Page 33 of The Last Graduate
As if to emphasize the problem, next morning there were more than a hundred kids for the English run. That many kids all in one place was so much temptation that a squad of extremely real, extremely hungry mals jumped us during the run, bursting out of snowdrifts and from behind jagged towers of ice. It wasn’t very wise of them; we could all tell they were the real thing, because they hadn’t been in the run earlier that week, so Orion made a beeline for each one. He took them all down without a worry, except for the massive manta-ray-sized digester that peeled itself off one face of the glaciers during their attack and tried to just flop itself completely over him. That one I just disintegrated whole.
I had the attention to spare, because everyone else had already got better. Thanks to Liesel, I was grudgingly forced to admit; she had been waiting right in front of the doors while everyone gathered, and as I got there, she preemptively announced in projecting tones, “We must approach the run differently. Stop thinking how you can help the people nearest to you. Think about what help you can give best, and look for the nearest person who needs that help.”
That was completely unintuitive, and very few people were willing to let go of their alliances quite that thoroughly yet. But by halfway through the run, it was so obviously the better approach that everyone was at leasttryingto do it. By the end I almost felt as if Orion and I were running it on our own—the same exhilaration except even better, though the run was still a thousand times harder—because the plan wasworking.Everyone was helping everyone else, saving everyone else, and all I had to do was jump in when anyone’s luck went a bit sour.
There were a lot more kids at the Hindi run in the afternoon, too: Ravi and three other enclavers from Jaipur showed up with their teams, so evidently Liesel’s cooing had paid dividends after all. Still nobody from Mumbai, though; not from anywhere in Maharashtra. That wasn’t really a surprise. Back at the start of freshman year, when all of us who weren’t enclavers ourselves were in the first frantic rush of trying to make friends, the other kids started going to lengths to avoid me by the second time meeting me. But the kids from Mumbai would literally pick up and move away from me without another word as soon as they heard my name.
I don’t know exactly what they’ve heard about me. My dad’s family haven’t actively spread the prophecy round, I don’t think. If they had, surely some of those enclaves I’m supposed to darken and destroy would have taken a much more energetic interest in my well-being, or lack thereof, some time before now. So I assume all they know is that the family were going to take me and Mum in, and we didn’t last a night inside their compound walls.
Perhaps that doesn’t seem like enough to meritinstantlyostracizing me, but the Sharmas have a reputation among the wizards in Maharashtra roughly like Mum’s got in the UK. They’ve produced several acclaimed healers of their own, but what they’re really known for—and how they keep their increasingly large family—is divinatory magic, with a twist. Divinatory magic doesn’t generally work out well for many reasons, but one of them is because human beings aren’t very good at predicting what will make them happy. I don’t mean if you wish for something and then get it twisted in some horrible way like that stupid story about the monkey’s paw; I mean in the same prosaic way that you can sincerely be certain that you’d like a dress you see in a shop, and you buy it and take it home, and then it sits in your closet unused for years while you insist to yourself that one day you’re going to wear it, until finally you give it away with a sense of relief.
Well, my dad’s family have seers who can tell you how to get what willactuallymake you happy. The most famous living one of whom is my several-great-grandmother Deepthi, who nowadays mostly gets approached in supplication by the Dominuses of enclaves that are in a difficult strategic position, who pay her in the equivalent of millions of pounds for a single brief chat. The legend about her goes that somewhere round her third birthday, she looked up from her toys while her family were idly discussing marriage prospects, and very seriously told them not to worry about it until she graduated from the Scholomance. That was quite baffling to them, since this was 1886, before the cleansing equipment had broken for the first time, and back then the school was only open to actual enclavers. Even enclave kids from Mumbai had to compete among themselves for the six seats that Manchester had begrudgingly allocated to them. Not to mention that it was perfectly obvious to them that you’d never spend a priceless Scholomance seat on a girl.
She was seven years old when London took over, subdivided the dormitory rooms, quadrupled the seats, and threw admission open to independent wizards. By then, her family already knew that if they ever did get a Scholomance seat, they were absolutely sending her, and also they were going to have to find a husband willing to marry in. No wizard family gives away a girl who can accurately tell you about significant future events that are years out.
