Page 24 of The Last Graduate
I really couldn’t argue with her especially since no, I had no idea when my last period was or when the next one was due. Thankfully, that’s one thing magic is good for; whenever the first signs show up, you brew yourself a cup of nice go-the-fuck-away tea—an easy alchemical recipe every wizard girl can brew in her sleep—and that’s the end of it. Some of us do have to keep a sharp eye on the timing, because theirs starts with blood spotting, and you don’t want mals to get a whiff of that. But my first symptom is a nice sharp whanging cramp in the midsection, completely unmistakable, and it arrives with a good five hours’ warning.
Unfortunately, one thing magic isnotgood for is avoiding pregnancy. The problem is, if you deliberately do something that you are conscious and deeply terrified might cause pregnancy, the magical intent gets confused. Protective spells are about as reliable as the withdrawal method. Science is much more reliable, but then you have to either invest some of your very limited induction weight allowance to bring in condoms or pills and then use them properly, or get an implant or an IUD before you get inducted and cross your fingers that nothing goes wrong with it over the four years you’re hopefully going to be in here before you next get to see a gynecologist. I didn’t see the point. Or rather, I hadn’t seen the point four years ago, when I’d been reasonably sure no one was going to talk to me, much less date me.
“It’s just—” I stopped squabbling and sat down on the floor of her room in a thump and said, “It was just sonice,” and maybe that sounds stupid but I couldn’t help my voice wobbling. Nice was what we didn’t have in here. You could manage desperate victories and even dazzling wonders sometimes, but not anythingnice.
Aadhya sighed out a long deep breath. “Well, forget it.I’mnot getting eaten by a maw-mouth because you got yourself knocked up.” I sat up with my mouth open in low-blow outrage, but Aadhya just looked at me hard-faced and serious, and she wasright;of course she was right. I’d already been screwing around excessively without making it literal, and if I kept on, I’d very likely end up with something even less helpful than a pewter medal.
We didn’t know what we were going to find when we got down to the graduation hall, and in some ways that was worse than knowing it was going to be the same terrible horde of mals that seniors had faced every year for a hundred years and more. We couldn’t even guess based on the early accounts of the days when the cleansings had been running, because the school had been brand-new then, and the only mals had been the first squirming pioneers to find their way through the wards. Now there were century-old infestations and colonies buried deep in dark corners, ancient maleficaria rooted into the foundations, generations who’d never lived outside the machinery. Maybe there had been enough survivors of the cleansings to start a sudden population explosion in the available space, like the oncoming wave of amphisbaena, and we’d be dumped into a ravening horde of recently hatched and starving mals, so many of them and so small that most of our strategies wouldn’t apply, just like that horrible mass we’d accidentally lured with Liu’s honeypot spell only ten thousand times worse.
Or maybe they’d all be dead. Maybe they’d eaten each other all the way down the food chain, and there would be no maleficaria left except Patience and Fortitude themselves, guardians on either side of the gates, and they’d have nothing left on the menu except us.
If that’s what we found down there—I had no idea what I’d do. There was an obvious and sensible thing to do, which was to pass the word to our entire graduating class in advance that if it was us against the maw-mouths, they’d all make one enormous circle and feed me mana, and I’d try to take them out. But just because that was obvious and sensible didn’t mean I was going to do it. I had killed a maw-mouth the only way you could, from the inside out, and if I tried to think even in a very vague distant way about doing it again, a faint incoherent screaming started up inside me that took up all the room there was in my brain, like standing next to a fire truck with siren wailing while someone tried to talk to you, their mouth moving with no sound at all coming through because the whole world was full of noise.
Maybe I’d get over it if I saw the maw-mouths coming and there wasn’t any other choice. Maybe. I wasn’t at all confident, for all I was about to have six months of honing my reflexes to razor sharpness. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t remotely the same. Having to choose to go inside again—I don’t know if it’s a choice anyone could make more than once. There certainly haven’t been many people who’ve had the chance to consider it. If I do make it out of here, I should look up the Dominus of Shanghai. He’s the only other living person who’s ever done it. We could compare notes. Or we could look each other in the face and just start screaming together, which feels more appropriate to me.
Of course, it was extremely likely that it wouldn’t work anyway. The maw-mouth I’d killed had been a small one, maybe budded off one of the big ones or however they spawn—no one’s spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths as far as I know. It had managed to squeeze through the wards and make it upstairs. I don’t know how many people had been inside it, how many lives; I’d been far beyond keeping count of the deaths I’d dealt out. But I did know that it hadn’t been anywhere near as big as Fortitude, much less Patience, who’s been lording it over the killing grounds almost since the hall first opened. I don’t think even I can do that much killing. The only way they’re going is if the whole school goes.
The point being that we still needed a better strategy for graduation thanWait and see if El can keep her big-girl pants on,and here I was whinging on about howniceit would be for me to do something unbelievably stupid instead, like Orion. Aadhya had every right to cram my face in it.
