Page 36 of The Last Graduate
It wasn’t a shield spell, really. It was an evocation of refusal—not to be too boringly technical, an evocation is more or less taking something intangible and bringing it into material reality. What the evocation of refusal produced—in Alfie’s hands—was a neat translucent dome roughly seven feet across. As long as he could hold it up—casting alone he could manage as long as three minutes, which is an eternity in the graduation hall—he could refuse anything he didn’t want inside, including mals, hostile magic, flying debris, loud farts, et cetera. And while there’re plenty of spells that will let you seal out the world, the extremely special quality of this one was that it let in all the things youdidwant, such as oxygen untainted by any poison gas in the vicinity, or healing spells from your allies. I’d seen Alfie use it for the first time back during our run against the evil ice mountains. He’d brought it out several times since then to save random other kids’ lives. He wasn’t one of the enclavers who whinged about helping other kids; his grace went both ways, or maybe he’d secretly internalized the fantasy of noblesse oblige, because he’d dived wholeheartedly into the project of rescuing everyone in his path.
But when I cast the evocation, I got a globe nearly twelve feet across, which showed every sign of staying up for as long as I bothered to keep it going, and after I put it round something, I couldmovethe globe and all its desirable contents, meaning I could scoop up a double handful of kids and deposit them in a different spot on the field, no mals included. That was a game-changing move. I could claim that was why I’d asked for the spell, for everyone’s sake, but that would be bollocks, too. I hadn’t known for sure what I could do with it when I asked him to give it to me. I’d just known it was a really top spell, and I could see that it had room to grow—the kind of room that I could fill up.
I had the smooth dome of it up over me and Orion before I finished turning round, which was good, because we very much didn’t want any of the literally twenty-seven different killing spells and deadly artifices that came flying at our heads, five of them backed by a true circle working. I don’t think I could have blocked or turned them all any other way. But none of them could make it through the impenetrableno thanks very muchof the globe. Most of them just dissolved. The more elaborate workings slid down to where the globe intersected with the floor, and dissolved into a frustrated cloud of churning smoke in a dozen different colors that ringed us, bubbling and seething, until one after another they finally dissipated.
By then Orion was standing up next to me, staring out of the shimmering wall into the faces of the thirty-two kids who’d just had a really good go at murdering us. I recognized Yuyan at the front, and Zixuan was standing with the circle—all of the Shanghai seniors, in fact, along with their allies, and a dozen other kids I was pretty sure were from Beijing and Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
It didn’t surprise me at all, except that I’d been taken by surprise. I ought to have known it was coming. But Orion just looked confused at first, as if he didn’t understand how they could possibly have made such a bizarre mistake. It took the grim disappointment on their faces as they watched their spells dissolving to drive home the idea that they’dmeantit.
I imagine they were very sorry about that a moment later, and so was I, because that made him angry, and it turned out I’d never seen Orion angry before. Notreallyangry. And I realize I haven’t one metacarpal to stand on here, but I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t even the one he was angry at. For a horrible moment I had the vivid sensation that I wasn’t holding the dome up to protect him anymore: I was keepinghimaway fromthem.
“Lake!” I said, trying to make it sharp, but it came out with an awful wobble I didn’t like. I couldn’t help it. His face looked allwrong,his lips peeled back in a snarl and a faint glimmer of eldritch light coming through his eyes, so much mana gathered for casting that you could almost see it with the naked eye, like a fist clenching. I had a clear and terrible vision of him just mowing gracefully through them, the way he did with a horde of maleficaria, conscious thought going entirely out of it until everything—everyone—was dead.
But thankfully, he grated out, “They wanted tokill you,” and despite my visceral horror, I managed a spark of indignation over that, just enough to light up my ever-helpful reservoirs of irritation and anger.
“I don’t seem to have been in any danger!” I said. “What wereyougoing to do, I’d like to know. Probably get your bones dissolved into goo, if you’d had it all to yourself. That’s up to eleven for me, by the way.”
It distracted him from the confrontation, just long enough to crack his own fury a bit. “Eleven!”
