Page 20 of The Last Graduate
We’re all wary of one another in here as a general rule. Budding maleficers are at the top of everyone’s list of potential threats, followed by enclavers, older kids, the better students, the more popular ones. Any other kid could become a mortal enemy without so much as a moment’s notice if the right conditions—usually a mal planning to eat at least one of us—came along. But we knew how to be afraid of one another; what we might do to one another had sensible limits. No one would ever in ten thousand years have imagined that if someone tried to kill me in the gym, I’d respond by rebuilding the gym fantasia and creating a fresh torment for everyone in the school, including myself. I certainly wouldn’t have imagined it.
So now I wasn’t just a dangerously powerful fellow student, to be flattered and watched and strategized over. I was an unpredictable and terrible force of nature that might do anything at all, and they were all shut up in here with me. Like I’d become part of the school myself.
As if to confirm it, the mals all suddenly stopped coming after me. I didn’t know why. I spent a few weeks panicking until Aadhya worked it out. “Right, here’s what’s going on,” she said, sketching it out on paper for us to understand, on a stick-figure diagram of the school’s screw-top shape. “It takes mana to run all the wards. Early in the year, when there’s not a lot of mals, the school does this neat trick: itopensa few of the wards, aimed right at you, and uses that mana to reinforce theotherwards. The mals take the path of least resistance, and voilà, you’re target number one. But by now there’s too many of them and they’re squeezing through on their own as usual.”
“And no maleficaria are going to come at you if they have any other choice,” Liu finished, as if that were obvious.
“Yeah, aces,” I said. “Even the mals agree I’m poison. Ow! Get off me, you little—!” Precious had just bit my earlobe. I swatted at her but she scampered handily across my hunched shoulder blades and grabbed the rim of myotherear meaningfully, a fairly potent threat given the stabbing pain in my first one. “No treats foryou,” I told her coldly, after I took her off—carefully—and put her back into the carrying cup. But I did say, “Sorry,” to Aad and Liu in a mutter. It really wasn’t on for me to be whining about beingunpalatable.I still remembered exactly how I’d felt about Orion tellingmethat mals never came after him.
Of course, even if the mals had gone, my hair trigger hadn’t. I was still jumping at every noise and nearly obliterating the occasional solitary fool who came bumbling across my path at unexpected moments. They were always the kind of pathetic friendless loser no one else would warn off from going into the library corridor where I was lurking or taking a seat too close to me. Just like I’d been. I’d almost have appreciated the distraction of actually being attacked.
Orion would’ve appreciated it even more. He was still grumpy about having passed up a full-grown quattria to race to my rescue. It seemed to grow in size each time he complained about having missed it. No one had seen the thing since—or rather, no one who’d made it out of Field Day alive. There were four kids who’d gone missing during the mass exodus from the gym, so almost certainly the quattria had successfully scored itself four separate meals of sobbing kid in flight, one for each mouth, and had hidden away somewhere in the depths for the next four years to digest until it split up into four separate littler quattria.
I suppose I’d traded those four kids for the ones from Shanghai who’d actually attacked me. Was that better because I hadn’t meant to do it? Or was I just being a stupid wanker who thought she was too good to look people in the face while I killed them?
I knew what Mum would say: it hadn’t been me killing them, it had been a quattria—or better yet the alchemist who’d taken four innocent baby animals and squashed them together. Alchemists make quattria because if you starve them of solid food for a month or so, then feed each one of the mouths a different reactant, you get highly useful alchemical fusions out the other end, some of which you can’t get any other way. But the quattria don’t like being starved, as you might imagine, so they break out fairly often, and then they start eating other creatures with mana because that’s the most efficient way to get enough mana to keep themselves going.
It’s always convenient to be able to blame things on people who aren’t in the room, but I wasn’t sure it made me feel any better. Fine, some vicious alchemist had bashed together a quattria a century ago and it was his fault really, but he was long dead and the quattria had eaten four people just last week.
Meanwhile Orion was scrounging around in corners for scrawny and pathetic mals that even a freshman could have taken out. He did catch a nice fat polyphonic shrieker in one of the sophomore girls’ bathrooms a couple weeks after Field Day; I understand there was a lot of non-maleficaria shrieking while he chased it through the communal showers during the evening rush, although no one really objected to him barging in on them, given the alternative had a lot more tentacles and smelled even worse than unwashed boy, which he wasn’t anymore by the time that fight ended.
The week after that, a gelidite quietly grew itself over the doors to the big alchemy lab during work period, froze them completely shut, and then started creeping steadily onwards into the room. Happily for all concerned—namely the thirty-odd kids in the room—Orion was sulkily doing his—already-late—homework in one of the smaller labs at the time, and he instantly abandoned it to be of service. Normally you can only kill a gelidite by piercing its solid core with a specially enchanted fire arrow, but Orion just started whacking big chunks off it with a metal chair and incinerating those with fire blasts before they could merge back into the rest. Eventually he took off enough mass that he could jam the remaining chair leg down onto the core, and then he heated the leg until the metal melted and ran down all over the core.
“Well, Lake, it’s not getting added to the recommended means of destruction in the textbook, is it?” I said coldly at dinner that day, when he displayed the metal globe that was all that was left of the gelidite, ostensibly because he wanted opinions on whether the thing was really dead or not. I wasn’t fooled: he was just trying to excuse himself for having left a week’s worth of lab work to dissolve on his own bench, when he could have spent thirty seconds to suspend the reactionbeforehe’d charged heroically to the rescue.
