Page 29 of The Last Graduate
Doing the course with fifty people at once isn’t normally a good idea, because you make it through all right, but you don’t get enough practice. That wasn’t a problem when we were being deluged from all sides. I realized afterwards that actually it had been terrific practice forme,the closest I could get to the real thing, all of us being dumped into a sea of maleficaria at once. But right then in the moment, I didn’t have time to think about anything but fighting, casting desperately in every direction to take out attacks that were about to overwhelm someone’s defenses. It was like one of those horrible twitchy games where there are seventeen things to do on separate timers and you frantically dash from one to the next and you’re always on the verge of missing one. It was just like that, except I had forty-seven timers running, and if I missed even one of them, somebody was going to die. It was a massive relief when we got to the final attack and I could just cast the one nice relaxing hideously powerful spell and let everyone else run for the gates while I held the eldritch glacier down.
We limped out with skins more or less intact but utterly exhausted. Even I felt drained, my whole rib cage aching; my heart was banging around inside like it’d had an argument with my lungs and now it was in the kitchen putting pots and pans away angrily while they tried to find a way out through my breastbone. Which I suppose was good really, as it meant I’d got some proper exercise in, but I wasn’t for taking the long view at the moment. Some other teams had come down and were waiting, but after I staggered out, they took off without even trying to bribe me for a run, so I gather I looked the way I felt.
There wasn’t any conversation afterwards. Aadhya said, “I want a shower,” and I said, “Yeah,” and basically all twenty-seven girls of our group trudged off to the showers together. It was almost time for Orion to harvest the amphisbaena for Liesel; the juveniles had stopped coming through with the water a week ago or so and now were just hissing and banging impotently at us from inside the showerheads like the steam pipes had gone mad. There was one moment when the wall cracked around one of the showerheads and the amphisbaena inside started to thrash around wildly to try and finish breaking out, but it was just an amphisbaena, so the girl using the shower didn’t even stop rinsing her hair, she just grabbed a long enchanted stiletto-knife out of her bathroom bag and stabbed it into the opening. The showerhead stopped moving around. It would be unpleasant if the dead amphisbaena started rotting in there, but probably the others would eat it before that happened.
None of us talked. We took our turns washing in almost complete silence broken only by the occasional “has anyone got shampoo to trade for toothpaste” and the like. We got our clothes back on and straggled up to the library for our respective postmortems, and still no one said anything to me or to each other until I sat down at our group’s table. But the boys were there waiting for us—and stinking, which was a lot more noticeable since we’d got ourselves clean—and before I’d even quite got my arse in the chair, Khamis demanded peremptorily, “What was that?” like he’d been holding the words back on a tight leash until I got in range and he could let them loose.
I gawked at him. Yes, I’m perpetually complaining about everyone cringing away from me, but of all the people to think theycouldsafely have a go at me without getting knocked back—and then I had a moment of even greater indignation as I realizedhe’dbeen biting his tongue for a month the same way I had, waiting until enough of the term was gone and we’d locked things down and I couldn’t shove him off anymore without crossing the line of what passes for common decency in here.
“What’s the matter, Mwinyi?” I snapped back. “Picked up a splinter today?”
“What’s thematter?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter! Six times today—six times—Fareeda went down.” He jerked a thumb at poor Fareeda, who was just sitting down herself, three chairs away from him. She was an artificer friend of Nkoyo’s I didn’t know very well, and she very clearly didnotthink she could safely have a go at me. She darted her eyes between us and slid the rest of the way into her chair while doing her best to convey that her entire being was on another plane of existence and it was just a mistake on our parts if we thought she was there. “On Monday, she only went down once. What do you say about that?”
There’s a lovely spell I know that makes your victim’s organs all desiccate while still inside them. The original was developed ages ago for perfectly respectable mummification purposes and fell out of fashion roughly along with that practice, but the version I’ve got is the really nasty nineteenth-century English one that everyone’s favorite Victorian maleficer, Ptolomey Ponsonby, worked up in translation out of his father’s collection of Egyptian artifacts. At the moment, I felt roughly as though someone were casting it on me.
“She didn’tstaydown, did she?” I squeezed out of my shriveling entrails. Khamis wasn’t wrong to be concerned if Fareeda was going down a lot: she was in their team’s lead position. She’d spent all the fall semester building a massive forward shield, which would have been a bad strategy on an individual level except it had bought her a place in an enclaver’s alliance, even if it was an extremely dangerous place.
