Page 31 of The Last Graduate
Chloe stared at her. “Well—” She looked at me and then back. “I mean, yes, of course, but—” She stopped and looked at me again, and fair enough, I’d clearly conveyed to her on more than one occasion that I could think of many uses for Magnus, in the line of testing sharp objects and toxic chemicals, so she had a reasonable cause for doubting whether I’d be on board with signing him on. But I didn’t look up. I didn’t feel I had the right to object to any other ideas anyone had, given I’d rejected the one that involved all of them getting to live.
“That’s the only way this can work. Anyone who wants to run the course with El has to join us, really become allies,” Liu said. “It can’t just be El and Orion covering all of us. They won’t be able to do it. We all have to help cover each other so they can fight the worst mals, or save anyone about to go down.”
No one else was really participating in the conversation; almost certainly all just wondering what on earth they were going to do to save themselves while I was busy saving everyone else. But Yaakov had been listening, and apparently he was sincerely giving it a think, because he said, “But if this keeps happening, soon we will have everyone trying to run the course at the same time.” Ibrahim actually blinked over at him in surprise that he was taking the conversation seriously.
“Okay, so?” Aadhya said. “Most years, sure, we’re all trying to get private time on the course. But that’s not the problem we actually have. Did anyone here feel like the course wasn’t hard enough this morning? Even with fifty kids running?” Nobody had, very clearly; Aadhya didn’t even bother answering her own rhetorical question. “Let’s say El and Orion run the course twice a day. Everyone who wants to run with them gets to go once every other day, like we’re all supposed to. Even if literally everyone joins up, that’s fine; the gym can handle a few hundred kids at once, no problem. This isn’t rocket science or anything. We already know that we need allies. If wedidn’tteam up for graduation, if we all ran solo, practically everybody would die. This is just—the next level. We’reallgoing to be allies, because it’s worth it to help some rando kid if that means five minutes later, El’s going to be able to stop the volcano from falling on your head.”
“All of which is true right up until we all get to the gates at the same time, and Patience and Fortitude come for everybody at once,” Khamis said, the bastard, and Aadhya looked at me, asking the question I still wanted to run away from while screaming loudly. But it was only fair, after all: if I was making them jump through all these hoops, just so I could be a hero, I had to be a bloody proper one, didn’t I?
“I’ll take them out if I have to,” I said. I was just trying to get the words out without hysterics, but it came out like I was performing deadpan. Half the table thought I was making some sort of joke and gave it a polite laugh by way of telling Khamis to shut up and stop making things unnecessarily awkward, but Liu and Chloe both understood instantly that I wasn’t joking at all, and Khamis was still glaring daggers at me so hard that he presumably could tell that I was thirty seconds from projectile vomiting into his stupid face, and with all of them staring at me, the tittering died off and then everyone went through a round of looking at one another sideways to checkDo we think El’s gone off her trolley for good,and then there was a round of uncertainty over whether I was just saying it or whether I had any actual reason to imagine that I could do anything of the sort.
I don’t think everyone had decided yet when Nkoyo said, “We should split up by language. You’ve got the big four, right?” she asked me, meaning English, Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish, and I managed a short nod. I suppose now I had to be grateful for my library seminar after all, and all Liu’s coaching.
Liu said, “We’ll write it up next to the gym doors,” and after a very abbreviated discussion, we broke up to start spreading the word.
Aadhya took me in tow—I think she felt I wasn’t to be trusted not to go skulking off again—but she didn’t move quick enough. As soon as I was plausibly but not actually out of hearing range, everyone else started whispering about it and I overheard Cora say, “Orion never found it, and she was so sick that day,” and I told Aadhya, very calmly in my opinion, “Sorry,” and ran ahead to the stairs and down to the nearest loo, outside the cafeteria, where I threw up what felt like most of my stomach lining, and then just sat crouched there over the toilet crying with my hands over my mouth. In here, by the end of freshman year you learn to cry with your eyes open, without making noise. Except of course nothing was going to come after me anyway, because I could kill maw-mouths as long as I had the mana, and there was a New York power-sharer on my wrist at the moment, apparently not to be removed no matter how ludicrous a swerve I took, so what mal would be stupid enough to come after me anymore?
