Page 41 of The Last Graduate
Yuyan sighed. “Wehavebeen thinking about it, for years,” she said, which made sense: if Shanghai had been able to develop a better solution, itwouldhave been worth their building a new school, andeveryonewould have moved. She gestured to the nearest copy of the newspaper article, mounted against the end of one of the stacks. “London has been thinking about it for a century, and New York nearly that long. Nothing we’ve found gets us better odds than the Scholomance.”
“Well, okay, but if we can’t think of anything better, at least nobody is any worse off,” Chloe said.
“The younger children would be,” Liu said. “They’d be out there undefended.”
“Just for a little while—it could be like summer vacation. We could all help look out for them. And if it turns out there isn’t a fix, or it takes too long, they could come back in,” Chloe said.
“Wouldyou?” Nkoyo said, with an edge I felt in my own gut. “Come back in? After you’d got out of here?”
Chloe paused. “Well,” she said, with a wobble. “They’d get to choose…” but it was only a faint protest, fading off.
Liu was sitting on the couch next to her; she leaned over and bumped shoulders with Chloe, comfortingly. “We should send the mals to school instead,” she said.
Ten minutes before curfew that night, she came and banged furiously on my door. I didn’t know it was Liu, so I jumped out of bed and threw up a major shield, got a killing spell ready, and yanked the door open ready to fight. I had to fling my arms to both sides as she lunged in and grabbed me by the shoulders, with a few pieces of scribbled-on paper crumpled in her grip. First she said something in Chinese too fast for me to follow, because she was so excited, and then she said, “We should send the mals to school instead!”
“What?” I said, and the final curfew bell rang, and she jumped and said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow!” and ran back to her room, leaving me to lie awake for an hour trying to figure out what she was thinking. The crumpled papers she’d left with me didn’t help: I could tell it was maths, but it was all in Chinese numbers, in two sets of handwriting, hers and I thought Yuyan’s, and even after I laboriously translated them, I could only guess what the numbers were referring to.
“The honeypot spell,” she said, the next morning, meeting me halfway down the corridor between our rooms.
“Right, I got that far,” I said: mals come swarming into the school through the graduation portals anyway; if we used our honeypot spell, we could lure a proper horde of them in. Theoretically tens of thousands over the half an hour of graduation, if Liu’s calculations were right and I’d understood them properly. “But what’s the idea? Are you thinking if we pack the whole hall completely full of mals, they’ll—eat the agglos?” That was the best guess I’d come up with in a night of thinking, although if mals were going to eat enough of the agglos, they’d have eaten them already, but Liu was shaking her head vigorously.
“Not thehall,” she said. “Theschool.The whole school. We leave, and we fill the school with mals.”
I stared at her. “Andthenwhat? Boot it off into the void or something?”
“Yes!” Liu said.
“Er, what?” I said.
I could tell you all the details of the next two weeks, during which we came up with five or six alternative plans and discarded all of them, and also had about ten different false starts working out the rough details of this one, but it was agony enough going through it once, so I won’t.
The main question was whether Liu’s idea would in fact work toprotect the wise-gifted children of the world.The Scholomance wasn’t built out of some kind of passionate dedication to the concept of boarding-school education. It’s just a casino, meant to tilt the odds in our favor, because surviving puberty is a numbers game. Any wizard parent can save their kid from anyonemal. But when mals come fifteen a day, sooner or later one of them is going to slip through your wards and shields and gates and get the tasty treat you’re hiding from them.
And that’s why we get crammed in here instead, past the guarded gates and only reachable through the narrow pipes covered with wards, and why we spend a healthy chunk of our formative years in a prison out of nightmares. If we could cut down the maleficaria population enough to give us odds of survivaloutsidethe school that were as good as, oh, one in seven, most people wouldn’t come to the school to get the one-in-four odds here. It’s too horrible. And after Liesel pounced on poor Liu and dragged her into a room to check the calculations a few million times, the two of them came back and announced that we had a decent chance of getting the odds outside down to one intwo,and they thought the effect would last for at least a couple of generations. That made it one of the few ideas on the list that couldn’t just immediately be crossed off, unlike for instance that morning’s suggestion of creating a flock of flying snake-tailed piranha vultures that would absolutely have polished off the agglos in ten minutes and then come up to start on the rest of us.
The rest of the issues with Liu’s plan were logistical. After poring over the blueprints and maintenance documentation, we worked out that when you touch the gates, your portal home opens at that precise moment, stays open just long enough to return you to your induction point, and then slams shut again in seconds—a sensible design meant to keep malsout.If we wanted to lure in as many mals as we could, everyone would have to queue up and leave slowly: a steady stream of kids going out, a steady stream of mals coming in, so we could keep the honeypot spell working through the full half hour of graduation.
Sorry, soIcould keep the honeypot spell working. No one even bothered discussing who exactly was going to be casting the spell intended to call up a vast tidal army of maleficaria. Well, it was a fair cop.
“How are we going to keep the mals from just killing everyone in line?” Aadhya said.
“As long as the honeypot spell is going, they’re just going to follow it, I think,” Liu said.
“So El has to be somewhere far from where they come in, to pull them deeper,” Magnus said. “Can she cast the spell up in the library and still have it work at the gates?”
“How am I gettingoutof the library afterwards in this scenario?” I said pointedly. I was very conscious that if the school didn’t mind being hacked off into the void itself—it hadn’t raised any objections so far—it would certainly considermeexpendable, too. I couldn’t refuse to risk my life, but I wasn’t keen on accepting martyrdom before we even began.
“For that matter, how are you just not getting smothered in five minutes?” Aadhya said. “If this even works, a billion mals are going to be coming right at you.”
“Why don’t I just kill them all as they come in?” Orion said, without the slightest doubt in his ability to kill a billion mals.
“Shut up, Lake,” I said, havingmanydoubts about his ability to kill a billion mals.
That left Liu’s idea as just one of the many very-long-shot possibilities on our list, but Yuyan talked it up to Zixuan, and three days later, he came up to the library with a solution for the problem of luring the mals throughout the school: a speaker system. The idea of it was we’d make hundreds of tiny speakers—magic ones, not the electronic sort—strung on a line, and then run this line in a gigantic loop throughout the entire school, starting and ending in the graduation hall, through all the corridors and stairways on every level, branches going off into every classroom; up to the library and winding through all the endless stacks, and then all the way back down into the hall. At one end of the loop would be me, standing near the gates: I would sing our alluring honeypot spell into a capturing mouthpiece, and it would get piped through the entire system and come back out at the very last and largest speaker, standing right in front of the gates, to broadcast the song out to any mals in listening range of the portals.
What would make the mals actuallyfollowthe line and go into the school was a single brilliant twist to the design: an enchantment so you only heard the sound coming out of the one speaker justaheadof you, and as soon as you got too close to that one, you’d start to hear it only from the next speaker along instead. The mals would come because they heard the song being blasted out, and then they’d chase it onward to the next speaker, and the next one, all the way through the school.
That certainly made Liu’s plan seem tidy, until you considered that there would be more than four thousand kids going out the gates, spanning the whole globe, and with hundreds of them headed to the huge city enclaves that were surrounded by hungry maleficaria. Broadcasting a honeypot spell out of the Scholomance—already the most tempting honeypot in the world—would be gilding the lily. If any of the malsdidn’tcome, it would likely be because they’d got stampeded or eaten by other mals rushing to get to the suddenly wide-open doors, or because they couldn’t make it to a portal in time.
