver would’ve gladly snatched her up for a graduation alliance. That was the smart thing, the practical thing to do, and I almost wanted her to do it. She’d already taken half a dozen chances on me that anyone else would have called a bad bet. I didn’t want her to drop me, but—I couldn’t be the reason she didn’t make it out.
But she only said, “Yeah, no,” almost dismissively. “I’m not a ditcher. We just need to figure out a way to get you some more mana. Or better yet, get the school off your back. I don’t get why the Scholomance is pulling this whole complicated stunt on you. You’re not an enclaver, it’s not like you were going to have tons of mana anyway, so why is it so into making you spend the little you’ve got?”
“Unless,” Liu said, and then stopped. We looked over at her; her lips were pressed together, and she was staring at her hands in her lap, twisted up. “Unless it’s about—pushing you. The school—”
“Likes maleficers,” Aadhya finished for her.
Liu nodded a little without looking up. And she was absolutely right. That was surely why the Scholomance had given me that Wednesday session. It was trying to give me—an easier choice to make. The school wanted me to have to make the first selfish choice, to save my own mana, instead of saving a random freshman I didn’t care about. Because then it would be easier for me to make the second selfish choice after that, and the one after that.
“Yeah,” Aadhya agreed. “The school wants you to go maleficer. What could you do if you decided to start using malia?”
If you had me make a list of the top ten questions I go to great lengths to avoid asking myself, that one would have comprehensively covered items one through nine, and the only reason it wasn’t doing for item ten as well was thatSo howdoyou feel about Orion Lakehad quietly crept onto the bottom of it. But it’s a long way down from the rest. “You don’t want to know,” I said, by which I meantI don’t want to know.
Aadhya didn’t even slow down. “Well, you’d have to get the malia somehow—” she was saying thoughtfully.
“Thatwouldn’t be a problem,” I said through my teeth. She wasn’t wrong to raise the question, since that’s the top roadblock facing most would-be maleficers, and the solutions generally involve spending a lot of time on intimate encounters with entrails and screaming. But my own main concern is how to avoidaccidentallysucking the life force out of everyone around me if I ever get taken by surprise and instinctively fire off something really gargantuan. For instance, I’ve got this great spell for razing an entire city to the ground, which will certainly come in handy if I ever turn into one of those people who write furious letters to the editor about the architecture of Cardiff, and I suppose it would do to wipe out any mals on the same floor as me. Along with all the other people on the same floor as me, but they’d probably be dead by then, since I’d have drained their mana to cast the spell.
That did finally stop her; she and Liu both eyed me a little dubiously. “Well, that wasn’t creepy and ominous at all,” Aadhya said after a moment. “Okay, I vote for younotturning maleficer.”
Liu put up an emphatic hand to agree. I let a choked snort of laughter come out and put up my hand. “I vote no, too!”
“I’m even going to go out on a limb here and say that pretty much everyone else in the school will be right there with us,” Aadhya said. “We could ask people to chip in for you.”
I stared at her. “Hey, everybody, it turns out El is some kind of mana-sucking vampire queen, we should all give her some mana so she doesn’t drain us dry.”
Aadhya scrunched up her mouth. “Hmm.”
“We don’t need to ask everyone to chip in for you,” Liu said slowly. “We could just ask one person—if it’s Chloe.”
I hunched my shoulders forward and didn’t say anything. That wasn’t a terrible idea. It might even work. That was why I didn’t like it. It had been almost a month since we’d gone down to the graduation hall, and I still remembered what it had been like with a New York power-sharer on my wrist, all that mana right in front of me like getting to plunge my head into a bottomless well and drink cold water in careless gulps. I didn’t trust how much I’d liked it. How easy it had been to get used to it.
“You think she’ll say no?” Liu said, and I looked up: she was studying me.
“That’s not…” I trailed off and then blew out a sigh. “She offered me a spot.”
“In an alliance?” Aadhya said.
“In New York,” I said, which only means one thing in here: an enclave spot, aguaranteedenclave spot. For most people, if you’re lucky enough to get picked by an enclaver to join their alliance, it means their enclave willlookat you, maybe give you a job. Usually four hundred kids graduate each year. Maybe forty enclave spots open up worldwide, and more than half of them will go to top adult wizards who’ve earned them with decades of work. A guarantee of one of those spots, fresh out of school, is a prize even if you weren’t talking about the single most powerful enclave in the world. Aadhya and Liu were both gawking at me. “They’re freaked out over Orion.”