“Nkoyo pulled her up three times, James pulled her up twice. I got her up once myself,” Khamis said. “What were you doing? I’ll tell you. You were taking out a razorwing coming at Magnus Tebow. I don’t see Magnus at this table. Do you think we’re putting ourselves out to cover you so you can help all your New York friends?”
Chloe was on Aadhya’s other side, or on the astral plane along with Fareeda—almost everyone at the table was halfway to joining her, or trying to transmute themselves into unmanned ventriloquist dummies—but at that she let out a small strangled squawk, and then covered her mouth and looked away when everyone glanced at her.
“Tebow had a really good go at killing me about seven months ago, right in that corner over there,” I said, stupidly grateful for Khamis to have given me ground I thought I could stand on. “I wouldn’t lift a finger to put him at the gates ahead of one single person in this school.”
“Ah, so he’s not your friend,” Khamis said, loading on the sarcasm. “You don’t like him, you don’t want New York to take you.”
“El’s already got a guaranteed spot,” Chloe said, obviously deciding that she had to come in after all if this was going to be some kind of challenge to New York.
Everyone round the table twitched instinctively; it’s the kind of gossip we all pay attention to because you can usually trade it for something, but no one really looked surprised. “Which I’m not taking,” I said through my teeth. “Idon’tlike Magnus, and he’snotmy friend, and I’mnotgoing to New York.”
Everyone did look surprised then, and Chloe flinched. But Khamis just stared at me incredulously, and then got angry, really angry, like he thought I was telling him a lie so stupidly obvious that it was insulting I expected him to swallow it. He leaned forward and said through his teeth, “Then I have to ask you again. What was that? Why are you helping Magnus Tebow, who you don’t like, who isn’t your friend, whose enclave you don’t want to join, when you’re supposed to be helpingus?”
But getting mad at me isn’t safe, because it gives me permission to get mad, too. I put my hands on the table and half came up, leaning forward, and I didn’t do it on purpose, but I don’t have to do this kind of thing on purpose: the lights in the room started to dim and stutter, except right around me, and the air got cold, and the words came out on a thin stream of fog when I hissed, “I helped Magnus because heneededit. The way I blocked the stone storm from crushing your skull whenyouneeded it, and if Fareeda had gone down and stayed down, I’d have helped her, too. And if it’s too much to ask you to help her cover your massive front so I can save someone else’s life in the meantime, then you can try going it without me at all, you selfish toerag.”
Khamis was leaning far back by then, with the iridescent green sheen of the light reflecting off his cheekbones and in the dark rings of his wide eyes, but he was stuck, after all. Maybe if hehadbeen a coward, he’d have shut up just to get me to back away, but he wasn’t, worse luck for both of us, and I had to be lying, because that couldn’t be the truth in here. He took a gasp of cold air and said thinly, “That’s crazy. What are you going to do? Save everyone? You can’t save everyone. Not even youandLake.”
“Watchme,” I said, furious and desperate, but even while I was snarling at him, I knew that the wheels were coming off and the wreck was coming. I’d just barely made it through the obstacle course with fifty kids—not quite fifty kids—and there were more than a thousand of us: the largest senior class in the history of the entire Scholomance. The senior class that Orion Lake had made by saving us and saving us. A thousand timers running out, all at the same time.
Khamis had been in the gym for the run himself, so after I said those stupid words, he wasn’t angry at me in the same way anymore, because he’d worked out that I wasn’t lying to him. It was the difference between someone threatening to shoot you and someone running around in circles screaming wildly while emptying a gun into the air. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “Get everybody out? Youarecrazy!” He spread his arms to the whole table. “What happens to us while you’re busy saving all these people you don’t like? You’re going to get us all killed while you pretend to be a hero. You think you can take our mana, take our help, and do whatever you want, is that what you think?”
“Khamis,” Nkoyo said, low and urgent; she’d got up too, and she was reaching out to put a hand on his arm. “It’s been a hard morning.” He stared at her incredulous, his whole expression twisted up with indignation, and then he looked round the table at everybody else—everybody else who wasn’t saying anything to me, in exactly the same way no one had ever said anything to him, all these years—while he took their mana and their help and did whatever he wanted, because there was no point saying anything when the answer wasyes.It was just rubbing your own face in it, and the only reason he didn’t already know that was he’d never been a loser before, lucky enclave boy.