“Sorry,” I muttered. She just nodded, which was kinder than I deserved, really, and then said, businesslike, “So I think I’ve figured out a good gym schedule,” and rolled out a timetable for me to look at.
After New Year’s, half of the gym gets cordoned off exclusively for the seniors, and every week, it lays out a fresh new obstacle course for us, so we can get as much practice as possible running flat-out through forests of sharp things trying to kill us. It’s excellently realistic, full of artificial constructs pretending to be mals, and also the many real mals who show up helpfully to populate it. It’s a testament to our top-quality educational experience how few of us die. Please envision me saying this with my hand held piously over my heart. But really, we were all hitting our stride by now. There isn’t anything much more dangerous in the world than a fully grown wizard. That’s why the mals have to hunt us when we’re young. We’re the real apex predators, not the maw-mouths that after all just sit by the doors mumbling to themselves and occasionally groping around for some supper. Once through the gates, we’ll be carving our dreams into the world like gleeful vandals scratching graffiti on the pyramids, and we won’t look behind us. But only once we’re out.
Ordinarily the reserved gym is a useful and highly valued privilege. No one was very enthusiastic about it this year, but there wasn’t any other option for practice. The fundamental goal of graduation is to get from the nearest stairwell to the gates as fast as possible without getting stopped along the way. It’s roughly a distance of 150 meters, about the same distance as from one end of the gym and back, and aside from throwing spells left and right, you also have torun.
“Mornings?” I said, in protest, because Aadhya had us meeting three times a week at eight, which meant hauling ourselves out of bed at the first quiet chiming to get breakfast and make it downstairs; we’d be first through all the corridors, not to mention—very important to mention—first into the obstacle course every week, without any warning how bad it was going to be.
“I talked to Ibrahim and Nkoyo today, during the cleansing,” Aadhya said. “We made a deal. They’ll go right behind us with their teams, on either side. We take the heat up front, and they keep us from getting flanked. We’ll practice together each morning.”
That kind of arrangement is normally a supremely terrible strategy for the lead group, to the point that you’re explicitly warned against it in the pre-graduation handbook we’ll all be getting in about three months—much too late to be of real use; we’re all using copies we bought in our sophomore years off that year’s seniors, who’d bought their own copies two years before, et cetera. The advice changes a little from year to year, but one of the most consistent points is that taking the lead is absolutely not worth whatever advantage you might get from the groups covering you. As soon as you’re in any danger of being overwhelmed, they’ll hop to one side and let whatever they’re holding off come at you, meaning that you won’t even have a chance to recover, while they take the opening created by the pile-on and go sailing onwards with a substantial improvement to their odds, taken out of yours.
It’s not great to be the one taking the lead even within an alliance, but at least in an alliance, you’ve been practicing together and integrating your skills tightly, so it’s not actually a good idea for your allies to cut and run. Unless you’re close enough to the doors, at which point loads of alliances do fall apart. And that, boys and girls, is why enclavers never take the lead.
Aadhya wasn’t making a mistake, though. There’s one situation where having someone covering you does in fact make excellent sense: if it’snevergoing to be a good idea for them to ditch you. For instance, if all they’ve got is knives and your team’s got a flamethrowing machine gun. So she was confirming that yes, our entire strategy was going to rest on my keeping my big-girl pants on. “Right,” I said, grimly, because what else was I going to say?No, don’t rely on me?No, I won’t do my best to get you to the gates, the way you’ve done for me? Of course she was going to build the strategy around me. And of course I had to let her.
“El,” Aadhya said, “you know we’d take Orion,” and you might think that was a hilariously absurd thing to say—yes, out of the generous goodness of our hearts we’d take the invincible hero along with us—but I knew what she really meant. She was sayingOrion’s not on our team,and if I was, that meant I couldn’t ditch them to go help him, even if, for instance, I looked over and saw him being dragged into the guts of a maw-mouth, screaming the way that Dad’s been screaming in Mum’s head since the day she crawled out through the gates with me in her belly. If that was the monstrous fate Mum had been trying to warn me away from, she’d know, she’d know the way no one else in the world would know just how horrible it would be to live with someone you love screaming in your head forever.
“I’ll ask him,” I said without lifting my head, pretending I could still see anything when actually I had my eyes shut to keep from dripping on Aadhya’s carefully written timetable. She put her hand on my shoulder, warm, and then she half put her arm around me, and I leaned into her a moment and then shook my head wildly and sucked in a big gulping breath, because I didn’t want to get started. What was the point? I couldn’t do anything about that, either.
I did ask him that night as we walked up to dinner, because I had to, just in case. He had the nerve to say, “El, you’re going to be fine,” in reassuring tones. “There’s plenty of mana in the pool, I’ll get more in now that there are more mals around, you’ve got Chloe and—”
“Shutup,you cartwheeling donkey,” I snarled at him, and he recoiled and wobbled between baffled and offended for a moment, then said, sounding confused, “Wait, are you worried about—?” and just stopped to gawk at me as though the shadow of the idea that any living being might at any point entertain a fraction of concern forhishealth and well-being had never crept across the windowsill of his molluscular brain, and I ran up the rest of the flight of stairs away from him because it was that or punch him in his beaky nose, which I’d caught myself idly thinking just that morning across the table at breakfast had a hint of young Marlon Brando, which might convey to you the depths to which I was sinking if your mum thinks, like mine does, that the height of appropriate children’s entertainment is antique movie musicals.
