Page 11 of The Last Graduate
“What’s the right way?” I said warily.
The right way was, Chloe whispered around to everyone in New York, thatOrion’s girlfriendwas keeping him from hunting mals because I didn’t want him getting hurt, and now I was getting suspicious about why the mana was suddenly running low.
The New York enclavers were all as eager for me to learn the truth about the source of their mana as Chloe had been, so they did start quietly contributing after all—which it turned out they could do by the bucketload without even getting anywhere close to their mana-building capacity. That of course didn’t keep them from being grumpy about the work theyweredoing. I confess I enjoyed catching a glimpse of Magnus stalking into the boy’s bathroom at the head of his entourage, soaked in sweat and red-faced from what I assume was a hearty session of building mana with annoying physical exercise.
But after a month of what I suppose they found unbearable suffering, they all began to interrogate each other in accusatory ways about mana use, and meanwhile the honeypot project ran into a serious snag. Aadhya had made up a special incense burner, a set of nested cylinders of different kinds of metal, with holes punched carefully in each one to control the path that smoke took through them. Chloe had mixed a dozen small batches of mana-infused incense and left them out around a drain in one of the alchemy labs during dinner. We came down afterwards—warily—and picked the one that showed the most signs of having been poked at with various appendages, including a snuffler’s face, which had left a distressing imprint roughly like a lotus seedpod.
“Great, let’s go,” Orion said promptly; he would have grabbed the cylinder off the table and headed straight for the door, but Aadhya put out a hand against his chest and stopped him.
“How about wedon’ttry it out for the first time next to a big junction going straight down to the graduation hall,” she said. The rest of us all agreed heartily. The diameter of the school’s plumbing is open to a determined interpretation, and if we weredeliberatelyluring mals, our intent would actually be helping them squeeze themselves through.
Orion sat on a stool in visible impatience, tossing the burner from one hand to the other, while the rest of us discussed the best place for a trial run. We finally settled on the lab itself, on the grounds that the incense had been out here for a bit already, and we didn’t want to carry it through the corridors to somewhere else, possibly accumulating a trailing horde in the process.
Aadhya put the incense into the burner, fussed with the positioning of the cylinders a bit longer, and finally said, “All right, let’s give it a shot,” handing it to Orion.
We all backed well off towards the door while he did the honors. He lit the small blob of incense—“Ow,” he said, burning his fingers with the match, which he was more worried about than the possibly impending mals—and dropped it into the middle of the cylinders. Then he put the burner on the lab stool and set it right near the drain.
The first threads of smoke came out and visibly wafted over the drain before dispersing. Orion hovered over it eagerly, but nothing came out. We waited another few minutes. The smoke began to pick up, making a thin stream that circled the drain and went down into it. Still nothing.
There had been a couple of small agglos in the lab, stealing the floor leavings—we’d ignored them as they’re quite handy when fully grown, and completely harmless otherwise—which had started slowly humping their way towards the drain to escape when we’d come into the room. While we were still waiting, they reached the drain and kept going, straight through the thickest smoke, showing no interest in it whatsoever.
Orion looked over at us. “Shouldn’t it work on them? They’re still mals.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Chloe said, a bit nasally. The burner was certainly doing something; even all the way back at the door, the air was taking on the same distinct aroma that regularly wafted out of the boys’ loo.
Aadhya frowned and took a few cautious steps towards the burner. “Maybe we should,” she started, and that was when Pinky stuck his head out of his carrying cup and gave a loud excited squeak. Aadhya had made each of us a bandolier-style strap with a cup attached, for the mice to ride around in during the day, since Liu wanted us to keep them with us more often. Before she could stop him, Pinky leapt directly out of the cup on her chest all the way down to the floor, raced over to the stool, scampered up the leg like a tiny streak of white lightning, and did a full-body flying lunge for the cylinder and knocked it onto the floor. While we were still yelping, Mistoffeles and Xiao Xing emerged from their cups and made their own mad dashes to join him.
Theywere certainly interested in the incense. Together they spent the next half hour rolling the cylinder around the lab in mad glee, sending it under cabinets and tables and squirming out of our grip every time we tried to grab it or them. It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good atnotbeing caught. There was a lot of swearing and yelling and banged elbows and barked shins before we finally managed to get the cylinder away from them and put the smoke out, at which point they collapsed in exhausted furry lumps with their paws curled and glazed expressions that somehow conveyed dreamy pleasure on their faces.
Chloe drew several thick lines through the incense recipe in her notebook, and Aadhya disgustedly dumped the set of cylinders into the scrap bin. When a first experiment goes that far awry from your expectations, it’s usually not worth the risk to keep going. It means you’re missing something quite important, and in this case, we had no idea what the something we were missing was. So if we tried again with just minor tweaks, we’dexpectit to go wrong, and at that point, not only would it go wrong, it would almost certainly go wrong in a much more dramatic and possibly painful fashion.
The only positive outcome was my getting the first sign that Precious was actually becoming a familiar. She hadn’t joined the frenzy; instead, as soon as Pinky went for the burner, she’d run up my shoulder and jumped onto a high shelf of the lab, where she tipped a large beaker over herself and sat there disapprovingly watching the other mice having fun with her tiny forepaws held over her nose. After we put out the incense, she climbed back into my bandolier cup and pulled the lid firmly on top of herself and made clear that she was coming home with me instead of going back to the group cage in Liu’s room with the other stupefied mice.
