Page 34 of The Last Graduate
But she made a big batch and we bottled it into thirty vials. It would take care of Hideo for the rest of the term, and leave enough over for anyone who panicked on graduation day: there were usually a reasonable number of unexpected freakouts. Orion lugged the crate downstairs to Chloe’s room for us and threw me one last reproachful look before flouncing off to go hunting, since I very firmly parked myself into one of the beanbags and made clear I wasn’t going anywhere alone with him.
Chloe bit her lip and didn’t say anything, but she continued not to say anything even after he left, which wasn’t usual for her. It was clear she could have happily used a dose of calming-waters herself to stop worrying:Is El going to take Orion away from us.I didn’t want to think about that myself, as letting the idea into my head was likely to lead me in the direction of many terrible decisions. “Were you always planning to do alchemy?” I said instead, by way of distracting us both. “Aren’t your parents both artificers?”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “But my grandma’s an alchemist. She started by teaching me to cook, when I was about ten. She was really happy that I wanted to learn; my mom and my uncle never did. She got in for working on the cafeteria overhaul,” she added.
For all that the food in here is mostly awful and regularly contaminated, we’re lucky to have it. Originally the Scholomance cafeteria dispensed a nutritious slurry three times a day—thin and watery enough to pass through the very narrow warded pipes—and if you wanted it to be something else, you had to transmute it yourself, which no one could afford to do.
Actually making a particular food out of something else with magic is almost impossible, because you aren’t just interested in how you experience it in your mouth: you want the food to work as nutrition for your body once you send it down into your stomach and forget about it. If you turn a box of nails into a sandwich, you might think you’ve eaten afterwards, but you’ll be wrong. And for that matter, if you turn gruel into bread, you’ll generally be wrong then, too, because gruel and bread aren’t actually that similar as far as your digestive enzymes are concerned. Ithasbeen done, but only in alchemy labs funded by enclaves, by the kind of wizard who will finish their Scholomance training and then go off to spend ten years in a mundane university getting advanced degrees in chemistry and food science.
You can start with something that technically qualifies as nourishment and then just put a sensory illusion on it, but the illusion will break down as soon as you start chewing. The result is generally more unpleasant than just choking down whatever you started with. The only practical solution is to selectively transmute whatever parts come into significant contact with your senses: you lose the nutrients out of the bits that were transmuted, but that sends the rest successfully down.
However, that’s loads more complicated and expensive mana-wise than just waving a hand and turning, say, a stick into a pen, where you don’t care in the slightest what’s happening on the molecular level as long as you can write with it. Not even enclavers could afford to do it on a regular basis. Most kids came out more or less malnourished, and everyone spent most of their weight allowance bringing in food. It was enough of a factor in deaths that after ten years or so, the decision was made to open up a hole in the wards for transporting in small amounts of actual food, enough to give everyone our thrice-weekly snack bar visit.
But shortly after World War II, New York and a consortium of the US enclaves swooped in and very cheerfully took over the school—London wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight—and they hired a batch of those chemist-wizards who went into their labs and developed a food-transmutation process to run on the slurry that was an order of magnitude cheaper than the best solutions before then.
Evidently Chloe’s granny had been one of the alchemists who had made it possible—good enough to get a place in New York enclave for the work. I already knew her dad had been allies with her uncle, during graduation, and he’d got in by marrying her mum. So her dad and her granny had been indie wizards who’d made it in by clawing and scratching and working themselves to the bone; her family weren’t high up in the council or anything, they were relatively new. No wonder she was so anxious about not losing the Domina’s son.
But I couldn’t say anything to reassure her. I wasn’t coming to New York. I wasn’t making her grandmother’s bargain, not even the better version of it that I could have struck. So if Orion wanted me more than he wanted New York, I suppose I was going to take him away, and I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it, either. Not after the way they’d treated him, raised him to be their hero instead of just another kid. I’d spent most of my childhood yelling at Mum fornottaking me into an enclave. It hadn’t occurred to me what any enclave would do with someone like me, what they’d want of me, what they’d tell a kid too young to resist them, just to get what they wanted.