She was perfectly right about not arranging her marriage beforehand, too. By the time she graduated, her family had racked up enthusiastic offers from virtually every Indian boy who’d been in school with her at any point during the past four years, all of whom she’d quietly given various bits of advice along the way, such as, “Don’t go to your lab section today,” on a day when their usual seat got incinerated in a pipe explosion, or “Learn Russian and make friends with that quiet boy in your maths class” who turned out to be the valedictorian and invited you to join his alliance. There was apparently even a group of boys who offered to marry her together, like the Pandavas or something. She picked a nice young alchemist from an independent wizard family outside Jaipur instead—already vegetarian and strict mana—who had two older brothers and was indeed willing to move in and join the family. They proceeded to have five healthy children, four of whom survived graduation, considerably better than the usual odds, and carried on from there. My father was apparently her cherished favorite great-great-grandchild, out of several dozen. I don’t understand why she didn’t warn him about getting too friendly with that blond Welsh girl in his senior year, although perhaps she did, and he listened as enthusiastically as teenagers ever do to that sort of warning. I would never ignore similar good advice myself if it were given me, of course.
Whatever advice Dad got, he didn’t follow it well enough, and as a result here I am, and here he isn’t. And I’m not a Sharma from Mumbai, I’m a Higgins from Wales, because thirty seconds after meeting me, Great-Grandmother pronounced my quite horrifying doom—well, horrifying for everyone else alive; for all I know, I’d find my own bliss in becoming a grotesquely evil maleficer blasting enclaves into submission. I certainly can’t claim the idea doesn’t have a lot of visceral appeal. So then Mum had to tote me all the way back to the commune because my father’s family were ready to put baby Hitler me to death, in order to save the world that I’m slated to cover in darkness and murder et cetera.
I should note that this is the same family who are so devoted to nonviolence that they turned down a priceless offer to move en masse into Mumbai enclave, because the place wasn’t strict mana and they wouldn’t cheat at so much as the cost of the life of a beetle.
You can see why their rejecting me might make the people who are familiar with their reputation look at me askance. Even lacking the details, it’s hardly unreasonable to imagine there has to be something extremely unpleasant in my future. And at that, no one’s imagining anything quite as extreme as the actual prophecy.
So I quickly stopped trying to introduce myself to any Marathi-speaking kids. In fact I’ve spent most of the past three years with a low-grade worry about what they might tell people about me, which helpfully filled all the hours where I wasn’t worrying about more immediate problems, such as whether I’d get enough to eat that day, or if something were going to eat me.
Of course, now I didn’t need to worry about that anymore. They could have stood up in the cafeteria with an amplification spell and repeated the prophecy word for word, and the people joining me for these runs wouldn’t have trusted me one jot less. They didn’t trust me to begin with; they weren’t here because they really believed I was going to save them. They were joining me because even if Iwasa vicious maleficer, there still wasn’t any other option for getting in any practice. Surely almost all of them were quietly making secret plans with their allies and other teams for what they’d really do in the graduation hall, and especially what they’d do if I did in fact turn out to be a vicious maleficer.
That was what made Liesel’s edict so important. It wasn’t possible to go through a run, even just one single run, with everyone round you all working to their own strengths and your most urgent needs, and not realize how much better it was than anything we could manage in a private alliance, even the very best. It was so much better that even if it turned out that Iwasa vicious maleficer and planning to cull some substantial number of the class, they were all probably still better off sticking to the strategy and accepting the risk of me instead of the risk of everything else down there.
That became just as clear to the kids in the Hindi run as it had to the ones in the morning, and word kept spreading. On Saturday morning there were almost eighty kids for the Spanish run, and that afternoon, the first five kids did finally turn up for the Chinese run. They were all stragglers.
There’s no single thing that marks someone out as a straggler. Sometimes it’s just bad luck—you’ve been jumped too often, blew all your mana fighting off mals, and now you haven’t anything to contribute to a shared pool. Sometimes it’s even worse luck—you’ve got an affinity for something truly useless, like water-weaving. That’s tidy on the outside, you’d make a fortune helping enclaves with their sewer lines, but you won’t have the chance, since it doesn’t do yourself or anyone else any good in here. Sometimes you’re just not very good at magic and not very good at people—you can get by with one or the other, but if you haven’t either, you’re in trouble.
