Page 32 of The Last Graduate
My hand instinctively went up to wrap around the bandolier cup on my chest, where she was curled up sleeping. “There’s something wrong with her?”
Liu shook her head. “Notwrong. But it took so much longer for her to start manifesting, and now she’s already a lot stranger than the others. I saw her try tobiteOrion once in the library when he was about to put his arm around your shoulders. That means she’s exercising judgment that’s independent of yours. That’s not really a thing that happens with mice.”
I was about to claim that my judgment was perfectly aligned with Precious on the subject of Orion putting his arm around my shoulders or on any other part of me, but Liu gave me a pointed look and I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth.
“Anyway, I also realized, you almost neverusenormal spells,” she went on. “You’ll even sweep the floor with a broom before you’ll use a spell.”
“My spells are more likely to sweep every living person in the room into the nearest rubbish bin,” I said.
Liu nodded. “Yes. And those are the spells you’re good at, the ones that come easily. So you don’t ever use magic when you can use something else.”
“But how didZixuanguess all that?” I asked, after a moment. I was having some difficulty digesting the idea. I neverdoget ordinary spells, and the ones I get are almost always unnecessarily complicated—like those Old English cleaning spells I’d got last term, which turned out to be worthless for trade even beyond being in Old English, because they took twice as much mana to use as the modern cleaning charms everyone else had, and needed more focus besides. I’d assumed that was the school—or, well, the universe—being out to get me, not because thereweren’tordinary cheap spells, for me. I wasn’t sure whether that ought to make me feel better or worse, actually.
“He said it’s the same way a reviser works,” Liu said. “It abstracts away detail and allows you to operate on a higher scale, control more power. But you can’t use a reviser to do detail work. So—you’re like a living reviser. That’s why you have trouble with little spells, and not really big ones. He guessed because you could channel the power fromhisreviser so easily.”
“I wouldn’t have called iteasy, myself,” I muttered, but that was just grousing. I would’ve quite liked a chat with him myself, actually; it sounded as though he might know more about how my magic worked than I did. “But in that case, they know I’m not lying—they know I reallycanget them through the course. Why wouldn’t they come?”
“They don’t believe you could really have hidden your power from everyone,” Liu said. “They think New York knew all along, and you’ve been in with them from the start, and just hiding it so none of the other enclaves would know about you before graduation.”
I groaned and thumped my forehead down against my knees. The problem was, I couldn’t see any way to disprove it. It made all the sense in the world from their perspective, which was limited by the language barrier that runs through the middle of the school. Over my four years in here, I’ve shared a class with at least half the kids in the English-language track, and almost none with Chinese-track kids. I know the ones like Yuyan who are doing enough languages that we’ve overlapped once or twice, and the bilingual Chinese-track kids who take their general classes in English to count for their language requirement. But that’s it. Most kids don’t cross over very much to begin with—most group conversations in this school happen either in English or in Chinese, so you hang out with the kids who prefer the same one you do. Liu deliberately chose to spend more time with the English-speaking crowd because she’s working on spell translation, which requires as much fluency as writing complicated metered poetry with lots of long obscure words in a foreign language.
But I crossed over not at all, because I wasn’t in any conversations, period. I went to my classes and spoke to almost no one, ate alone, studied alone, worked out alone, tucked away in my own cramped little cell,exactlyas I would have if I’d been deliberately hiding a very bright light under a bushel. The actual explanation, which was that I hadn’t had any alternatives because no one liked me, only invited the question of why I hadn’tmadeany of them like me by giving them a good look at the aforementioned bright light, thereby getting myself courted by all instead of dangerously isolated.
That was such a good question that I’d literally spent three years aggressively telling myself I was going to join up to an enclave as soon as I got the chance, and then carefully avoiding any possibility of a chance while pretending to myself I was playing some sort of extremely long game. If I’d ever acknowledged to myself that possibly my mum had been right and I didn’t want to join an enclave after all, I’d probably just have lain down and died in hopelessness at the prospect of—the rest of mylife. I’d only been able to admit it to myself after Orion, Orion and Aadhya and Liu; after I wasn’t completely friendless anymore.
“I don’t suppose they let you talk them out of it?” I asked, without any real hope. It looked stupid in retrospect even tome, so I didn’t think Yuyan and Zixuan were going to believe it. Maybe someone who’d been among the kids who’d deliberately avoided me, but the Shanghai kids hadn’t any clue that loser-kid me even existed until suddenly I erupted into prominence. And then Chloe and the New York kids suddenly embracing me en masse, offering me an alliance and a guaranteed spot, just because Orion had been hanging around me for a few weeks? I’d thought they were completely mad. It would make loads more sense if actually I’d secretly been part of their crew all along, or at least for a year or more.
Liu shook her head. “They were polite, but I’m pretty sure the other reason they wanted to talk to me was to get an idea if you had tricked me, or if I was trying to establish a relationship with New York.”
I blew out a breath. That was Liu trying to be polite to me, but I knew what she meant was, the Shanghai kids wanted to get an idea if she—and by extension her family—were getting ready to undercut the established Chinese enclaves and make an alliance with New York to get their own enclave. “Which did they pick?”