I wasn’t going to give in to them. I wasn’t going to give in to anyone: not Magnus, not Khamis, not Chloe, not even Orion, if he asked me himself. I wasn’t going to give in to New York, to any of the enclaves, and most of all, I wasn’t going to give in to the Scholomance.
After I left Chloe in her room, I walked alone to the gym. The doors were closed today: there were no runs on Sunday. On the other side, the low grinding and clanking noises were going steadily as the obstacle course went on rearranging itself to try to kill us, all in the name of making us stronger. I stood in front of them listening for a long time. I could; nothing tried to jump me. “That’s right,” I said, aloud, defiantly. “Don’t even try. You’re not going to win. We’re going to get everyone out.I’mgoing to get everyone out.”
Dramatic pronouncementsare all very well and good, but on Monday, two hundred kids turned up expectantly for the next English run, and Orion and I started to hit our limits.
The new course itself was absolutely awful. The gym was full of plum trees on the cusp of blooming, with a soft gurgling brook winding among their roots, the last traces of ice clinging to the banks and a pale edge of frost limning the grass. Sunlight dappled down through the leaves and small birds darted around in the distance, chirps coming from amid the branches, lovely and inviting, at least until we got close enough for the trees to start savagely clubbing us with thorny limbs that shredded most shielding spells, and the tiny birds bunched up into a flock that came at us en masse and turned out to be shrikes.
I tried to hit the whole swarm with a killing spell, but it didn’t work. Just before the spell landed, the cloud of shrikes all burst apart and started attacking us separately. Orion spent the whole run weaving back and forth through the crowd, shooting them down one at a time, but I couldn’t do that: throwing one of my killing spells at a single shrike while it was flying rapidly around a person pecking at them was an excellent way for me to miss the shrike entirely, and kill the person and their three closest neighbors at the same time.
The only thing that saved it from disaster was that everyonedidkeep helping one another—throwing fresh shields over people who had been clubbed, picking the shrikes out of the sky one at a time if they came close enough, neutralizing the poison clouds that occasionally spurted out of the plum blossoms. I wasn’t useless, either; halfway through, the trees got inventive. A dozen of them pulled up their roots and wove themselves together into a living wicker man. It went crashing about, grabbing enormous handfuls of people and shoving them inside the basket of its own chest, and then erupted into flames with them imprisoned and screaming just as a second batch of trees followed the first.
The shields that everyone had to keep up against the shrikes were totally useless against the tree-basket-men, and even Orion couldn’t make a dent in the things. They weren’t consumed by their own fire, which was presumably psychic instead of corporeal. They just kept merrily burning on, right until I tore them all apart with a handy spell I have for constructing a ritual dark tower. It uses whatever construction materials are in the area. The people inside got dumped out, and the trees got shredded apart and reassembled into a tidy hexagonal tower of solid walls bristling with upcurved sharpened stakes placed at intervals that looked exactly as though the structure was designed to have people impaled all over the surface. Even dodging shrikes, everyone gave it a very wide berth.
Nobody died, but seven people came out with exposed bone, a dozen with severe burns, and two people had lost eyes. A couple of enclaver alchemists grudgingly shared drops of restorative tinctures, which were good enough to heal the damage once they emerged from the gym, and nobody complained if they made it out of graduation alive at the cost of an eye, but it had been a sharp lesson in our limitations. There were plenty of small, quick mals. In fact they were excellent candidates to have survived the cleansing, down below.
In the library afterwards, Magnus pulled Orion aside into a corner of the reading room for a deep heartfelt chat, out of earshot of where I’d been before I got up and quietly snuck after to eavesdrop. “Look, bro, I’m sorry to have to be saying this, I know you’re trying to move mountains here, but—we’ve got to have a plan for when you can’t,” by which he meant, a plan for leaving people behind. That was what every enclaver had.
“If that happens, I guess we’ll have to let the best-prepared fend for themselves, Tebow,” I said, sweet as a poisoned apple, from behind his back. He flinched and glared at me before he could help himself.
