Page 7 of The Last Graduate
“After you’ve only been dating two months?” Liu said.
“We’re not dating!”
Aadhya made a dramatic show of rolling her eyes heavenwards. “After you’ve been doing whatever you’re doing that is not dating but totally looks like dating to everyone else, for only two months.”
“Thanks ever so,” I said, dryly. “As far as I can tell, they’re shocked that he’s talking to another human being at all.”
“To be fair, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who’d come up with the idea of being wildly rude and hostile to the guy who saved your life twenty times,” Aadhya said.
I glared at her. “Thirteen times! And I’ve savedhislife at least twice.”
“Catch up already, girl,” she said, unrepentantly.
It’s not that I’dratherhave had Aadhya and Liu ditch me to face the rest of my school career alone and desperate instead of asking Chloe Rasmussen for help, but I had definitely managed not to see asking her as an option. I wasn’t actually sure what she’d say. I’d turneddownher offer of a guaranteed place in New York, after all. I was still sullen about having to do it. I’d spent the better part of my life carefully planning out my campaign for an enclave spot. It had been a really comforting plan that ended in the fantasy of me having a nice happy long life in a safe and luxurious enclave with endless mana at my fingertips like all the other enclave kids, and by making sure the campaign was long and involved and never quite completed successfully, I’d neatly avoided having to think about how I didn’t really want to be an enclaver at all.
Even Chloe—she’s a decent sort, and better than that if I’m being fair. When the enclave kids started courting me last term—because of Orion—they all behaved as though they were doing me a generous favor by so much as talking to me. All it got them was my violent and unstrategic rudeness in their faces, so they stopped talking to me at all. But Chloe stuck it out. She’s already asked to sit with us ten times this year, and she hasn’t brought any tagalongs with her. I don’t know that I’d have bent my neck the way she did, apologizing to me and even asking to be friends after I bit her head off. I’m not sorry for doing the biting, I had more than enough cause, but I still don’t know that I’d have had the grace.
Oh, who am I lying to? My supply of grace wouldn’t overflow an acorn cap.
But Chloe’s still an enclaver. And not like Orion. All the New York kids have a power-sharer on their wrists that lets them exchange mana and pull from their shared storage, but Orion’s is one-way, goingin.Because otherwise, he’ll just pull as much mana as he needs to kill the nearest mal and save other kids. It’s so much of an instinct for him that he can’t actually stop himself. So the son of the future Domina of New York doesn’t get access to the shared mana pool, although he sure gets to contribute, not to mention come running if any of them get into danger.
Chloe’s one of the kids who gets the benefit of all that power he puts in. She doesn’t need to budget her spells. She throws up a shield anytime she feels anxious. If a mal jumps her, maybe she has to keep her head and figure out what spell to use on it, but she doesn’t have to worry that she can’t afford to cast it. When she came in as a freshman, on top of bringing in a bag of the most useful magical items that wizardry can devise, she inherited a massive chest crammed full by more than a century’s worth of other kids from New York, each of them bringing in a new set of useful items and making others in here—items they can afford to leave behind, because when they get out, they’re going home to one of the richest enclaves in the world. And theydoget out, because they’re the worst targets in the room when we get dumped into the graduation hall, and there’s lots of tasty losers available to be the cannon fodder.
I can’t forget that whenever I’m with her. Or more honestly, Idoforget it after a bit, and I don’t want to. I find myself wishing she’d just gone on being awful, so I could go on being awful back. It feels unfair for her to get to have real friends, the kind of friends who don’t care about how rich you are and how much mana you have, and also have all the mana and the money and the eager hovering sycophants on top of it. But whenever I really get into that mean sour squirrely thought, I immediately get the sensation of Mum looking at me with all this love and sympathy, and I feel like an earthworm. So hanging about with Chloe is a constant roller coaster from guarded to relaxed to resentful to earthworm and back again.
