Page 25 of The Last Graduate
“What,” Jowani said, and stopped there, which actually did pretty well to encapsulate all our feelings, I think.
Well, notallour feelings. “It’s so nice, El,” Orion said to me, almost dreamily, arms outstretched and his face turned up to the artful flurry that the sky allowed to fall to greet us. “I can’t even tell we’re not outside.” I think he meant to be complimentary.
You could pick out the boundaries of the obstacle course with a good squint: there was a low wooden fence running down the halfway mark dividing the obstacle-course area off from the rest of the gym. But apart from that, the illusion artifice had integrated the obstacles fully into the environment: bristling thornbushes, trees with grabby-looking limbs, a steep hill covered with snow; a thin grey fog lying over a wide black slick of icy river ready to break into jagged shards and an ominous handful of ways to cross: a thin rickety board, a scattering of slippery rocks poking up above the ice, a healthier-looking narrow stone bridge that was undoubtedly the most dangerous option. If you looked up at the inside of the gym doors, they seemed to be two enormous iron gates set in the wall of a mysterious and alluring stone tower.
We’d already started wrong. The best way to use the obstacle course is to just throw yourself at it instantly, the first time you see it, without taking time to look it over. After you come out bruised and limping—assuming you do come out—that’s when you go over all the things you did wrong, and try new things the rest of the week, and then the new course comes out on Monday and you do it all over again. And if you’re lucky, every week you get better at doing it the first time, with no planning. You don’t get any planning time at graduation. But in our defense:What.
“Let’s get going before the next teams show up,” I said. Then I realized that everyone else was waiting forme,which was both obvious and terrifying. I stared out at the perfectly lovely expanse of winter-touched wilderness. Any mals out there were in hiding, except for the faint dancing lights visible on the other side of the river, glowing in colors through the fog, exactly as if will-o’-wisps had moved in to take up residence, only those are largely decorative constructs and not much use for the purposes of practice. They might have been some variety of soul-eater, but real soul-eaters that close to one another would have merged into one very hungry soul-eater, so a pack of them wasn’t much use for practice, either. But that would be useless in a more dangerous and unpleasant direction, and therefore more likely. The fake mals the course produces are very much like the ones that get put on display in Maleficaria Studies—just because they’re not real doesn’t mean they can’t kill you, and sometimes the real ones sneak in and pretend to be fake just long enough to get hold of you. But we weren’t doing ourselves any favors by waiting to find out which these were. I took a deep breath, nodded to Liu, who started playing the lute, and I sang out the mana-amplification spell in a slightly squeaky voice and ran straight in.
The snow burst open all around us before we were more than a stride away from the doors, jagged scything blades curving out with the tips lunging for our guts, and after that I couldn’t tell you what order any of it came in. We had to cross the river both ways, both going and coming, but I don’t remember whether I turned it to lava on the way out or the way back. We didn’t actually make contact with the wall, since the gym illusion was trying very hard to convince us there wasn’t one: when we got close, a sudden blizzard came howling into our faces with quavery ghost voices, telling us to turn back.
Actually the lava was definitely on the way in, because on our way back out, the obstacle course was still trying to reset around the lava spell, so instead the river fired geysers of superheated steam at us through cracks in the ice. One of them caught Yaakov’s leg. He fervently yelled out what I’m absolutely sure were wild curses with every step the rest of the way back to the doors: he was usually such a nice, proper boy, carefully polite; it would’ve been funny under any other circumstances. But not here: it meant he was in the kind of desperate pain where all you can do is drop where you are and howl, and he couldn’t do that, because he’d die. The instant he got out into the corridor, he did drop, and started trying to pull out a bandage to wrap around the blistering skin, still gasping curses under his breath with tears gathering in his eyes. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t unrollit.
“You can’t keep yelling!” Ibrahim snapped, even as he dropped to a knee next to him. He dragged his arm across his forehead—not very effective; each one smudged some streaks of blood on the other—and took the bandage out of Yaakov’s hands to put it on for him.
“No,” Liu said, panting; she was on her knees on the floor mostly draped around the long neck of the sirenspider lute. “No, it was all right. It went into the music. We should all yell, I think, or sing.” She was better off than most of us; she’d been playing the whole way from inside the sheltered place at the center of our alliance.