But he was now. He was a loser, and so was Magnus, so was Chloe, so was every last enclaver in the place, because they weren’t getting through the obstacle course without me. It was entirely possible that they weren’t getting through the graduation hall without me. So if I offered any of them a place at my side, in exchange for everything they could possibly scrape together, mana and hard work and even friendship, and if I took everything they gave me and used it to pretend to be a hero—even though of course they didn’t want me to, because that was, actually, very likely to get them killed—still they’d take it and say thanks, if they knew what was good for them. Thank you, El. Thank you very much.
The silence got longer. Khamis didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t look at me. He wasn’t stupid any more than he was a coward, and he’d got it now that hehadrubbed his own face in it. And mine, of course, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. From this side, it was only embarrassment, really. How unfortunate that someone had made such a scene, such an unnecessary fuss. If only I’d been an enclaver myself, I expect I’d have been trained up to handle moments like this with grace. By now, Alfie would have said, a little rueful,Do you know, I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea,and he’d have reached into his ample purse of mana and turned our jug of water into a big steaming teapot, with milk and sugar on the table—just the soothing comfort his own lightly chafed spirit needed. And everyone else would have taken it, not because it helped the gaping wound on their side, but because when you had nothing, you took what you could get.
But I wasn’t an enclaver, so I didn’t handle it gracefully, and they didn’t even get a cup of tea for their pains. I just turned and ran away into the stacks.
Aadhya found me a while later.I don’t know what time it was. There isn’t any daylight in here and the surroundings never change and I was alone in the little library room where you couldn’t hear the bells, the room where no one else had ever had a class, where the Scholomance had tried and tried all this year—not to kill me, but to make me turn my back and let other people die, kids I didn’t know. As though the school had known what it needed to worry about, long before I’d worked it out for myself. The way it had known that I could kill a maw-mouth, and had tried to bribe me into going the other way.
My freshmen were still coming up here for their session every Wednesday, but Zheng had told Liu that the attacks had stopped completely. This ought to have been the safest place in the school to begin with, and now it was. There wasn’t any point shunting mals over here anymore. The school had tried, and it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t learned my lesson; I hadn’t turned my back.
“So this is nice,” Aadhya said, from the doorway, looking around the room and seeing it the way I’d seen it my first morning, a promise of safety and shelter and quiet, before I unwisely signed my name on the schedule and picked up the gauntlet the school had hurled at my feet. She came in and dragged around the desk in front of me, sitting down to face me. “The others went down to lunch. Liu and Chloe are going to get us something. Everyone’s still on board, if you were wondering.”
“Not really,” I said, and laughed a little, jangly and helpless, and put my hands over my face so I didn’t have to look at her, my friend, the first friend I’d ever had, besides Orion, who didn’t count; the first normal sane person in the world who’d looked at me and decided she was going to give me a chance to not hurt her.
Then Aadhya said, “I had a sister,” so I picked my head back up to stare at her. She talked about her family all the time. She’d given me a letter for them, the way she and Liu and Chloe had letters for Mum, just in case, but even without looking at the envelope, I already knew the address of the big house in the New Jersey suburbs with the swimming pool in the backyard. I’d heard endless painfully appetizing descriptions of the ongoing and deeply vicious cooking competition between her grandmothers, Nani Aryahi and Daadi Chaitali, and a whole line of bad jokes acquired in her grandfather’s garage workshop, where he’d taught her how to solder and how to use a saw. I knew all about her sharp and sharp-dressed mum who wove enchanted fabric by hand, fabric that went to the enclaves of New York and Oakland and Atlanta. I knew about her quiet dad who went out six days a week to do technomancer work at whichever enclave had hired him for that month. I knew their names, their favorite colors, which Monopoly tokens they liked to play. She’d never once mentioned a sister.
“Her name was Udaya. I wasn’t even three when she died, so I don’t really remember her,” Aadhya said. “Nobody in my family ever talked about her. For a while I thought that I made her up, until when I was ten I found a box of photos of her in the attic.” She gave a snort. “I freakedout.”