So that was tidy, but the honeypot project was back to square one.
Meanwhile the New York enclavers weren’t my only problem anymore. Everyoneelsewas starting to look into the pattern of mal attacks, or lack thereof. We all spend a great deal of time thinking about mals and what they’re going to do. Almost half our freshman and sophomore courses are devoted to the study of maleficaria, their classification, their behavior, and most important, how to kill them. When mals start behaving unexpectedly, that’s bad. Even if the unexpected behavior is that they’re not leaping out to kill you anymore. That usually just means they’rewaitingto leap out and kill you at a much more opportune moment.
The next Wednesday, at the end of our cheery library death seminar, Sudarat waited until the kid on my other side got up and then said softly to me as we packed up to leave, “A girl from Shanghai asked me if our class had been attacked again.”
We were getting into striking range of midterms by then, and a grand total of twenty-three people had been killed so far the whole year. More than half of them had been freshmen blowing themselves up in shop or poisoning themselves in alchemy lab, which was barely like dying at all by our normal standards. The others—bar one—had all been cafeteria mistakes. Even that was radically below the usual rates, since almost everyone could afford to cast sniffer spells and brew antidotes, sincetheyweren’t getting jumped by maleficaria.
Death number twenty-three was the only upperclassman, a junior-year charmer named Prasong who’d been another former Bangkok enclaver. He had been very unhappy to discover he wasn’t an enclaver anymore, and he’d made himself obnoxious enough in the years he’d been one that he found sympathy and friends in very short supply. As he couldn’t see any other way to continue in the lifestyle to which he’d become accustomed—or to reliably continue living, for that matter—he made the decision to go maleficer. And obviously the best and safest way for him to get a big helping of malia stored up, enough to see him through graduation, would be draining it out of a group of unsuspecting wide-eyed freshmen.
If that sounds unimaginably evil to you, I should mention that it wasn’t to us. Most years there are somewhere between four and eight kids who go for the maleficer track, and since most of them haven’t planned it out carefully in advance and brought in a supply of small mammals, targeting younger students is their standard order of business. We’re all warned about it quite prosaically in the freshman handbook, and told to be wary of older or more successful kids showing too much interest in our activities. I owed my own charming gut scar to one of them, the late unlamented Jack Westing, who’d also done for Orion’s neighbor Luisa back in our sophomore year.
Sudarat was the only freshman that Prasong could talk to without arousing suspicions. He didn’t even have to go out of his way—she was going as far out of hers as she could to maintain her connections to the older Bangkok ex-enclavers. Even if all that got her was a chance to sit with them in the cafeteria once in a while, or the last hand-me-downs they couldn’t sell as seniors, that would still be better than nothing. So all Prasong needed to do was agree to let her fill an empty seat at his table for a single meal. She must have told him enough about her weird library seminar to convince him it was the perfect meal: eight freshmen in an isolated room with no witnesses around. I assume she didn’t mention me.
A few days later, he snuck upstairs just before the end of lunch period and laid down a flaying hex circle on the floor under the desks.
It wasn’t very good. You can’t exactly look up malia-sucking hexes in the library; officially there aren’t any malicious texts available in here. That’s nonsense of course, I’ve stumbled across at least a hundred of them. But anyone who wentlookingfor them would probably have harder luck getting one. Anyway, Prasong wasn’t as ambitious as dear Jack. His hex was good enough to rip off a substantial patch of skin on his victims, opening us up so he could pull a tidy bit of malia out of us through our pain and horror, and I imagine that was all he wanted. Actually killing eight wizards at once, even freshmen, is no joke for a budding maleficer; the psychic damage would’ve left him visibly marked in the ominous sorts of ways that make your fellow students—particularly your nearest neighbors—gather up a sufficient group to put you down before you get any more bright ideas that might involve extracting mana fromthem.
Unfortunately for him, I noticed the hex before I even crossed the threshold. I assumed a construct mal had done it; some of the more advanced kinds can draw spell inscriptions, although usually not very well. That didn’t rule out this example. I could’ve done better without half trying, and that’s exactly what I did: I grabbed a piece of chalk off the nearest board, rewrote half the sigils to turn the spell back on the original inscriber—correcting the various mistakes and adding a few improvements while I was at it—and invoked it with contemptuous ease and barely an ounce of mana. I was even a little smug that the first attack of the afternoon had been so easy to deal with.
I only found out who had cast it at dinnertime, when people were gossiping energetically about how Prasong’s skin just completely flew off him in the middle of the language lab and how he ran around in circles screaming wildly until he died of massive blood loss and shock.
I won’t say I was sorry. I won’t. I vomited after dinner, but it was probably something I’d eaten. Sudarat left the cafeteria looking moderately ghastly herself. She and all the kids in the library had known at once what had happened: I’d made a point—smug, smug, smug—of showing them the hex circle, what it was trying to do to us, and how I was cleverly turning it back on the creator. She’d been extra quiet in the couple of weeks since, which was saying something. This was the first peep she’d let out in my direction since.
“From Shanghai?” I said slowly.