And now I had to ask her to letmein on the mana pool, because if I didn’t, I’d be laying out Aadhya and Liu and all the freshmen in the library, and possibly everyone else in the school if I everdoscrew up one fine morning when a rhysolite tries to dissolve my bones or a magma slug squirms up the furnace vent and launches itself at my head. I’d have even less excuse for being resentful of her than I’ve already got. I half wanted her to say no.
“Wait—do you mean you’ll take the spot?” she said instead, sounding hopeful about it, as if I was meant to think that it was on perpetual offer, and I could claim myself a place in New York anytime I liked.
“No,” I said, warily. I’d come to her room—I didn’t want eavesdroppers for this conversation—and the whole place made me feel twitchy. She had one of the rooms above the bathrooms, where the opening to the void is overhead instead of out one wall. On the bright side, you never need to worry about falling out. On the downside, you’ve got an endless void over your head. She’d dealt with that by putting up a canopy of opaque cloth with just one spot open over the desk. Anything at all could have been hiding above it or in the folds.
She’d also kept all the standard-issue wooden furniture that I’d almost immediately replaced with thin wall-mounted shelves that didn’t provide loads of dark corners. She even had two half-empty bookcases: her room had just gone double-width in the last reshuffle, which I could tell because she had a bright cheerful mural painted over the wall alongside the bed and was still working on continuing it onto the new space. It wasn’t an ordinary painting, either; I could feel mana coming off it. She’d probably imbued the paint with protective spells in alchemy lab. Even so, I kept my back to the door and didn’t come far into the room. She was snuggled in doing some reading on one of three luxuriously plush beanbag chairs amid a pile of other cushions, and I didn’t trust a single one of them. My hands were itching to pullherup out of the heap before it suddenly swallowed her whole or something. “I’m just asking to borrow mana. I’m running out.”
“Really?” she said dubiously, like that was an extraordinary thing to imagine. “Are you feeling okay?”
“It’s not mana drain or a pipesucker,” I said shortly. “I’musingit. I’ve got three seminars, a double independent study, and once a week I’m stuck with eight freshmen in a room and things try to eat them.”
Chloe’s eyes were all but popping before I’d finished. “Oh my God, are you nuts? Adoubleindependent study? Are you making a last-ditch run for valedictorian? Why would you even do that to yourself?”
“Theschool’sdoing it to me,” I said, which she didn’t want to believe was possible, so I spent the next ten minutes standing there with metaphorical cap in hand while she earnestly informed me that the fundamental intent of the Scholomance was the shelter and protection of wizard children, and the school couldn’t act contrary to that intent, as if it didn’t toss half of us to the wolves on a regular basis, and also that the school couldn’t violate its standard procedures, which it also did on a regular basis, and after she had laid out those lines of argument, she finally wound up triumphantly at, “And why on earth would it be out to getyou?”
I really didn’t want to answer that question, and I was already sick of hearing her trot out the enclave party line. “Just forget I asked,” I said, and turned to go; she was going to turn me down anyway.
“What? No, El, wait, that’s not—” she said, and even scrambled up out of the heap to come after me. “Seriously, wait, I’m not saying no! I’m just—” and I gritted my teeth and turned round to tell her that if she wasn’t saying no, she could get on with saying yes, or else stop wasting my time, except instead what I did was grab her arm and yank her sideways onto the bed with me as the cushionsdidhave a go at swallowing her whole, and me along with her. Her own beanbag chair had split open along one seam to let out a gigantic slick greyish tongue that swiped across the floor towards us. It moved horribly fast, like a slug on a mission, and after we got out of the way, it kept going and swiped over the doorway, leaving every inch of the metal coated and glistening with some kind of thick gelatinous slime that I was confident we didn’t want to touch.