Chloe was shivering with her eyes wide enough to be on the edge of shock, and she was fumbling out some bandages of her own; Jowani was helping her. Her whole right side—the exposed side—had been perforated with one too-close swipe from one of those clawing tree branches, blood and skin showing through open gaps in her clothes from her shoulder down to her thigh, the frayed edges stained dark. Aadhya had been bringing up the rear; she was standing with her arms wrapped around herself, her hands still clenched tight on the fighting-sticks she’d made for the run. I didn’t see any wounds, but she looked pretty sick. I was just about to go to her when she pulled in a deep breath and then went to Liu to look at the lute and make sure it had stayed in tune.
Nkoyo’s team had been hit by a spray of razor-blade-sized slivers of sharpened ice and were all even bloodier than the rest of us, except for their resident enclaver, a boy named Khamis from Zanzibar, who’d been very firmly ensconced in the most protected spot in their team, at the center. He was an alchemist and armed only with a bandolier of spray bottles, one of which he was wielding right now on Nkoyo’s slashed arm: the wound underneath was disappearing along with the blood as she wiped tears from her face.
All of us were freaked out and shaking, from a dozen near-death experiences crammed into the span of five minutes and also from the even worse knowledge that this was nothing, absolutely nothing. It was the first obstacle course on the first day after New Year’s, it was warm-up material, and there was nowhere to go from here but a long steep road uphill all the way. Most of us were used to being jumped by mals, but there’s a substantial difference between one attack and an unending stream of them. About half of us were crying, and the other half wanted to cry.
When I sayus,what I mean isthem.I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.
“Hey, that looked pretty good,” Orion said encouragingly, coming to join us with a bounce in his step and the mangled corpse of something spiky dangling from his hand: he’d somehow managed to sniff out the one real mal hiding amidst the fakes. Normally every word out of his mouth automatically produces a burst of adulation, but everyone in our group had spent enough time sitting at meals with him for the shine to wear off a bit, and under the circumstances, they all glared at him with pure hatred. I’m fairly certain I saved him from bodily harm when I interrupted his attempt to dig himself a deeper grave—“I mean, you all made it okay”—and said, “Lake, what is that dead thing and why are you carrying it around?”
“Oh, it’s—I don’t know, actually,” he said, lifting it up: it had a vaguely Doberman-sized body with dachshund legs and was covered with narrow cone-like spikes that had tiny holes at the tips. I had no idea what it was myself. Mals are always mutating, or being mutated, or new ones get made, et cetera. “The spikes put out some kind of gas. I didn’t want to leave it out there; it was covered with snow and the gas blended into the fog. I thought somebody might step on it.” Very thoughtful of him.
Other seniors were beginning to cautiously trickle down from breakfast by then. As we dragged ourselves off to lick our wounds both metaphorical and literal, I overheard someone asking Aadhya, “Hey, you’re taking first run?” and she shrugged and said, “We’re thinking about it,” meaning that we were open to offers: at least one or two teams would be glad to bribe us to be the very first ones through the doors, so they could come down bright and early themselves and still know that someone else had already cleared the way. If we were going to do it anyway, we might as well get paid for it.
She negotiated the arrangement at lunchtime, with three alliances who wanted to share the time slot after us, and got us a promise of cleanup help from them, meaning we wouldn’t have to waste our own healing and mending supplies. That was a good deal for us: helping us right after we slogged out meant they had to wait instead of starting their own runs before anyone else showed. They agreed because they had to wait anyway: the obstacle course took a good long while to finish resetting itself after we’d gone through.
Normally that process takes place in the time it takes for the doors to close on your heels and open up again. The runs aren’t actually real. A thousand wizards all hurling their most powerful spells around three times a week would wreck the place almost instantly, and also if we were actually casting our most powerful spells, we wouldn’t have enough mana for graduation, our works of artifice would get worn out, our potions would get used up, et cetera. So instead the obstacle-course magic fades everything out: when you cast spells inside, it feels the same, but you’re only casting half of one percent of a spell, and the course fakes the reaction so it’s as if you’ve cast the full thing. You think you’re taking a big swallow of potion, but it’s being diluted down; you think you’re using a piece of artifice, but it’s wrapped in a traveling-protection spell. And when you come out, swish, everything goes back to normal—except for any injuries you’ve picked up, those are entirely persistent, the better to encourage rapid improvement—and the next round of eager seniors gets to go in.
And all of that works because we voluntarily enter the course: consent is the only way for someone else’s magic to get at your mana and your brain on that level. Well, except for violence. There’s always violence.