I’ve tried not to think about what it would be like—the idea of having to wade into the graduation hall all alone, the mass of the crowd breaking for the gates ahead of you, a sea of people with plans and friends and weapons, warding spells and healing potions, and the maleficaria all around already beginning to rip kids out of the mass, shredding them into bones and blood—running because your only hope was to run, knowing that actually you hadn’t any hope, and you’d die watching other people going out the gates. I spent three years trying not to think about it, because I thought that was going to be me.
In this case, one of the poor bastards had developed shakes that occasionally interrupted his spellcasting, probably aftereffects of a poisoning, or perhaps just trauma. There’s no shortage of that in here. Another one of them had Chinese about as good as mine, which was a bad sign given that it was presumably the language she’d been taking classes in for all four years. It’snotactually worth it, statistically speaking, to send your kids in here if they aren’t properly fluent in English or Chinese to begin with, which generally also is a sign they’re no good at languages. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a wizard they are otherwise: they’ll be at too much of a disadvantage when they can’t keep up with their general subjects. You’re better off keeping them at home, guarded as best you can, teaching them in the vernacular theydoknow. But some families try it anyway.
And in fact none of the five were any good during the run. The wisdom of our crowd is vicious, but it’s rarely wrong. The boy with the shakes, Hideo, would’ve been a quite good incanter, except that he’d have died twice during the single run when he interrupted his own invocations. But it didn’t matter; with only five kids in the run with me and Orion, we still all sailed through.
Afterwards I made myself tell Hideo, “I’ll get you a potion that will hold you for the run.” My mum’s got a recipe for something she calls calming-waters. She makes a monthly batch to give to wizards who’ve got muscle spasms brought on by overcasting—when you try to cast a spell you haven’tquitegot enough mana for, you can make up the difference out of your own body, but it often has side effects that are brutal to get rid of. I was reasonably certain it would work for his shakes, too.
The sticking point was, I couldn’t actually brew it myself. I had to ask Chloe to do it for me. I gave myself the reward of a silver lining: I asked Orion to come down to the labs, too. He got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic, and then gave me a look of wounded disappointment when he discovered that Chloe was coming, which was exactly why I had asked him. The next time I asked, he’d be sure to ask if there was going to be any company, and then I’d have to say yes or admit I was asking him on a date, which I absolutely wasn’t going to do. It was the best protection against myself that I could come up with.
He was even more annoyed when it took us three hours to get the bloody thing concocted. Chloe kept asking excellent questions like, “Do you grind the scallop shells fine or just pound them to coarse bits?” and “Do you stir clockwise or counter?” none of which I could answer except by pantomiming Mum doing it, trying to remember with my body, and then guessing as best I could. I’m rubbish at alchemy in general, and I’m rubbish at healing in general, too, so the combination is almost always a disaster. The last time Mum tried to teach me, the test drop disintegrated a chunk the size of my fist out of the floor of our yurt.
“That can’t be right,” Chloe said, looking into the seething angry yellow boil in the pot, which indeed did not look anything like calming-waters.
“It’s not,” I said grimly. “I think I got the timing of the salt and the sulfur wrong.”
She sighed. “We’ll have to start over.”
“Oh, comeon,” Orion moaned outright. In justice, which he wasn’t going to get from me, it was take four.
“Stop complaining,” I said. “Pretend you’re staking us out as bait. The two of us alone in this lab are as likely as anyone in the entire school to get jumped.” Judging by her sidelong look, I’m not sure Chloe really appreciated my argument.
The fifth attempt actually came out vaguely resembling the cool green-blue it was meant to be, only with a thick streak of muddy yellow-brown winding through it. I had absolutely no idea what we’d done wrong at that point, but Chloe very cautiously dipped in a lock of her own hair, rubbed it between her fingers, then sniffed it, and finally just barely touched it with her tongue. She made a face and spit into the sink and said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it,” then cleared the decks with a brisk cleaning spell and dived in once more. She went much quicker this time, and I couldn’t even spot what she did differently, but when she was done, at the end the yellowy mud streak got swallowed up smoothly and vanished away, and a single drop on my tongue was enough to tell me shehadgot it.
The drop wasn’t enough to keep away the burst of sour jealousy: I couldn’t brew calming-waters, my own mother’s recipe, and Chloe could. I’d have had to drink a triple dose to clear that taste out of my mouth.
