Page 27 of The Last Graduate
I sped up even more, which I could do because for the last five weeks I’d been sprinting for my life on a near-daily basis, only that turned out to be a terrible idea because I ran straight into Magnus. He was coming off the stairs to go practice with his own team: a pack of five boys who took up nearly the full width of the archway so I couldn’t dodge round them and had to pull up hard instead, and he reached out instinctively to steady me and said, “El? What happened? Is Chloe okay?” as if evenhehad a thought to spare for another human being, as long as she was someone he’d grown up with. Or maybe as long as he could risk caring about her because he knew the odds were she wasn’t going to die before her eighteenth birthday.
“Oh, I hate you,” I said, childishly stupid; I was about to burst, into tears, into something else, I have no idea what, when Orion got literally bowled down the stairs and knocked all six of us off our feet like a perfect strike. A monstrous roaring slitherjaw, thrashing squid-sucker tentacles around a prehistoric-shark mouth, came humping down the stairs after him, gargling and grabbing, and all of the boys screamed and tried to get away, which was hard to do when we were tangled up on the floor in a heap.
At least Magnus didn’t do anything heroic; he scrabbled wildly for escape just like the rest of them. There wasn’t any, though; it was on us, arms already grabbing Orion and all of Magnus’s teammates and dragging them towards its gnashing mouth, more coming for him and me, but after it pulled Magnus off me, I sat up and screamed at it, “Shrivel up anddie,you putrescent sack of larva!”
Those weren’t actually the right words of the rotting spell that I had been trying to cast on the vines, but apparently that didn’t matter, because the slitherjaw obeyed me without the slightest hesitation, its skin shrinking down until it popped along seams that unleashed a writhing mass of tiny horrible maggot-like grubs all over the floor, half burying the boys as it dropped them—still screaming, possibly even louder—in its disintegration. They all flung themselves out of it and went wildly careening into the corridor, frenziedly shaking off grubs in every direction and crushing them underfoot as they went grape-stomping around. Except for Orion, who just surfaced out of the sea of maggot-things, shook himself off without an iota of decent horror—they werein his hair—and looked around at the rapidly disappearing remains of the mal: the larvae were fleeing down the drains en masse, leaving behind nothing but the two enormous bony jaws full of serrated teeth, hanging still wide-open on the floor like something out of a natural history museum.
He didn’t have the nerve to reproach me, but he did heave a faintly disappointed sigh. “Don’t even start, Lake,” I said. I felt better; maybe because I’d blown away my gathered mana forcing a new spell into existence, or maybe it was just the same kind of calm as going through a crying jag and coming out the other side, where you know nothing’s changed and it’s all still horrible but you can’t cry forever, so there’s nothing to do but go on. “Tell me something, what’s the plan?Isthere one, or were you just going to improvise the whole thing?”
“Uh, the plan?” Orion said.
“Graduation,” I said, making sure to enunciate every syllable in case he missed one. “Taking out the mals. Before theyeateveryone.”
He glared at me. “I don’t need a plan!”
“In other words, you can’t be arsed to think of one besides ‘run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.’ Well, too bad for you, that’s not what we’re doing.”
“Whatwe’redoing?” he said after a moment, warily.
“Well, look at you,” I said, making a condescending wave to take in the still-writhing mess of the stairs. “If I let you clear the hall on your own, you’ll trip over your own feet and get yourself eaten by a grue in five minutes; it’ll just be embarrassing.”
He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be offended more than he wanted to be pleased, and he obviously also had a brief thought about making a chivalric protest of theno you mustn’t do something so dangerousvariety, but he thought better of that and shut his mouth before it escaped him. Instead he folded his arms over his chest and said, coolly, “So what’syourplan? Turn all the mals into maggots? That would be fun for everyone.”
“They’d take it and say thanks if they knew what was good for them,” I said.
I hadn’t any better plan to offer, in fact, than “run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.” I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going through. I wasn’t going through until everyone was out.
Of course, nobody elseeven noticed my grand noble decision to save all their lives, as I started with the only thing I could think of, which was in fact just not going through the gym doors until everyone else had made it out. But that wasn’t noticeable, because given this week’s ridiculous course, that was the only sensible thing to do. The course usually doesn’t change throughout the week, but we thought possibly this one time there would be additional attacks during our second and third runs, because it was so aggressively useless otherwise, but no. For that whole week, for everyone who ran it, that’s all the course was: a good sprint with one not-actually-surprise attack at the end.
Even if I had been full of ironclad determination to abandon everyone behind me and run through the graduation gates at the first chance, it would still have been stupid to let my teammates get picked off in the gym during practices.
So no one batted an eye when I stopped at the doors on Wednesday and Friday and turned round to disintegrate the entire forest of vines even as they came whipping out. We didn’t even discuss strategy or anything; there wasn’t any strategy to discuss, except to agree after the Wednesday run that Nkoyo and Khamis should just take Friday off and build mana while they healed up. That wasn’t even a nice break for them; it was making the best of a bad situation. None of us wanted a break. What we wanted was more of the practice that we desperately needed to get out alive. Personally, I wanted it even more than I had before.
I tried going round the school hunting with Orion to make up for it, but that was even more useless. Nothing whatsoever attacked us, and if there was ever a faint scritching noise somewhere, he’d instantly abandon me and take off at top speed to go and get it. At best I’d catch up and there he’d be satisfied with himself standing over some dead thing. At worst, I’d have to spend half an hour wandering around the seminar-room labyrinth trying to find him again. Wait, no, sorry. At worst, I spent half an hour wandering around trying to find him, slipped in a giant puddle of goo that was the solitary remnant of whatever thing he’d killed, and then gave up and found him in the cafeteria eating lunch, still satisfied with himself. He didn’t say outright that I’d asked to be covered in goo, but his expression was perfectly explicit. At that point I realized the only thing I was going to kill was him, so I gave it up.
