Page 45 of The Last Graduate
“Yes, we are!” I said. “And you do want things other than hunting. You’re sorry enough if you miss a meal, and you minded when I was mean to you, and you certainly seemed reasonably interested in the events of the past hour—”
He huffed a short laugh. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
“The only thing you’ve tried to tell me so far is that you’re a hollowed-out suit of armor marching steadily onward through the ranks of mals whilst insensible to all human emotion, so I’m not keen on listening to anything else you’ve got to say!” I said.
“I’m trying to tell you that Iwas,” he said. “I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t know how to want anything else. Until—”
“Lake, don’t you evendare,” I said, appalled as the full horror dawned on me, but it was too late.
He still had my hand entwined with his; he brought it to his mouth and kissed the side of it softly, without looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not fair, El. But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.
“And you don’t need to lie to me,” he added. “I’m not going to do anything different tomorrow, no matter what you tell me. I don’t think I could. Once I’m fighting, I just go flat-out and keep going; you know that’s how it works. I’m not going to play it safe if you say yes, and I’m not going to do anything dumb if you say no.”
“What you mean is, you’ll do an enormous number of truly stupid things no matter what!” I said, mostly on reflex; the rest of my brain was running around in circles making noises like Precious in a rage.
“Sure, whatever,” Orion said. “This isn’t about graduation. It’s about after. After I’m home, and I know—Chloe told me you won’t come to New York. So I need to know if I can get on a plane and come to you. Because that’s what I want to do. I can deal with graduation, I can deal with the mals. I just can’t deal with being out, trying to reach you when you don’t even have a freaking cellphone, and not knowing if it’s okay for me to—”
“Yes!” I said, in a despairing howl. “Yes, fine, you utter wanker, you can come to Wales and meet my mum,” and then, I didn’t add, he could also be shut up in the yurt for a year until she had cleared the rubbish out of his skull, and ifthiswas what Mum had been warning me about, if she didn’t want me bringing her a shedload of work to do, it was just too bad.
I told myself that mostly because I had a dreadful feeling that thiswaswhat Mum had been warning me about. I couldn’t help knowing she would have told me off for giving him the least encouragement, in the strongest terms possible for her, and also that she’d be absolutely right: I hadn’t any business agreeing to be with someone who told me in all sincerity that I was his only hope of happiness in the world, at least not until he’d sorted his own head out and diversified.
But I’d told him the truth. I did want that, too: I wanted him to get on a plane and come to me, and I wanted to live happily ever after with him in a clean and shining world we’d purge of maleficaria and misery, and apparently I wasn’t a sensible realist after all, since I was leaping after that outrageous fantasy with both hands, straight into the chasm I could see perfectly well open before me.
“Idohave plans, though,” I added, to distract myself from my own stupidity. “You might be perfectly satisfied to roam the wilds hunting and then come home to the little woman at night, Lake; it won’t do for me,” and I told him half defiantly about my enclave-building project, except it only made matters worse. He kept that horrible shining look on me the entire time; not even smiling, just holding my hand in his and listening to me go on and on getting progressively more fanciful, littering the whole world with tiny enclaves, sheltering every wizard child born, until finally I burst out, “Well? Haven’t you anything to say about it? Go on and tell me I’m mad; I don’t want humoring.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said, his voice cracking. “El, this school was the best thing I could imagine. But now when I hunt, I’ll be helping you dothis,” as if I’d laid a gift in his hands.
I let out a strangled sob and said, “Lake, I hate you so much,” and put my head down against his shoulder with my eyes shut. I’d been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I’d been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn’t need this much more to lose.
We couldn’t affordto miss dinner, which thankfully gave me an excuse to put a stop to the sentimentality and horrific confessions. I gave Orion a slap on the shoulder and told him to get his clothes mended and back on. It had stopped pissing down snake-things, and the ones that had fallen were mostly dead—amphisbaena aren’t very sturdy, and the gym ceiling is alongway—although we did have to pick our way gingerly past the ones that were still writhing a bit.