What business of mine, you might say, and then I’d explain at length how I’d had to rescue himyetagainjust two days before. He’d got to his lesson and started straight in on an overdue batch of spelled dye without paying any attention to the fact that the four other members of his senior lab section had all skived off that day. Of course all the ventilation in his lab had quietly shut itself down, and he didn’t notice, just went straight on blithely stirring up more toxic fumes for himself to inhale while increasingly vivid daydreams of pythagorans and polyvores filled his head.
The only reason I’d known in time to save his stupid useless life was because one of theotherstudents noticed all of her other classmates were in the library working, and decided to score points with New York by scuttling over to Magnus to tell him that Orion was all alone in a lab section. She could have scuttled over to me directly: I was at the center table in the reading room at the time, with seven fat dictionaries spread out round me in a vengeful spirit. There were nine seats completely open at the best table in the reading room because Chloe and Nkoyo were the only ones there who dared sit with me. Magnus didn’t even nerve himself up to come over; he sent one of his minions to get Chloe, told her, and let her come back and tell me.
By the time I got down to the lab, Orion was hallucinating so hard he thought I was a pythagoran myself and tried to throw an immobilizing spell at me. If it had landed, I suppose we’d have died hallucinating together; how romantic. I caught it and hurled it right back at his head, and he promptly toppled over with a crash, taking out three stools on the way down. At least that got him out of my way so I could get on with vaporizing his cauldron of increasingly toxic dye, along with a substantial chunk of his lab table. Overkill, but I was vexed. I didn’t get any less vexed after dragging his lockjaw-rigid body out into the corridor. I vented my spleen by haranguing him for the next five minutes while he still couldn’t move, but he was still high as a kite and only kept staring at me glassily until I finished and then he said in a soupy way, “El? Is that you?” Then the immobilization spell wore off and he sat up and vomited purple all over my feet.
So he had no business getting himself into avoidable trouble with his classwork, and he knew it, and he could just stuff his large frosted beach ball into the nearest bin. He squirmed away from my glare and looked an appeal over at Chloe, who’d been trained up to be nice to him all her life. “Well, Ithinkit’s probably dead, but you could try a scrying on the internals,” she said cooperatively.
“Yes, you could, if only you weren’t six weeks behind on your schoolwork,” I said through clenched teeth.
“I’m not!” Orion said. “I’m onlyfourweeks—” He stopped himself too late and glared at me while everyone at the table, including even Chloe, made the appropriate squawks of horror at him. I smirked back over folded arms. That evening he got told off by Magnus and Jermaine, by which I mean they cornered him in the boys’ bathroom and earnestly talked to him about the need to catch up properly and how silly he was being to let his work get away from him for no reason when it could be so easily managed. I wasn’t there to hear it, but I didn’t need to be; they were enclavers.
I did see them going in after him, so I hurried to brush my own teeth and then waited in the corridor until Orion sloped out again, properly chastened; I fell in with him and said, “So, Lake, going to let your enclave pals shove your schoolwork off onto some poor sod desperate to get in with them?”
He threw me a look of outrage: having got him into trouble in the first place, couldn’t I at least have the decency to let him just look away while Magnus made his work conveniently disappear? But as I clearly couldn’t, he sighed and muttered, “No,” reluctantly.
I nodded and asked very sweetly, “Going to keep shoving theconsequencesoff ontome?”
The right answer to that question wasn’t very hard to find, either, although he did scowl at me before handing it over. “No.”
“Good,” I said, with satisfaction, and stopped by his bedroom door and pointedly waited for him to go and shut himself in with his overdue homework.
He looked at the door and then back at me. “El—if the cleansing runs down in the graduation hall again—”
“At New Year’s, you mean?” I said. The end-of-semester cleansing isn’t nearly as thorough as the graduation day cleansing. School maintenance had to be cut back a great deal in quantity and ambition once they had students doing it instead of teams of grown professional wizards coming in through the graduation hall. One of the places where they decided to cut back was the mid-year cleansing. Only about a quarter of the walls of mortal flame go, in order to save on wear and tear. That leaves plenty of survivable escape routes available, so the cleansing really only winnows back the more mindless mals.
Of course, where a lot of the smarter ones retreat to is the graduation hall. If the machinery did run down there, then we’d very likely end up with all the mals cut down back to the nonexistent levels from the start of the year.
“Yeah,” Orion said, glumly. Poor him: the greatest hero in generations and no evil monsters for him to fight. Precious made a dismissive squeak from her cup, but lucky for him, he wasn’t in range for biting. At least he wasn’t trying to complain of it to anyone but me, the one other person who had a decent reason to dislike the idea. If the mals did get cut back that far, the school would probably be able to funnel all of the attacks right back at me again.
But I wasn’t going to commiserate with him out loud. Iwasin range, and I’d been bitten twice that week already. “Much difference it’ll make if you get yourself turned into goo beforehand because you couldn’t be arsed to do a few worksheets,” I said. “It’s thirteen seconds more to New Year’s, and then you won’t need to do any more classwork ever, unless you completely flunk everything. Do you need another helping?”
“No, I’m okay,” he said, although he had to drag his eyes away from the power-sharer when I waved my wrist at him. “I’ve got enough, I just—got used to it, I guess.” He shrugged away the misery of his lot with one shoulder, but he was still staring at the floor, and after a moment he brought out the real problem: “It’s not like there’re loads of mals in New York. In the enclave, I mean,” he added. “Not much gets through.”