But the truth waseveryonehad that plan: how to recognize when one of your allies had gone down too hard, and it was time to cut them loose and keep going. I’d lived with that plan in my own head for years and years, and just declaring that I was giving it up wasn’t actually a solution to the underlying problem. We needed a plan to save everyone instead, and we demonstrably still didn’t have one. Magnus wasn’t wrong about that.
But we still had a better option than any of the other available ones. More kids kept joining the runs all week long, except in the still-almost-empty Chinese section. One of the former Bangkok enclavers did show, warily, and later in the week, Hideo—calming-waters did beautifully to stop his tics, for half an hour at least, which was plenty of time to do the run—brought a group of three other kids with him, a loser-alliance that he’d had an agreement to follow after in the graduation hall, with no other benefits: even the worst stragglers can get that kind of lousy deal. I think he’d asked them to come and watch him perform with the tics medicated, in hopes they’d agree to let him properly join up, and the prospect of a real fourth brought them—that, or they liked him, and wanted to be convinced.
Apparently they were convinced, and it was contagious, because the following Monday—after the gym debuted yet another completely unsurvivable course—all of the Japanese enclavers turned up for the Chinese section en masse, bringing their allies with them, which made it suddenly a substantial crowd. The biggest Japanese enclaves all have each of their kids make their own team, with no more than one or two carefully picked potential enclave recruits from among the independent Japanese kids, and the rest of the kids are foreign wizards whom they’ll aggressively sponsor into foreign enclaves after graduation, the idea being to create relationships all over the world. Loads of kids take Japanese and compete for the slots as a result, since it’s substantial help to get into the enclave you actually most want to live in. Mostly people consider themselves lucky to take whatever enclave they can get, even if it means moving halfway round the world from your family.
Some of them had been coming to the English runs before now, since most of them knew both English and Chinese, but it obviously made more sense to come to the less crowded run. They just hadn’t wanted to pick a fight with Shanghai enclave, and who could blame them. Turning up like this was the equivalent of them saying publicly they were convinced that they weren’t getting out alive otherwise, a vote of no confidence in whatever the Shanghai kids were trying to organize.
What they certainly weren’t organizing was runs of the obstacle course, since as far as I knew, no one in the school but me could mind-prison a castigator, which was this week’s special guest star. It tookmea full ten minutes of wrangling the thing while it bellowed and roared and thrashed hideous slimy limbs dripping with acid all over the gym, eating enormous holes in the wide spring meadow buzzing with seventeen different swarms of mana-eating insects that everyone else desperately had to keep off. Orion literally had to go across the gym and back thirty-two times in the single run with a net spell, which kept coming apart every time one tiny drop from the castigator’s arms hit it.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Liu offered wearily, that afternoon in the library, as we sat slumped round the table. Orion had put his head down in his arms and was snoring faintly from inside them. The rest of us were trying to think of ways to talk the Shanghai enclavers round. “Nobody will turn down help on graduation day, and the really desperate ones who will need the most help are coming to the run. Maybe we’ll be able to just include them.”
“Yeah, it’s not like they’re going to be useless,” Aadhya said. “They’re doingsomething.They’re in the workshop all the time; I’ve seen Zixuan in there working with at least a dozen kids every time I go in for supplies.”
“This is nonsense. They are not going to beprepared,” Liesel said. If you’re wondering how Liesel came into our discussions, so were the rest of us, but she was both impervious to hints that she wasn’t wanted, and also hideously smart, so we hadn’t actually been able to chase her from the planning; in fact she had edged her way further up the table at every session. “There are more than three hundred of them and they are not coming to a single run. We cannot yet manage a group even of two hundred properly. Areweuseless? Havewenot trained? But it is only lucky that no one died this week. And it is still only the beginning! If they don’t start practicing before the end, there will be no hope for them. Put that out of your heads.”
“I suppose you’d like me to just abandon three hundred people, then,” I said sharply.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, the great heroine is angry. If they want your help they will come. Until then you should worry less how you will save them and worry more how they will get in your way. Now is it possible we can talk about the order of entry? We cannot keep running in without any organization. This is not a good strategy when we are all collaborating.”
