Page 35 of The Last Graduate
She then hauled out four separate diagrams with multiple color-coded alternatives and spread them out on the table. “We must systematically try each of these options over the next six runs. First we will begin with the students with the strongest shielding, and attempt to create a defensive perimeter which can be monitored closely—”
I’ll draw a merciful veil over the rest. Liesel was clearly right, so we couldn’t stop her marching us off firmly in the proper direction, but for my part, I did feel very much like I’d just been put against the wall by the most dragonish dinner lady at primary school.
That week, without bothering to mention it to anyone, Liesel also marshaled every creative-writing-track kid out of our runs and gave them marching orders to invent minor cantrips that would do things like highlight anyone in trouble with an aura that would shade from amber to bright red as their situation worsened—not something that anyone in the graduation hall would ever previously have wanted, since it was more or less like putting out a beacon for mals—and automatically mark the ground where a person last saw a mal, to warn off the people behind them. Again, not something anyone would’ve spent mana on in the past. The first I knew about this clever program was when people started glowing all over the place on Friday, and Liesel lectured me and Orion sternly after the run not to even bother looking at anyone who wasn’t bright red.
I’d have had several things to say about her high-handed behavior, except I was lying flat on the floor with my eyes shut trying to convince my heart and lungs that really everything was fine and they should just calm down and keep working, and Orion was sunk over his own knees gulping for air, his entire shirt soaked completely through with sweat. We’d reached three hundred kids in the English run.
All of whom had in fact come out alive, and no one had even suffered a half-dissolved limb in the process, because launching behind a perimeter of the students with the best shielding was, in fact, extremely effective, and so were the new warning systems. By the time I had managed to haul myself up to the cafeteria and fork in my lunch and recovered enough energy to contemplate squabbling with Liesel, I had grimly realized that the only possible grounds on which I could squabble with her were that she was seizing authority that nobody wanted to give her. As grounds went, that had the solidity of a bog. At least she was doing it on the basis of terrifying competence and not just the random chance of affinity.
Anyway any spare energy I might have had for squabbling was soon to disappear. That afternoon we were up to 150 kids in the Hindi run: the Maharashtra kids all finally turned up. They were still keeping as far from me as they could, but they’d come. The next morning the Spanish run had more than a hundred as well. I was pathetically grateful that the Chinese run was still thin; running with forty kids felt like a relaxing stroll by comparison. It was all the more clear that without Liesel’s ruthlessly imposed improvements, we’d have been losing people left, right, and center.
Which didn’t actually reconcile me to her approach. “How exactly have you managed to spend your entire career until now pretending to be a nice person?” I demanded grouchily as I stomped down to the cafeteria on Monday the next week: in our library session after the English run that morning, she’d brought out a long checklist of the many, many things I’d done wrong or inefficiently that needed correcting, all of which she’d carefully observed while somehow managing to sail through the run completely undistressed herself. She was still demanding my attention for a few more of them on the stairs even after the lunch bell rang.
She sniffed disparagingly. “It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that there was ananswerto my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists. I must have looked aghast, because she scowled at me and said sharply, “Or instead you can spend years sulking around the school letting everyone believe you are an incompetent maleficer. Do you know how much simpler everything would be now if only you had given us any reasonable time to prepare? Not to mention we would not be having all these difficulties with the Shanghai enclavers! You had better be careful. They are waiting too long.” She flounced on from me to join Alfie and the London kids further ahead in the queue. They all moved back to make room for her right behind him, even Sarah and Brandon, although they were enclavers and she wasn’t.
“She’s a monster,” I said flatly to Aadhya and Liu as we queued. They were both quite shadowy under the eyes themselves: on top of all going in the English runs together, Liu was going with us in the Chinese runs, and trying to push the mana-amplification spell out to cover as many people as she could each time, and Aad was doing the Hindi runs, not to mention they were both actually suffering Liesel far more on a regular basis than I was, since they and Chloe had been doing all the managing. I was grateful to have to spend much more of my time running desperately for my life.
“She’s thevaledictorian,” Aadhya said, which was in fact a good point: terrifying ruthlessness is close to a necessary criterion. “Stop picking fights with her. We need everything that’s coming out of her giant brain. We’re all getting wiped out as it is. Even the kids doing only one of the runs.”
I was tired enough myself that I hadn’t really been paying attention, but when she waved an arm round the cafeteria tables where people were already sitting, I could see instantly she was right: anyone who’d been doing the runs with us was more or less slumped over their tray in a way that would’ve been an invitation to be pounced on by at least three different mals in an ordinary Scholomance year. You could literally pick out the lingering objectors just by seeing whowasn’tfalling into their vegetable soup. Loads of the kids who’d come out of the English run this morning were literally not eating yet; they were taking turns doing catnaps on the tables.
“Whyarewe getting so wiped out?” I said. “Do you think the school’s draining our mana somehow?”
But I looked back and Aadhya and Liu were both giving me the same kind of level, murderous looks I’d seen aimed at Orion in the past. “We’re all being attacked much more in every run than ever before,” Liu said. “It’s not just the extreme maleficaria. At this time last year, the obstacle course only had ten attack stations, all separate. The general melee runs aren’t supposed to start until June.”
“Oh, right,” I said awkwardly, as if I’d just needed to be reminded.