Orion clearly wasn’t satisfied to put his emotions away where they belonged: he tried to hold my hand on the way up the stairs, and I had to scowl him off and put my hands firmly in my pockets. At least we caught up with Aadhya and Liu on the stairs, and they let me fall in between them to provide an additional bulwark, although they charged me in eyebrow-wagging and insinuating looks—Liu was clearly pleased to get some of her own back. It wasn’t any great act of telepathy on their part: there were sparkly-dust handprints all over my clothes and even my skin. Orion all but bounced along behind us, despite having offered to carry the lute for Liu, and even hummed on the stairs, as if he’d been wafted ethereally far above minor mortal concerns such as our impending doom. Liu covered her mouth with both hands to stifle giggles and Aad smirked at me. I couldn’t complain at them for enjoying the distraction—I’d have liked one myself—but I put on my dignity and refused to acknowledge it.
He did manage to get hold of my hand under the table at dinnertime, rubbing his thumb over my knuckles, and I’d already finished eating, so I didn’t immediately yank it away and shove his chair over or anything. Although I should have, because after dinner, he trailed me down the stairs, and when we reached our res hall, he tried hopefully, “Want to…come to my room?”
“The night before?” I said repressively. “Go and get somesleep,Lake. You’ve had yours; if you want more, you’ll just have to graduate.”
And he sighed but went, and I went to Aadhya’s room with her and Liu instead. The lute was there waiting, but we didn’t have any work to do on it, we just sat crammed in there together, piled on the bed. They both teased me for a bit more, but I didn’t actually mind, and then obviously we moved on to the serious business of my giving them a detailed report, and I confess that by the time I finished going over it, I was privately thinking to myself maybe I might after all stop by Orion’s room before bed for just a little bit, and Aadhya sighed and said, “I’m almost sorry I turned down that junior.”
Liu and I both demanded more information—turned out this junior artificer named Milosz had been helping her make some precision-enchanted strips of gold to go on the lute tuning pegs, and he’d suggested one of those last-night hurrahs to her, which idea she, being the sensible girl I knew and loved, had firmly quashed.
“What aboutyou?” she said to Liu, nudging. “I saw Zixuan going downstairs just before us. He should be in his room around now…”
Only Liu didn’t go red. Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “I kissed Yuyan last night instead.”
We obviously immediately set up a howl for more details, and she was giggling and she did turn red again, admitting that there had been somewhat less deadly serious practicing of music going on in the evenings in her room than perhaps we might have thought. “Also excuse you,” Aadhya said. “What was up with letting us hassle you about Zixuan all this time! Or were you trying todecide?”
She only meant it in fun, but Liu swallowed, visibly, and then she said, a bit wavering, “It would…it would have been smart of me.”
We both understood right away, and it stopped the teasing cold: she meant, shehadbeen trying to decide, but not because she’d wanted to do something stupid; she hadn’t wanted to sneak over to Zixuan’s room for one last night, hadn’t wanted to rip his shirt into shreds in the middle of the gym pavilion with a mass of amphisbaena romantically hissing and thrashing down at the base of the steps. She’d had that insidious whispering in her ear, the calculations that never stopped running inside our heads:it would be smart—to hook a cute, talented, enclaver boy from Shanghai, when he let it be known he was there to be hooked.
Just like it had been smart to bring in a dozen mice, small helpless lives you could hold in the cup of your hand, and kill them instead, one at a time, so you could suck enough mana out of them to keep yourself alive.
There were a few tears welling up over her lashes and dripping off. She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and pressed to stop them. She said rawly, “Iwantedto want…the right things. The things I was supposed to want. But I don’t. Even the ones that are good.” She gave a small choked sniffle. “And Zixuanis. He’s nice, and cute, and I like him, and it would make it okay that I didn’t do what they wanted. I didn’t have mana to give to Zheng and Min, but I did this instead, this other right thing. And Ma would be so happy. I’d be her smart girl. I’d be her smart girl again. Like when I said I would do it to the mice, for me and Zheng and Min.”
I hadn’t realized before, but it made perfect sense: that was why the cleansing had worked so well on her. Because she’d said yes, not so much for her own sake, but for the boys, and so she’d taken almost no malia from the mice, our first three years. Just barely enough to survive on.
“And that’s what Zixuan would like, too,” she said. “A smart girl who wants the right things. He wants the right things himself. He wanted to meet my parents and help build the enclave. He’s excited about it. Dominus Li is his great-uncle. He thinks he can persuade him to help us. And I want to help my family, I want to take care of them, but…I can’t be that girl. I can’t be the smart girl. I can only be me.”