However, apparently there was still substantial effort required to clean up even one half of one percent of a giant river full of lava. The particular spell I’d used on the river this morning had come from an overambitious maleficer from the Avanti kingdom who decided his evil fortress would be much more impressive if only it was surrounded by a moat of lava. How right he’d been. The teams behind us had been forced to twiddle their thumbs on the threshold for ten minutes until the doors opened up again on the charming wintry landscape of murder.
We spent the rest of the day the way we’d be spending all our days from now on: gathered around a table in the library, going over every move we’d made and trying to decide what we’d done wrong. As noted, I had almost no idea what moves I’d made, and no one else did, either, which made our first postmortem difficult. Everyone did very clearly remember the river boiling up into lava, points to me, so we frittered away quite a lot of time discussing whether we should make that the centerpiece of our strategy: just have me bang a molten river of magma down the middle of the graduation hall, throw a cooling spell on our feet, and all run along it to the doors. It did sound good, nice and simple, but there are plenty of mals who are just fine with even boiling-lava amounts of heat, and anyway every single kid would get on the highway to heaven right behind us, which would concentrate mal attention too much. Mals would force each other into the lava by sheer pressure of numbers, and the second wave would climb over the charred bodies to get at us. Also, not only would the maw-mouths not mind the heat, they’d just flop parts of themselves over onto the path and make it their serving tray as soon as we started running towards them. It’s not like we could juststop.There aren’t a lot of cooling spells that will last long if you keep standing on lava for any length of time.
“What if you throw it across the room the other way, right behind us?” Khamis said. “You could keep the mals off our backs.”
I said levelly, “I’d also block any otherkidsbehind us.”
He clearly considered that their lookout and not ours, but he was a smart guy; he didn’t say so to my face. I’m fairly sure he did say so to Nkoyo’s face, though, in the vein ofCan’t you reason with your silly friend?I saw him pull her back to talk to her as we went downstairs for dinner, and she was all controlled resignation when she got to the queue, her usual sparkle dimmed.
There was a man who came to the commune once with his girlfriend and patronized everyone, asking overly polite questions with a sneer in the smile that he always tacked on,and you all really believe in this sort of thing?It was a familiar sneer: the exact one that filled my own heart every time someone tried to tell me earnestly about how I would really clear my chakras if only I would wear this set of beads or that magnetic copper bracelet. They’d always get wound up when I told them that putting on a thing churned out of a machine from ore that had been strip-mined by underpaid laborers wasn’t likely to improve my mana balance any. But I still hated this wanker the instant he turned up. He’d only come, as far as I could tell, to make his girlfriend feel bad about having a nice weekend doing yoga in the woods with people kind enough to ask her how she was feeling, even if they did it with a bunch of blather about her chakras.
The tired way she had looked, that was how Nkoyo looked, and it made me just as cross to see, cross enough that back at the commune I’d actually gone up to the guy and told him that he should get out and stay away. He laughed and smiled at me and I just stood there looking at him, because that usually did the trick even though I was only eleven years old at the time, and fifteen minutes later he did indeed leave. But he made his girlfriend go with him.
So I didn’t go tell Khamis to get out. I just made sure to bus my tray with Nkoyo and told her, “Feel free to tell that prick that I kicked off at you when you even tried to suggest the idea,” and she glanced at me and her mouth quirked, a little of the sparkle coming back. I should have felt proud of myself; I’m sure Mum would have told me I’d grown. I’m afraid all I felt was an even more passionate desire to drop Khamis down a maintenance shaft.
When we ran the course again two days later—we each get to go every other day; anyone who tries to hog the course more than that starts to have unpleasant experiences, like for example their spells not working at all at a critical juncture—I didn’t turn the whole river to lava. Instead I summoned just enough lava at the bottom of it to boil the whole thing up while simultaneously cooling the lava down. The variety of traps and simulated mals lurking in the river almost all got encased in the new stone, or at least became completely visible, and we could just walk across at any point we liked.
“El, that was the right thing to do,” Liu said to me afterwards, intently. We’d made it to the far end and back without any serious bloodletting that time, which made that seem obvious, but she meant it more generally. “It was the right thing to do because it gave us choices. Having a choice is the most important thing.”
I’d heard that before. It’s a bullet-point line in the graduation handbook:As a general rule, regardless of the specific situation in which you find yourself, at every step you must take care to preserve or widen the number of your options.It hadn’t quite sunk in properly, but now it did. Having a choice meant being able to choose something that worked for you and whatever you were carrying and whatever you’d prepared. Having a choice meant you got to choose getting out.
