Page 15 of The Last Graduate
And not even a share in the New York mana pool was going to be enough to power more than one of my major workings. There were six other New York seniors who’d be in the graduation hall at the same time as Chloe, all wanting hefty quantities of mana for themselves and their own teams, and even if they didn’t mean to cut me off beforehand, they were very definitely going to ration just how much mana I could take during the main event.
So all our planning took place at one remove: how could we get enough mana for me tokeepslaughtering mals all the way to the gates. The two key pieces were Aadhya’s sirenspider lute and Liu’s family spell. Liu’s grandmother had sneaked her a really powerful song-spell for mana amplification to bring in, even though she couldn’t cast the spell alone—her affinity was for animals, and anyway it usually took two or three of her family’s most powerful wizards to make it work. After a lot of careful Chinese coaching, I’d got the words down. Our strategy was, just before we sailed into the hall, Liu would play the melody on the sirenspider lute while I sang out the lyrics, and then she’d carry on playing even after I finished. With a magical instrument, the spell would keep going, and our whole team would have the benefit of amplified mana. So Liu would be in the middle of our team, sustaining the spell; Chloe and Aadhya would be on either side of her, covering her and me, and I’d take the lead.
That was the theory, at any rate. Unfortunately, the lute wasn’t quite working according to plan. We’d made one experiment with it a few weeks back while still urgently trying to make a honeypot for Orion. Liu had written a Pied Piper spell for mals with the idea that we’d do a little parade through some section of the corridors one evening, me singing and her playing, and Orion whacking the mals one after another as they popped out at us.
I’ll leave you to imagine how appealing I found the prospect of wandering around loudly calling,Here, kitty, kitty.I’ve spent my entire life tryingnotto lure mals. But we needed to try out the lute, and Orion didn’tquitebeg and plead for us to get him some mals to kill, but he clearlywantedto beg and plead, so after Aadhya finished the last bit of inlay, we agreed to give it a go.
We bolted our dinners and hurried to a spare seminar room down on the shop level, so everyone else would still be upstairs and not in range to see us doing anything this unbelievably stupid. Orion hovered around hopefully, and this time we tied all the mice securely into their bandolier cups as a precaution. That seemed to have been a good idea, because they all set up a frantic squeaking from inside as soon as Liu started tuning the lute and I hummed the line of melody.
In retrospect, the mice were just trying to warn us. Liu hit the first notes, I sang three words, and the mals came from everywhere. Thebabymals. Agglo grubs came out of the drain and larval nightflyers started dropping from the ceiling and thin scraps that looked like flat handkerchiefs that were probably going to be digesters peeled off the walls and blobby mimics the size of a little toe and a thousand different unrecognizable flabby things all started coming out of every possible nook and cranny of the entire room and converging on us like a slow horrible creeping wave swelling out of every surface around us.
“It’s working!” Orion said delightedly.
The rest of us, not being absolute madmen, all ran for the door at once, with mals crunching and squishing under our feet and more of them still coming, crawling out of tiny gaps between the metal panels and oozing from the corners and falling from the ceiling and pouring in a torrent out of the air vent and the drain. Orion barely made it out before we had the door slammed and were barricading it fervently against the solid mass of mals. Chloe rushed to seal up all the edges with an entire syringe of mana-barrier gel while Liu and I reversed the invocation and Aadhya unstrung the lute. We locked in place there staring at the door, ready to flee, until we were sure it had stopped bulging out any further, and then we all jumped up and down and shook ourselves wildly and pawed and batted at one another to get the larvae out of our hair and clothes and off our skin and onto the floor where we stomped and crushed them in a frenzy. We’re used to flicking off larval mals—it’s always satisfying to take them out that small when you have the chance—but there’s a horrific difference between one tiny digester trying very hard to eat a single square millimeter of your skin and athousandof them speckled all over your body and clothes and hair.
All the while Orion stood in the corridor behind us and said, exasperated and plaintive, “But you barely even tried!” and other insane and stupid things until we turned on him in unison and yelled at him to shut up forever and he had the gall to mutter something—under his breath, he wasn’t suicidal—about girls.