Aadhya and Liu and Chloe had gone on ahead, but I caught up to them before they actually went into the food line. “Thanks for holding a spot,” I said, grabbing a tray, without saying how it’d gone, and Chloe bit her lip and Liu looked sorry and thank goodness Aadhya just said, “What do you guys think of asking Jowani?” and got us discussing the merits.
I could list them out for you. He had a really top-notch perimeter-warning spell, the kind you cast once and then it lingers for half an hour; his was notable because it worked off intent rather than physical presence, which meant it would warn you about incorporeal mals. He’d give us a solid personal connection across our little trio of alliances, because Cora had teamed up with Ibrahim and Nadia and Yaakov. And boys are undeniably useful for heavy lifting; I was the closest thing to brawn on our team at the moment. The discrepancy hadn’t seemed as significant at the start of the year, but lately it felt like all the senior boys were expanding up and out when we weren’t looking, and they were suddenly doing things like toting an entire crate full of iron all the way across the shop under one arm.
You might think those all sound like minor advantages, and they were, relatively speaking. Everyone in the school could make themselves somewhat useful—that’s what all of us have been doing all four years of this, finding ways tomake ourselves useful. And now that everyone knew I wasveryuseful, we could have cherrypicked ourselves one of the top kids. In fact, I suspected that at least two of the near-miss valedictorian candidates had made overtures of their own to Aadhya: I’d seen them stopping by her room.
None of us raised those objections. We all agreed that Jowani would be helpful and a good strategic addition to round out our team. But we didn’t talk about why. We didn’t say that we didn’t want him to get left behind. Ever since Cora’s arm, we’d all been eating together as a group almost every day, and each day at the start of breakfast, he would bring out a tiny book full of incredibly thin pages—one for each day of four years, I realized after the first few times—and he’d softly recite out loud a short poem or an excerpt of one that his dad had copied out by hand into the book, in one of a dozen languages, each one a piece full of love and hope:have courage. His voice reading them smoothed out even my most snarling mornings.
Before then, I’d never heard him emit more than a monosyllable. I’d always assumed that was dislike on his part, but actually it hadn’t anything to do with me in the slightest. He had a stammer, which didn’t trip him up when he recited poetry, and luckily also not when he was casting spells, but made it almost impossible for him to get out a word in conversation unless he really knew you. And that was why he’d held on to Nkoyo’s social coattails past when that had stopped being a good idea, and why he was now having a lousy time of finding himself an alliance. And if he didn’t get an alliance, he wasn’t going to make it out.
We didn’t say any of that to one another. You didn’t, ever. Ibrahim and Yaakov and Nadia hadn’t taken Cora because they remembered making the circle around her, mana flowing through us all like a river to heal her arm, a gift that hadn’t cost anything but caring to give. They’d taken her because she and Nadia both knew how to dance spells—there’s quite a lot of spells that get more powerful if you dance them along with the incantation—and were now working out a magical sword-dancing routine using blades that Yaakov was making; Ibrahim had scored a major matter-phasing spell to put on them from one of his other enclaver friends, who’d traded it to him on the cheap after putting together his own alliance, as apology for not asking him. That was a good solid fighting team, and they’d got offers from at least two or three enclavers to join up. That was why. You couldn’t choose people because you liked them, or because you wanted them to live.
But we did scrape together good enough reasons to say yes to Jowani, and when we got to our table, Aadhya pulled him aside and asked him, and after that all three of our alliances were firmed up, and everyone agreed we’d go for the first run the very next morning. Even Orion. He was clearly not even bothering to think up any kind of plan for getting to the doors beyondKill things until there aren’t any more,but he overheard us discussing the merits or lack thereof for going first thing, and how we’d have to keep a sharp eye out for anyrealmaleficaria that had crept into the gym overnight and hidden in the course. At which he perked up and said, “Oh hey, do you mind if I come down with you?” It will shock you to hear that nobody minded.
So we all trooped down after breakfast the next morning. I hadn’t been back to the gym myself since Field Day. I was braced, but not enough. The place had got even worse. Some birdwitted freshmen—it could only have been freshmen—had replanted the big planters along the walls with seeds out of the alchemy supplies, and the spell machinery had worked them in, currently as hedges, so now you couldn’t even tell where the walls met the floor, and it was an even more perfect illusion of being outdoors. The big trees in the distance had let their leaves fall, and there was a feathery dusting of snow on their wet dark branches, broken by the occasional red huddle of a tiny bird, and every delicate blade of the grass underfoot was crisp with frost. Our breath fogged.