Aadhya came in after a few minutes and waited for me outside the stall. I finally got hold of myself and crept out to wash my face. She kept watch for me until I had finished and then said, “Let’s get started.”
Orion gave me a poke in the back at lunchtime—the kids behind me in the queue let him ahead of them without his even asking—and said, “Hey Orion, I’ve got this great idea, how about you stop huntingactual malsthat are eatingactual people,and spend six days a week doing fake gym runs twice a day instead.”
I didn’t stop; I wasn’t going to miss out on the rice pud that for once was actually rice pud. There was a colony of the usual glutinous maggots growing rapidly through the big metal pan, but they’d only got halfway through so far, and I managed to get a bowlful. Ah, the privileges of being a senior. I also got three apples, despite the faint greenish shine you could see if you held them to the light at just the right angle: Chloe had a really brilliant spray that would take off the toxic coating. “Lake, I know you like your walkies, but fewer than twelve people have been eaten this year so far, and five hundred are due to be gobbled in the first ten minutes downstairs. Don’t be a twat. You can run around and play with the mals after the work’s done.” He scowled at me, but the numbers were too pointedly on my side, so he stopped arguing and sullenly took a scoop of the spaghetti Bolognese, and sprinkled it with a thick helping of shaved antidote in lieu of Parmesan.
We gave it an hour after lunch, to let the word spread a bit, before we went down for the first Hindi run. There were perhaps twenty kids waiting: two teams mostly made of friends and trading acquaintances of Aadhya’s, including one girl from Kolkata enclave who knew her cousins. My freshman Sunita had talked her older brother Rakesh into talking his team into coming, which included one wary enclaver from Jaipur.
The handful left over were stragglers, kids who hadn’t got into any alliance yet. There aren’t many Hindi-speaking stragglers. The enclaves in India and Pakistan only have enough spare seats for half the indie kids who would like to come, so there’re brutal exams and interviews before you even get inducted, and even the worst of the kids who make it in are almost always a cut above the straggler level of Scholomance loser. But some parents will spend huge amounts of money buying seats, even if their kids can’t qualify on their own merits. Sometimes those kids turn out to be great at making friends, or sometimes they get better under the pressure, and sometimes they get lucky, and these were the ones who hadn’t.
They’d come down for the run because they didn’t have much hope anyway, so a grasp at any straw was worth it. It was a tiny bit useful just to come here and meet some kids whodidhave alliances, because those kids might end up with openings they’d have to fill. But they all looked deeply skeptical while Aadhya gave everybody the official lecture that they each had to help anyone they could, or they wouldn’t be welcome to run again. This boy Dinesh with really awful alchemy scars that had melted half his face—an accident it would probably cost five years of mana to fix if he got out of here—stared at her while she was talking as if she were an alien from several galaxies over.
But when we crossed the river for the first time, and the rilkes came out of the half-frozen mud on the banks and lunged with shredding claws for him and the two straggler kids next to him, he went ahead and threw up a shield over them all instead of just himself, which won me the ten seconds of casting time that I needed to finish disintegrating the massive hungerhowl erupting from beneath the ice, which was about to swallow them whole along with the rilkes and several other members of our group.
They all still looked fairly shell-shocked coming out of the gym, but one of them offered Dinesh a drink from a water bottle, and he walked away down the corridor with them. And I came out panting for breath, but nobody had got killed, and I wasn’t a twitchy wreck, either.
Orion wasn’t panting at all, just sullen and bored as he trailed out after me. “You really want to do this twice a day, every day?” he said, with a whinge to it. I have to confess I felt meanly pleased the next day during the first Spanish run when the crazy evil glaciers reared up a few minutes earlier than before, and hetripped,because he hadn’t been paying proper attention. I had to use a telekinesis spell to scoop him out of the giant toothy blue crevasse and toss him—possibly a little more vigorously than necessary—into a snowbank.