Iwasgrateful that we no longer needed to find a way to provide Orion with mals, because after that experience, none of us wanted to keep trying. Except him. He even went so far as to talk to other human beings to try and get more information about honeypots himself. He spent a lunch period with half a dozen kids from the Seattle enclave and a desperate expression, and came up to our study corner in the library afterwards and said, “Hey, I’ve found out how you make honeypot bait,” urgently. “The main ingredient is wizard blood. You just hold a blood drive and everyone donates…” He trailed off, I presume as he heard the words coming out of his own mouth and saw our faces, and then just stopped and sat down with a glum expression. That was the end of working on honeypots.
However, we did still urgently need the lute. And instead of getting to work on that, or at least something else useful, Aadhya had to very carefully design a garden planter, then I had to rewrite her design back into Urdu for her, also very carefully, and when the Scholomance delivered the finished product to be tested, the most useful thing she could do with it was plant some carrot tops from the cafeteria. It produced carrots roughly the size of a gnome’s top hat. We fed them to our mice. Precious ate hers very daintily, sitting up and holding it in her forepaws and nibbling it from tip to end before carefully handing back the leafy top to be planted again.
At least the planter was reasonably sure to net Aadhya a decent mark. I was less sure to get decent marks in Development of Algebra: all the readings were in the original languages, and specifically in Chinese and Arabic, the ones that I’d just barely started. Aadhya could generally figure out for me what the actual equations being described were, so I could do the problem sets, but sitting the midterm essay exam—compare and contrast Sharaf al Tusi’s explanation of polynomial evaluation with that of Qin Jiushao, including examples of usage—had been an experience worth forgetting as quickly as possible. The only part of those readings I had actually done were the names, which had been enough for me to look the authors up in the library, find out that Horner had reinvented the same process, and learn it in English instead. I’d felt so clever, too.
So I was holding my breath when I went to class that whole week. We don’t knowexactlywhen we’re going to get our marks. Predictably, I got my safest one first: a B+, for the Proto-Indo-European seminar. Our class was now being held on the second floor, but in an even smaller room and sharing a wall with the alchemy supply room, so we were constantly hearing banging as people went in and out. Liesel glared at me through every class session with cold resentment, and mals would often attack the alchemy supply room thanks to my being on the other side, which made me as wildly popular as you’d think. Enough mals were creeping out of the woodwork at this point in the year that they’d finally started to come after people other than me once in a while, but I remained top item on the menu.
The rest of my marks trickled in grudgingly over the next couple of days: a B+ for the Myrddin seminar and a pass on my shop assignment—a sacrificial obsidian dagger, clearly intended for unpleasant purposes, which I’d chosen because it was the quickest of my options to knock off, so I could use the free time to finish the book chest for my sutras. I also netted a pass for my alchemy section, where I’d had to brew a vat of sludging acid that could etch through flesh and bone in three seconds.
The next Monday morning I finally I got my algebra results, a D, and wiped my metaphorical brow, and then just had to wait for my last mark, on my independent study. I’d really wanted the bad news already, so the whole week after midterms, I tried to bait it out: I kept my head down and focused on my desk the entire time, and then looked away for a solid thirty seconds only right in the middle of class, so there was only the one opening for it to drop, which usually gets you the mark early on. But instead it didn’t come until the tail end of the week.
Except that day I was working on the last piece of the first major working of the sutras, and I’d got so deep into it that I forgot to pause mid-class. My bolted-down desk was a monstrous thing of wrought iron—I scraped my knees on the underside every other week at least—and the only silver lining of it was having the space to spread out. I always kept the sutras right in front of me, wrapped up in a leather harness Aadhya had made me: it went over the ends of each cover, with soft wide ribbons that I kept tied down around all the pages except the handful that I was working on that day. It had a foot-long strap attached that buckled around my left wrist, so at an instant’s notice I could just leap up and the book would stay with me even if I had to use both hands for casting. I stood my dictionaries open on end above it, and I used a three-inch memo pad for my notes, which I held in my hands braced on the edge of the desk so it wouldn’t touch the sutra pages.