I always keep my one decent knife on me; I already had it out and was slicing fast through all the canopy ties along the wall over the bed, so I could yank it down to envelop the slug-tongue. That bought us a moment, but not a very long one, since the fabric almost immediately started to hiss and smoke: yes, the slime was bad. I didn’t recognize this particular variety of mal, but it was the kind that’s smart enough to play a very long game, waiting until it can take a victim without sparking suspicion. The dangerous kind. A glistening tip was already wriggling out through the first dissolving hole in the canopy, but Chloe had got past her own instinctive shriek and was grabbing a pot of paint from the rack at the foot of the bed; she threw the paint over it. A gargling noise of angry protest came from under the disintegrating canopy, and it rose to a higher pitch when she threw on another pot: red and yellow streaming together over the silky fabric, staining through and running off in rivulets, coating the thrashing tongue.
The mal pulled the tongue back in through the hole and back under the canopy, making a lot of ugly squishing and gurgling noises underneath that unfortunately sounded less like death throes than a mild attack of indigestion. “Come on, quick,” Chloe said, grabbing another pot of paint and jerking her head towards the door, but halfway there, we ran out of time; there was a large gulping noise and the whole canopy, paint and all, was sucked into the slit of the beanbag chair with a slurp of tongue, and then the whole pile of beanbags and cushions heaved itself up together and came at us in a humping rush.
There was no chance Chloe had been stupid enough to inherit that entire pile and never even move the pillows apart over the course of the past three-odd years, so that meant it was the kind of maleficaria that can animate wizard possessions, and it was also the kind of maleficaria that had a corporeal flesh-digesting body of its own—each of which is a significant branching on everyone’s favorite cladogram from Maleficaria Studies, meaning it was actuallytwo separate malsthat had formed some kind of wonderful symbiotic relationship. Trying to take out two mals at once when you don’t know what either of them are isn’t what you’d call easy. The only way to do it, at speed, was something grandiose—the kind of thing that would eat a heap of the mana I had left, and if I blew it all on Chloe and shedidn’tpay me back, I’d be saving her, choosing her, over everyone else who needed me.
Or I could just have—waited. Chloe had thrown the paint over the slime to neutralize it, and she was already sliding the door open. The cushion-monster was lumping straight towards her back: it would get her before she got ten steps onto the walkway. If I held back until it caught her, I’d be able to make it out the other way and get clear. She wasn’t even looking to see if I was behind her. She hadn’t looked back when we’d been in the stairwell, either, fighting together to try and keep the argonet from getting into the school. She’d taken off to save her own skin. Aadhya and Liu had stayed with me, but she’d abandoned us. And she’d just spent ten minutes telling me at length that I was making up reasons why I needed mana, which is to say reasons why she shouldn’t feel bad about saying no to me.
“Get out of the way!” I said through my teeth, and pointed at the cushion beast. Chloe darted a look back that went wide when she saw the thing coming at her. She gave a terrific heave and shoved the door and flung herself out into the hall even as it slid open, where she collided bodily with Orion, who was already off-balance because he’d been holding on to the door handle from the other side. She took him down to the floor beneath her in a heap.
The spell I used was a really terrific higher-level working I’d just learned in my Myrddin class. It had taken me a solid week to plow through the antique Welsh manuscript—time enlivened by the many lavish illustrations of the way it had been used by a tidy-minded alchemist maleficer to flay the skin off hapless victims, neatly drain their blood, pop the organs into separate containers, and then the flesh into a desiccated heap, leaving behind the cleaned bones.
The incantation did a remarkable job of whipping off the outer layer of cushion covers and beanbag chair casings, sending them into a beautifully folded pile that might have come straight from a laundry. That step briefly exposed a glowing translucent sac full of tongue and undigested canopy and, gruesomely, a half-digested person. Thankfully the face was already unrecognizable, even before the sac shredded into a stack of inch-wide strips of some vellum-like material, and dumped the whole tongue out flopping onto the floor. The tongue proceeded to roll up into a very thin spongy mat, a huge puddle of viscous fluid squeezing out of it, which after a moment of alarming uncertainty and struggle finally separated into three different liquids: one ectoplasmic, one clear, and one sort of jelly-pinkish, which all leapt like graceful fountains into the emptied paint cans on the floor. The excess more or less reluctantly went down the drain in the middle of the room.