Liu held up her hands in a shrug. “I told them that I couldn’t prove anything. But you were my friend, and you really wanted to get everyone out, and you aren’t going to New York. So…they think you tricked me.” She gave a small sigh.
It wasn’t even especially paranoid of them. The Asian enclaves have been in a slow and increasingly vicious decades-long wrestling match with New York and London to force them to hand over more Scholomance seats. The Chinese-language track of general classes literally only started in here in the late eighties. Before then, it was English or nothing, even after a good quarter of the school was coming in with some dialect of Chinese as their first language, and it only finally changed when the ten major Asian enclaves, Shanghai in the lead, publicly announced an exploratory committee to build a new school under their control.
Of course, the enclaves didn’t really want to follow through on that threat. The wizard population has been growing steadily since the Scholomance opened, but as of right now, adding a second school and splitting the enclaver population across them would mean they’d have tocompetewith the Scholomance for indie kids. Both schools would have to sweeten the odds for us—at the cost of their own kids. And that’s apart from the massive cost of building the school itself.
What they really wanted was what they got: more Scholomance seats for their enclaves to hand out, and classes in an easier language for their kids. Not much to ask, but they’d had tomakethe threat to get it, and the allocation is still a far cry from fair. I’m in here myself thanks to a spot London really shouldn’t still have had to give out, and meanwhile indie kids all over Asia are still doing those grueling exams for the chance to be among the one in two kids who get a place.
But that can’t be fixed any more without starting to take places away from the very top international enclaves in the US and Europe, none of whom want to give up a single one. The next reallocation is coming soon—and there’s a real fight brewing over it. New York and Shanghai and their allies on both sides have been doing increasingly nasty things to one another for the last few years, jockeying for position. It would be a bit of a shocker to find out that a New York ally had gone after Bangkok and literally taken the enclave down, but we can all imagine it. Everyone knows it’s entirely possible that there’s a full-on enclave war happening right now.
Everyone including me, but the truth is, I’ve only known it in a vague background-noise way. All these years I’ve been a loser struggling in the soup; the geothaumaturgipolitical dancing among the top enclaves of the world didn’t matter to me anymore than pariah-loser me mattered to the top kids from Shanghai enclave. But it matterednow, and the more I thought about it, the more of a desperate mess it looked. Of course Yuyan and Zixuan wouldn’t trust me. They thought I was planning to graduate and head straight to New York, where presumably I’d be trying to help kill them and their families. Why wouldn’t I just do for them in here if I had the chance?
“But what’s their alternative?” I said in frustration, having gnawed it over in my head without finding a way through. “No matter what, they still can’t get through the obstacle course without me, and if they don’t get any practice in, they’ll die anyway. I’ll grant you it’s a bad chance, but it’s the only chance they’ve got. Why not give it a go? Or—why not at least send a few minions to give it a go, and make sure?”
Liu shook her head. “The course is in thegym.”
I groaned and lay myself out flat on the ground, staring at the ceiling. The gym, which I’dcompletely overhauledthis past Field Day, in a bizarre and utterly nonsensical use of power which would suddenly make fantastic sense if what I’d been doing was, for instance, arranging some kind of mysterious sabotage of the obstacle course that would force people to put themselves in my power. Ideally in some way that would allow me to maintain power over them even after they left school and went home to their enclaves. That’s the whole idea behind the obstacle course to begin with—giving your consent is necessary to make it work. If some maleficer—somemaleficer—managed to wriggle their way into it, that would be an excellent mechanism to use to force people to become their mindless zombie servants et cetera.
“I’m sorry,” Liu said softly. “I did already try asking a few indie kids to come, but…they don’t really trust me.” She put her hand up to run it back and forth over the short spiky fuzz of her head, an unconscious gesture she’d picked up ever since it had been cut. She hadn’t made that many more friends than I had, in her first three years in the Scholomance. Her family hadn’t needed her to network. They’d needed her to stay alive, and keep her kid cousins alive through their freshman year, and she’d been meant to do it with malia. And when you’re just a low-level maleficer, people pick up on that sort of thing and get nervous. “And they do trust the Shanghai kids. Most of them wouldn’t have spots in here at all if Shanghai hadn’t fought for them.”
I’d have debated the purity of the enclavers’ motives, but I’ll grant you that I didn’t have very good ground to stand on, me with my for-granted spot that Mum askedmeif I wanted to take. “Do you suppose it would help things if we told them that I’ve actuallygota mind control spell that works on masses of people at once?” I said aloud.
“No,” Liu said, positively. Then she said, “…do you?”
I grimaced, enough of an answer. She was right, of course; that’s not very confidence-inspiring.
But if we couldn’t find a way to change their minds—if Zixuan and Yuyan and the other kids from Shanghai didn’t come, if they all stayed away from our obstacle course runs, because they were afraid that it was a massive setup meant to take control of their brains and turn them all into trojan horses—and then graduation came, and they alldied, in droves, because they hadn’t had any practice, while everyone who’d followed New York’s lead came sailing out home to their families—then it would in fact turn out tobea massive setup, in result if not intention, and I didn’t think their parents would be particularly interested in what my intentions had been.