It’s not that the book was so fragile; it was made out of really lovely heavy paper and didn’t look like it had aged more than two months since the last bit of gilt had dried. But that was clearly because it had snuck away from its original owner roughly two months after the last bit of gilt had dried, and I didn’t want that to happen tome,so I cosseted it as much as possible. It was worth having sore wrists at the end of each class. Whenever I ran out of space on my tiny notepad—often—I just tore off the filled sheet and stuck it into a folder I kept on the side, and each night I rewrote them into a larger notebook in my bedroom.
That day I had filled about thirty tiny pages with tight handwritten notes. The bell was about to ring and I was still going when the whole folder did a sort of angry jerk and went flying sideways off my desk, scattering paper everywhere; I gave a yowl of protest and grabbed for it, too late, and then had to pack up in a hurry, expecting something to jump me at any moment. I only realized that it had been my mark being delivered when I finally had all my notes collected again. I opened the folder to stuff them back in, and the little slip of green paper was tucked in the pocket, withAdv. Readings in Sanskpoking out above the top. I pulled it out and glared at the A+ with a footnote asterisk going toSpecial Commendationat the bottom, which was just rubbing it in:Look at all your misspent time. I could practically hear the Scholomance sniggering at me from the ventilation system. But that was just pettiness, and overall I heaved a sigh of relief; it could’ve been loads worse.
Itwasloads worse for other people. At lunch that day, Cora came to our table with her face tight with pain and her arm wrapped up in her beautiful yellow head tie with the embroidered protection charm, blood soaking through it in spreading dark patches. “Failed shop,” she said, her voice ragged. She had her tray held tight against her waist with her other arm, and the contents were pretty scanty. But she didn’t ask for help. She probably couldn’t afford it. She hadn’t nailed down an alliance of her own yet.
She and Nkoyo and Jowani were friends, and they’d been great help for one another for tables and walking to class, but the same reason they’d been great for that was why they weren’t a viable graduation team: all three of them were incantations-track, and doing all the same languages. And Nkoyo was going to get decent alliance offers. In fact, she probably had one already, since just that morning she’d carefully mentioned that she might sit with someone else tomorrow for breakfast. A lot of alliances happened after midterm marks cleared. But Jowani and Cora were going to be stuck until after the end of the semester, when the enclavers had got their alliances set and the leftovers sorted themselves out.
It’s not that they were loads worse as students, even. As far as I knew, they were all three somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as classwork went. But Nkoyo was a star, and they weren’t. She’d always been the one who made the friends and connections, and when you thought of the three of them, you always thought of her in the lead. They’d leaned on her social skills the whole time, and that had been good for them—right until now, when everyone thoughtNkoyo,and not one of them.
Most years, that meant their odds were going to be somewhere in the 10 percent range. The rule is that 50 percent of the graduating class makes it out, but that doesn’t mean it’s even odds. The kids in enclaver alliances almost all get out, with maybe one or two members picked off each team—rarely the enclave kids themselves—and that’s roughly 40 percent of the class. So the ones who die almost all come out of the 60 percent who don’t have an enclaver on their side. Of course, even that leaves you with better odds than you get on the outside of the Scholomance, which is why kids keep coming.
If the cleansing machinery down in the graduation hall really had got fixed, if it stayed fixed this year, they might make it out after all. But it wouldn’t improve Cora’s odds any to be going into the second half of the semester with a bad arm that she’d got because she’d screwed up and misjudged the amount of effort to put into her shop assignment. No enclaver was going to look at that arm and ask her to join their team. She sat down carefully, doing her best not to jostle the wound, but once she was down she still had to shut her eyes for a few long minutes, taking deep breaths before she tried to fumble at her milk one-handed and shaky.