We went through the line and loaded up our trays with bowls of spaghetti—we had to pick out the red mana leeches hiding among them, but we were all used to that—and big helpings of sliced peaches in hallucinogenic yellow syrup that Chloe would probably be able to neutralize for us when we got it back to the table she was arranging. Annoyingly, the last helping of sponge cake they were meant to accompany went just in front of us, to a boy from Venice who had a tidy fishing tool he used to snag it from among the surrounding spikegrubs. Even more annoyingly, once he’d got it, he paused and turned andofferedit to me, exactly the way people sucked up to enclaver kids all the time. And Aadhya gave me a jab with an elbow before I could erupt in the boy’s face like I wanted to, so instead I just had to say in as ungracious a tone as I could manage, “No. Thanks.”
“We need to think about it, though,” Aadhya said at the table, a while later. I was sullenly eating the peaches without even being able to enjoy them, and it wasn’t just because the neutralizer gave them a faintly metallic taste. “What if the schoolismaking it harder on purpose? What if it’s trying to wipe you out so bad that it can hit you in a gym run, take you or Orion out?”
“Well,” I said, trying to think how to word it so I wouldn’t get more death glares from the entire table. Iwastired, but to be perfectly honest, I’d mostly been whinging. You’resupposedto be tired during graduation training. If you aren’t, you aren’t working hard enough. I was working-a-full-day tired, not falling-into-my-soup tired.
Orionwas,and I’d saved his bowl twice so far this meal, but that’s because he was sneaking out to go hunting real mals after curfew. I’d tried to persuade Precious to keep watch on him, but she wouldn’t; the only thing she’d do is insist on coming along anytime I went over to his room to force him to actually get into bed and shut his eyes and turn out the lights before the curfew bell rang. If he did, he instantly fell asleep and stayed down until morning; otherwise he’d be in the cafeteria at dawn, eating from a giant heaped tray before anyone else got there. In case you’re wondering, staying out past curfew is normally a death sentence and probably still was for any other student even in this strange year, but at this point mals were all fleeing Orion very energetically. Mostly he only ever got to kill them in the runs, when one of them got too distracted trying to eat another student and blew its cover.
“Or maybe it wants to kill some of us now in practice, in case most of us do get out,” Liu put in, a perfectly reasonable concern which helpfully relieved me of having to make a bright and cheery point of explaining that it wasn’t that bad really, at least for me.
“What should we do?” Ibrahim said, anxiously.
“Why don’t we just take a break?” Chloe said, which I suppose was the obvious solution if you were someone who had ever had the luxury of being able totake a break.“We could take the rest of the day, skip tomorrow, and Wednesday morning. Nobody would miss more than one run. That’s not much.”
Almost everyone endorsed the idea as soon as it percolated outwards. Even Orion perked up dramatically as soon as he woke up enough to hear it. I assumed he was planning an all-day hunting extravaganza. I personally slept in to the glorious hour of eight, just early enough to still make it upstairs for breakfast dregs if I rushed, and was up and stuffing my hair into a short ponytail when someone knocked. I’d got much more cautious about that sort of thing since my delightful encounter with Jack last year, but with a vat of mana available, that now just meant I kept a nice murder spell on the tip of my tongue and opened the door at arm’s length.
Orion was standing there looking a bit nervous, carrying a large mug of tea and an alchemy lab supply box heaped with three buns, a small glass full of apricot jam and butter pats that were starting to permanently intermingle, a bowl full of congee with a whole egg on it, and a half-green clementine. I stared at him and he blurted, “Would—would you—have breakfast with me?” and then realized as the words left his mouth that he hadn’t made the situation horrible enough and added, “On a date?” in a squawky warble.
I slammed my hand down on the door of Precious’s enclosure, where I’d tucked her in with some sunflower seeds, and latched it shut just in time. I ignored the furious chittering and squeaks from inside and blurted back, “Yes,” before anything resembling good sense could assert itself.
I had to work extremely hard not to think better of what I was doing, even as I followed Orion through the corridors. I couldn’t even distract myself by watching for attacks or traps; nothing with a mind, right or otherwise, was attacking Orion lately. He’d grown three inches so far this year, at least, and his shoulders and arms were straining every seam of his t-shirt, and he’d showered and his silver hair was dark and curling round his neck, and I was having to devote really enormous effort to ignoring that I was being a truly colossal wanker, when I suddenly realized where we were, and stopped, everything forgotten in appalled outrage, on the threshold ofthe gym.
Orion didn’t even break stride. He sailed onwards through the doors and into the half of the gym that was left over from the obstacle course. The famed cherry trees had appeared this week and were just getting ready to make a proper scene, tiny pink and white buds dotting the dark limbs.
I almost couldn’t believe he’d done it. I went after him blankly, waiting for him to explain this was some sort of joke, which would itself be in poor taste. He just stopped under one particularly laden tree and earnestly began spreading out a ragged blanket for our picnic, while I stood staring down at him, trying to decide if he was literally insane, and whether I liked him enough to pretend he wasn’t. I had already liked him enough to drink the horrible tea-stained hot water he’d brought me, so the answer to that was almost certainly yes, but I wasn’t sure I liked him enough topicnic in the gymwith him.
It’s just as well that I was too appalled to move, I suppose, because that’s why I was still on my feet when Orion looked up and saw something coming. I had no idea in that first moment what it was he’d seen; his face didn’t actually reach any kind of positive or negative expression, he only focused on something behind me. But I knew that something was coming at my back, and that I hadn’t heard it or picked up on it. That was warning enough.
Even as I turned round to find out what it was, my hands were already moving in the shielding spell that Alfie had given me, two weeks ago. I’d bitterly made myself ask him for it, knowing he’d say exactly what he said, “Of course, El, delighted.” Bollocks. It had to be one of the best spells even his London enclave family had, worth loads in trade. In here it would probably have brought more than my sutras, since a decently skilled senior could cast it during graduation, and the sutras wouldn’t do anyone any good until they got out alive.