Then the next week rolled round, the course changed again, and the school made clear it was more than ready to make up for the slow week. We couldn’t cover ten meters of ground before yet another thing came at our heads. To fully convey the experience, on Friday the previous course had taken us a grand total of three minutes start-to-finish, including the time it took for me to wither all the vines into dust. Even on a more typical course, the average run only takes ten minutes. When a real graduation run takes more than fifteen minutes, it normally means you aren’t getting out at all.
On Monday, I didn’t come out until the twenty-seven-minute mark, into a crowd: we’d taken so long that there were about eight other alliances already downstairs and waiting outside the doors for their turn. None of them looked very enthusiastic. Usually you avoid finding out what’s in the obstacle course so you can have a blind first run, but this time the waiting teams were all busily interrogating everyone in our group who’d come out, and going into huddled negotiations with other alliances to run it together.
I don’t think my appearance was reassuring. I emerged trailing clouds of dark-green smoke flickering phosphorescent with crackles of lightning, the dwindling remnants of the hurricane I’d whipped up to dissolve the shambling army of frozen-mud-things. There was also the large ring of glowing orange-purple balefire spheres orbiting round my waist. The workings all fizzled out as I came through the doors, but they hung in the air just long enough to make a fashion statement of thebehold your dark goddessvariety, and anyway I’d been standing there just short of the threshold for five minutes, siccing spheres and thunderbolts on strategic targets to clear a way to the doors. Everyone else on our three teams was staggering. Nkoyo even sat down in the corridor right there and shut her eyes and leaned her head on Khamis’s shoulder when he sat down next to her. The worst of the gouged marks around her throat were barely healed and some of the scabs had cracked and bled again.
“Righty-o, who wants a rundown?” I said, waving away the last trailers of smoke in as prosaic a way as I could manage. Which wasn’t very, but desperation still drove people to talk to me, or at least to creep close enough to overhear what I said to the braver ones. I stayed there in the corridor for the next ten minutes, answering questions to help everyone work out their strategy for running the course. Then the four alliances who’d been lined up to go after us gave it a go, together. They made it about ten meters from the door and then gave up and ran back out. At that point, everyone else just left. The new course was useless in the opposite way: it was too hard for anyone to get through. Except for me.
On Wednesday morning, we came out of our run after only fourteen minutes; we’d thought up loads of better ways for me to take out everything in our path. There was nobody outside waiting at all. We had to patch ourselves up, which went slowly; everyone in our group was exhausted. Except for me. I felt energized and extremely ready for lunch.
During which, it occurred to me that if no one else was trying, the course was wide open. Normally the school goes after you if you try to run the course more than three times a week, to keep people from hogging it, but you’re allowed to take an extra run if there’s literally nobody else queued. “I’ll be up to the library in a bit,” I said abruptly to everyone as we got up to clear our trays. “Come on, Lake.”
Orion whinged all the way down the stairs—all the real mals had abandoned the gym, since nobody was down there trying to run the course, so as far as he was concerned there wasn’t any point—but he gave in and came with me. We ran it together.
It was an even worse idea than hunting with him, in a completely different way. Blazing through endless hordes of fake mals, Orion killing them left and right in a sulky bored way and keeping me clear, with no one at my back I had to worry about, utterly free, utterly fearless. I made him do it three times in a row, and when he balked at a fourth run, I jumped him right there in front of the gym doors. We were kissing and everything was going really well in my opinion, and then he put a hand on the side of my breast mostly by accident and panicked and jerked back from me and babbled, “I’ve got, it’s, uh, I didn’t, you have, we,” incoherently, and nearly walked himself backwards right onto the corpse of the very real drencher he’d killed in our first run, which was still sopping wet and perfectly capable of dissolving the flesh off his feet and legs if he touched it on his own. I had to jump after him and drag him to one side, and he didn’t even notice why, he just pulled free of me and fled, leaving me standing alone in front of the doors.
But this time, not even that humiliation could bring me down. I went upstairs breathing deep and full of my own power, helplessly happy, even though it had obviously been stupid in every respect. I’d already known that I could get out if I didn’t bother worrying about anyone else. I didn’t need to shove my own face in how lovely and easy it would be, and especially I didn’t need to contemplate how much fun I could have with Orion in the process.
If Ihadneeded help recognizing the stupidity of it all, Precious was waiting eagerly to provide it, perched on a shelf just inside the library doors. We weren’t taking the mice with us on the obstacle course; they weren’t the kind of familiars that help in combat situations, so instead we were practicing with small stuffed balls tucked into safe places in our gear. But I didn’t need to be bitten on the ear by the time I got up there; I’d had several long flights of stairs on which to contemplate the folly of my ways. “Yeah,” I told her shortly as I reached up to take her down, and she just nosed at the knuckle of my thumb and scampered back into her bandolier cup.
In the reading room, I stopped by one of the teams Aadhya had made our cleanup deal with, and told them if they did come down on Friday, I’d do another run with them after ours. They all stared at me like a herd of wildebeest being offered safe passage across the Nile by a very large crocodile. “Or don’t,” I said crossly. “I can use the practice if you want it, that’s all.”
They couldn’t decide that they did, but evidently they shared the offer around to get opinions, because on Friday, the other two teams were waiting when we came out. They didn’t actually ask me outright to go with them, like I was a person or anything; they just looked at me sidelong. I swallowed it and told Aadhya shortly, “I’ll see you upstairs,” and after my team had gone off down the hall, I said, “Let’s go,” and marched myself back in.