Nkoyo silently reached over and got it and opened it. Cora took it and drank without looking at her. Nkoyo hadn’t taken unfair advantage. She’d helped them make it this far; it wasn’t on her if she couldn’t take them the whole way, if they weren’t good enough and she had to jettison them to make it herself, like boosters of rocket fuel falling away spent while the orbital module went flying on past gravity. There wasn’t anything she could do to save them, and they’d made their own choices, getting here. But Cora still didn’t look her in the face, and Nkoyo still didn’t say anything to her, and all of us at the table pretended we weren’t looking at Cora’s blood-stained arm when of course we were.
I didn’t know I was going to say anything until I did. “I can patch the arm if everyone at the table will help,” I said, and everyone paused eating and stared at me, either sidelong or just straight-out gawking. I hadn’t thought it through, just blurting it out, but the only thing to do in the face of the stares was push onward. “It’s a circle working. No one has to put in any extra mana, it’ll work if we all just hold the circle, but everyone already here has to do it.”
That’s actually a simplification of how the spell in question operates. The underlying principle is that you have to get a group of people to willingly put aside their selves and offer their time and energy to help perform a working for someone else’s benefit that doesn’t help any of them directly. And the trick is, once you ask a particular group, if anybody in the group refuses or can’t make themselves do it, the spell fails. It’s one of Mum’s, if you couldn’t tell already.
Nobody said anything for a moment. It’s not even remotely how things work in here. You don’t do anything for anyone without some kind of return, and the return’s always got to be something solid, unless there’s some more substantial connection in place: an alliance, dating, something. But that’s why I knew the spell would work if everyonedidagree. It means a lot more in here than outside to do something for nothing. Even Cora herself was just staring at me confused. We weren’t even friends; she was willing to sit at a table with menow,when Chloe Rasmussen from New York was my ally and Orion Lake himself would be here as soon as he came off the line with his tray, but she’d barely tolerated my company all those years when Nkoyo used to let me tag along behind them on the way to language lab in the mornings. She was standoffish in general, and had always been a bit jealous of Nkoyo’s company, but it was more than that: she was aces at spirit magic, her family had a really long tradition of it, and she had clearly thought—and probably still did—that I was carrying some kind of unpleasant baggage on mine.
Nkoyo didn’t say anything. She was staring at her own tray without looking up, her lips curled in between her teeth, her hands curled on either side, waiting, waiting for someone else to speak. I really wished Orion had made it to the table already, and then Chloe said, “Okay,” and held a hand out to Aadhya, who was sitting between us.
Aadhya was definitely in the sidelong-eye camp, less at the request than at me: I could all but hear her sayingokay, El, are you trying to develop a martyr thing of your own now or what, but after one good hard look, she just sighed and said, “Yeah, sure,” and took Chloe’s hand and held her other out to me. I took it, and as soon as I did I felt the living line of the circle building. I turned and offered my other one to Nadia, Ibrahim’s friend. She glanced over at Ibrahim but then after a moment took it, and he took hers and reached out to Yaakov across the table.
I’d been in circles with Mum a handful of times. She hadn’t asked me very often, almost always only when it was magical harm, usually someone suffering from a spell a maleficer had put on them or a complication from some spell they’d cast themselves, or the attack of some maleficaria. Healing something like that is a lot easier if you have another wizard helping, even a kid, instead of just you and a bunch of enthusiastic mundanes who can’t actually hold mana. But she didn’t ask me a lot, because most wizards who came to her for help couldn’t keep from getting uneasy round me. They were already vulnerable, so when they looked at me they were rabbits looking at a wolf—a half-starved wolf who sometimes snapped even at the hand that fed her because it also kept her on a leash. I never really wanted to help them. They were sick and weak and cursed and poisoned and desperate, but they were still part of the pack that hated me, that left me alone and scared and desperate myself. So Mum only asked me when she badly needed the power that came from me agreeing to help anyway, because otherwise she knew I’d say no sometimes. And I’d done it, grudgingly, partly to make Mum happy, partly to try and prove to myself I wasn’t what they saw when they looked at me.