“I’ll write out the tally for you later,” I said, managing a decent façade of coolness. “Now let’s pack this up and go and have our picnic in the library, likenormal people.What are you going to do otherwise?”
That was a wrong question to ask, because Orion looked back at them and still clearly felt thatkill them allwas a perfectly valid response—and when I say perfectly valid, I mean that he was an inch away from going at them, and I hadn’t any idea what to do, but the choice was abruptly not mine anymore, because people literally started appearing round me in bunches, starting with Liesel and her crew: Alfie with his face screwed up in strain, holding up his own casting of the evocation of refusal as they flew in through the doors.
It wasn’t just them, though; other teams were all shooting into the gym around us with the bungee quality of yanker spells going off, all of which I realized after an incredulous glance were keyed off the shield holder on my belt. Ibrahim and his team appeared; even Khamis had come, with Nkoyo.
And more to the point, Magnus and his team sailed in, along with Jermaine and his; then a team from Atlanta, another from Louisiana—and in minutes, what any outside observer would’ve said was going on was that the New York and Shanghai enclavers had squared off, with their various allies, all of us ready to tumble down into the open waiting jaws of Thucydides’s Trap together. It would be at least as effective at killing wizards off as a horde of maleficaria, especially once any survivors went home and told their parents that the war everyone was half expecting had started here on the inside.
I had no idea how to stop it. One look told me Orion wasn’t going to be any help: he was going to be the spearhead. Magnus had already led the New York kids to form up behind him. And the only people whoweren’tthere were Aadhya and Liu and Chloe, presumably because whoever had organized this protective scheme—three guesses, all Liesel—had known that they’d tell me about it in advance, thus denying her the satisfaction of getting torescue me.
As if things weren’t bad enough, at that very moment the school jumped on the bandwagon, too: we all paused as we heard the grinding of the obstacle-course machinery disengaging—the way it did at the end of each week before the place reconstituted itself, only it was twice as loud when we were all inside at the time—and then the entire floor beneath our feet lurched and wentpliable,open to reshaping.
We’re all on alert for anything like a potential advantage, so everyone started grabbing for it immediately. Like the opening rounds of some strategy game where everyone’s trying to establish their positions before they start lobbing bombs. The green hills swelled and heaved like rolling waves as everyone tried to re-form them into handy things like trenches and fortifications. It felt like trying to surf a continental plate over the ocean with nothing more to steer by than a horse bridle.
And as soon as I came up with that metaphor, I realized I only had one possibly useful working: the one and only spell I’ve ever successfully written by myself. It’s also the one and only spell I’ve ever tried to write, because what I produced in that shining burst of creativity was a spell for setting off a supervolcano. I burnt the parchment instantly afterwards, but the spell has remained firmly lodged in my mental catalog along with all the other most horrible spells I’ve ever seen.
I pulled mana in on one breath and spread my arms out on the exhale, chanting the opening incantation. Two glowing ley lines branched out over the floor to either side of me and began spiraling over the entire floor like the arms of a galaxy, and everywhere they touched was abruptly and vividly in my head, brought under the power of my incantation. Everyone else kept trying to hold on to the small chunks they’d managed to control, but the spell ruthlessly tore them away and gave them to me, until I’d got the entire gym seething and shuddering in my mental grip.
And round then, the better incanters all began to realize where my spell was very clearlygoing—namely straight for some kind of gigantic mass-extinction-level eruption that would take out everyone in the room and quite possibly all four floors directly overhead.
“What are youdoing?” Magnus yelled at me in absolute panic—he was in fact quite a good incanter—and there was a perfectly clear tipping moment when everyone in the gym stopped worrying about the other side and started worrying about me.
As well they should have, since I’d hit the end of the opening incantation, and once I started into part two, there wouldn’t be any stopping it. I halted with my whole body clenched up around the gathered power and flattened the gym out with both my hands, so abruptly that half the kids fell over as hills vanished from beneath them and trenches popped them up into the air. Everyone still on their feet was backing away from me, eyes wide with horror, and I snarled at all of them universally, “Stop it. Juststop.If I wanted you dead, if I wanted any of you dead, you’d be dead!Rú guo wo xiang ni si, ni men si dìng le!” I translated, in my flabby Chinese.