“Maybe youdoneed a bit more practice, Lake,” I said sweetly to him out in the hall as he irritably brushed off the snow and scowled at me. I beamed back and flicked a blob of snow off his nose, and then he visibly stopped being annoyed and started wanting to kiss me, but there werepeoplethere, so I glared him off.
The Spanish run was almost too easy to be good practice: it was an even smaller group than the Hindi one, just a handful of Puerto Rican and Mexican kids who’d heard about the plan from friends allied with New York enclavers, and one alliance headed by a kid from the Lisbon enclave who was friends with Alfie. But that made it easier to spot who wasn’t actually trying to help anyone else; three guesses who, and no prizes if you got the Lisbon enclaver on the first go. She got huffy and indignant when I told her afterwards she wouldn’t be welcome if she did it again, and that if she wanted the chance, she’d be spending her mana to patch up all the assorted injuries from the run.
“Is that what you think?” she said, sharp with outrage. “I’m following your orders now? I don’t think so. Who needs you anyway? Come on, we’re leaving,” she added to her team, except we’d just finished a course that had made abundantly clear thattheyneeded me, very badly, and her top recruit, Rodrigo Beira—sixth in the class rankings, in sniffing distance of valedictorian—got up from where he’d been crouched on the floor gulping for air and quietly went over to start help tending one of the Puerto Rican girls who had a badly lacerated arm filled with spiky bits of ice that were melting only grudgingly. Enclaver girl stared after him, and then jerked a look at the rest of her team, none of whom met her eyes, and all of whom one after another went to help Rodrigo.
If I was feeling a bit smug afterwards, which I might have been, the afternoon took care of that nicely: when Orion and I went down with Liu for the first Chinese run, there wasn’t a single person there. We waited for nearly twenty minutes, Liu biting her lip and looking sorry. Chinese and English circles are fairly separate in here, since you can go your entire career doing lessons in only one language or the other, but a Chinese-speaking team of kids from Singapore and Hanoi had been among the crowd at the gates two days ago, and Jung Ho from Magnus’s team did lessons in a mix of Chinese and English and had promised to spread the word, which surely hadn’t needed much spreading.
Which meant, I realized when we finally gave up waiting, that someone had sent round adifferentword:Stay away.
“I asked around a little at dinner,” Liu said that evening. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed picking softly at the lute while I sat against the wall doing crochet in a sluggish desultory way, every stitch reluctant. I looked up at her. “The Shanghai enclave had a meeting of their seniors yesterday, about the runs. After I asked a few people about it, Yuyan sent someone to invite me to meet her and Zixuan in the library.”
I sat up and left the crochet in my lap. “And?”
“They wanted to ask me a question about how you do magic,” Liu said. “I agreed I would tell them, if they told me why they wanted to know.” I nodded a bit grimly; that was a sensible information trade—if also the kind you only carefully negotiate with someone you’re considering a potential enemy. “Zixuan asked me if you have trouble doingsmallspells.”
I stared at her. If I’d had to guess at his question, that wouldn’t have been anywhere on the list. I’d been braced for the one about what I’d do to get the power for my spells, if for instance I ran out of mana on graduation day, or maybe how exactly I was so good at controlling gigantic maleficaria. Most wizards don’t give a rat’s arse whether I’m bad at boiling a cup of water for tea once they see me setting lakes on fire. “I have troublegettingsmall spells.”
“You’ve got trouble casting them, too,” Liu said. “I didn’t realize it was important until Zixuan made me think about it, but I did notice—you remember back in August, when we were just starting to work on the amplification spell, and I tried to teach you that little tone-keeper spell first, so you wouldn’t accidentally sing the wrong tone and change the meaning?”
“Ugh,” I said, which comprehensively described that afternoon’s delights, which, yes, had lodged firmly in my memory. I had ten goes at the spell and my tongue felt like it had been clamped in a shop vise before I gave up and told Liu I’d just have to learn the bloody tones properly on pain of blowing myself to bits.
Liu nodded. “It’s meant for really little kids who are just learning how to talk, so you can teach them the ‘yell for help’ spell. I could cast it when I was three.” I must have been gawping at Liu openly with my doubt on my face, because she added, “It’s happening for you with Precious, too.”