Which was so patently true under the circumstances—since I was having to work extremely hard tonotkill them all—that it made a visible impression all round. Well, as much as it could while everyone was actively terrified that I was in fact about to kill them all. At least they had certainly stopped worrying about doing any killing of their own. Even Orion had got over being enraged and was just standing gawking at me—in an infuriatingly starry-eyed way, in his case, demonstrating his continuing total lack of judgment and sense.
When I was satisfied that everyone had stopped, I let my control over our alarmingly malleable surroundings slide slowly out of my hands, hills and valleys lurching themselves back into place, trees unfolding up from the ground in an unnatural fashion as they crept back into the illusion. Untangling from the spell took me nearly fifteen minutes, but absolutely no one did anything to interrupt or distract me; a few kids even went to the gym doors to stop anyone else coming in. I was shaking when I’d finished, nauseated. I’d have liked to go lie down in a dark room for a significant amount of time, but I gulped air and grated out, “What I want is to get youout.To getall of usout. Do you think you could pull your heads out of your collective arses andhelp?”
On Thursday,four hundred kids showed up for the Chinese run. Afterwards Orion and I dragged ourselves into the library and each crawled onto one of the couches and lay there letting everyone else do the postmortem over our heads. I felt like a sheet of kitchen roll that had been used more than once and wrung out thoroughly in between.
It wasn’t just the larger number: most of the new kids hadn’t learned any of our completely unfamiliar strategies, and apart from that, the obstacle course bloodyworks.So skipping it for seven weeks had put them substantially behind the rest of us. The only reason there hadn’t been a metric shedload of deaths today was because I had cheated in pure desperation by using Alfie’s evocation to toss bunches of students and mals together out of the obstacle course into the other half of the gym. The mals had then dissolved, as they were just fake constructs. The mals in the graduation hall were not going to dissolve conveniently of their own accord, so it wasn’t going to be a helpful maneuver in the actual event. But I’d had to dosomethingjust to get everyone out of practice alive.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the discussion, since everyone agreed the main point was that the new cohort all had to catch up, which was fairly obvious. Yuyan—she’d joined the planning team—suggested letting them run every day for the next two weeks and giving everyone else—except for me and Orion, obviously—more time off. Everyone agreed on this, and then Aadhya said thoughtfully, “Actually, we probably want to have everyone from the Spanish and Hindi runs join up with either English or Chinese anyway pretty soon. We want to start doing five-hundred-person runs—in a month!” she added, when she noticed I’d craned my head up from the couch in outrage.
I put my head down again, briefly mollified, but Liesel gave a loud exasperated sigh, too pointed to miss. I glared at the patched threadbare upholstery just past my nose and gritted out, “Next week for English. The week after that for Chinese.” Orion groaned faintly on the couch perpendicular to mine, but he didn’t argue. We were already looking April in the face. Less than three months left.
I’m not going to claim that I enjoyed the next week, but by Wednesday, the Chinese run was in spitting distance of survivable, and after Friday’s run, Zixuan approached Liu and Aadhya and offered to use his reviser to improve the sirenspider lute. They spent the whole evening in the workshop together, and on Saturday, when Liu struck the first chords and I sang the spell, the mana-amplification wave rolled out over the entire mass of kids and gonged against the gym walls and camebackfor a second pass that quadrupled the power of everyone’s workings. I didn’t have to cheat once; I wasn’t even exhausted at the end.
“He didn’t make yougiveit to him?” I muttered to Liu afterwards: everyone was clustered round Zixuan gushing congratulations. I’d just incinerated an entire anima-locust swarm so large that it had blotted out all of the hideously blue sky: they just kept spawning afresh so I had to literally keep a hurricane-sized psychic storm burning over everyone’s heads the entire fifteen minutes of the run, but I was old hat at that by now. Or possibly the storm had been so disturbing that everyone was blocking it aggressively out of their memories; one or the other.
