Page 5 of The Last Graduate
“Why?” Aadhya asked.
“It was…” Liu’s throat worked. “She said, in here, it would tell people I was someone to watch out for.” And it had worked, because you can’t afford to have long hair unless you’re a really rich and also careless enclaver—or unless you’re on the maleficer track.
Aadhya silently went and dug a leftover half of a granola bar out of a small warded stash box on her desk. Liu tried to refuse it, but Aad said, “Oh my God, eat the freaking granola bar,” and then Liu’s face crumpled and she got up and put her arms out towards us. It took me a few moments longer than Aadhya—three years of near-total social ostracization leaves you badly equipped for this sort of thing—but they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn’t quite believe in: I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.
But it hadn’t. I was still in the Scholomance, and all the miracles in here come with price tags.
I’d only accepted my horrific schedule for the chance of building mana on those glorious Wednesday afternoons off. Since I’d been wrong about how wonderful my Wednesday work sessions would be, you might think I’d also been wrong about how terrible my four seminars were. And thenyou’dbe wrong.
Not one of the Myrddin seminar, the Proto-Indo-European seminar, or the Algebra seminar had more than five students in it. All of them took place deep in the warren of seminar rooms that we call the labyrinth, because it’s roughly as hard to get through as the classical version. The corridors like to squirm around and stretch a bit now and then. But even those paled in awful next to Advanced Readings in Sanskrit, which turned out to be anindependent study.
I reallycouldhave used a dedicated hour a day of quiet time to work on Sanskrit. The spellbook I’d managed to get my hands on last term was a priceless copy of the long-lost Golden Stone sutras; the library had let it come in range in an effort to keep me from taking out that maw-mouth. I still slept with it under my pillow. I’d just barely managed to fight my way through twelve pages to the first of the major invocations, and it was already the single most useful spellbook I’d ever so much as glimpsed in my life.
But what I got instead was a dedicated hour a day, alone in a tiny room on the outer perimeter of the very first floor, squeezed in around the edge of the big workshop. To even get there, I had to go almost as far as you could possibly go into the labyrinth, open an unmarked windowless door, then walk down a long, narrow, completely unlit corridor that felt like it was anywhere from one to twelve meters depending on its mood that day.
Inside the room, the one large air vent at the top of the wall shared an air shaft with the workshop furnaces. It alternated between whooshing blasts of superheated exhaust air and a steady, whistling stream of ice-cold cooling air. The only desk in the room was another ancient chair-desk, the whole iron contraption bolted to the floor. Its back was to the grating. I would have sat on the floor, but there were two large drainage channels running across the whole room, coming from the workshop and going to a big trough along the full length of the back wall, and ominous stains around them suggested that they overflowed routinely. A row of taps were stuck in the wall overhanging the trough as well. They dripped constantly in a faint pinging symphony, no matter how much I tried to tighten them. Every once in a while, horrible gurgling noises came out of the pipes, and weird grinding sounds happened under the floor. The door to the room itself didn’t lock, butdidslide open or shut at unpredictable moments with an incredibly loud bang.
If that sounds to you like an absolutely magnificent setup for an ambush, well, a significant number of mals agreed. I got jumped twice in the first week of classes.
By the end of the third week of term, I actually had to dip into my mana stash instead of adding to it. That night I sat on my bed staring at the chest of crystals Mum sent in with me. Aadhya had done another auction, and now I had a grand total of seventeen of them glowing and full of mana. But all the rest sat there empty, and the ones I’d emptied taking out the maw-mouth were starting to go completely dull. If I didn’t start reviving them soon, they’d become as useless for storing mana as the kind you buy in bulk online. But I couldn’t find the time. I was building mana as hard as I possibly could and cutting every corner possible on my schoolwork, but I was still stuck on the very same crystal I’d been trying to fill back up since last term. That morning I’d been attacked in my seminar yet again, and I’d had to empty it completely.
I had gone back to doing sit-ups sooner than any doctor would’ve told me to, just because the struggle to do them with my aching gut actually made it easier to build mana. But I was pretty much healed up now, and I couldn’t even rely on crochet anymore for real mana-building. I just didn’t hate it as much when I was doing it at night hanging out with Aadhya and Liu. My friends; my allies. Who were relying on me to help me get them out the doors.
I closed up the box and put it away, and then I went out. It was still an hour to curfew, but already quiet: no one hangs out in the corridors senior year. Either they were up in the prime spots in the library, or taking the chance to go to bed early in the last week or so before the mals were expected to come back full-force. I went down to Aadhya’s room and tapped on the door, and when she opened it I said, “Hey, can we go to Liu’s?”
“Sure,” she said, eyeing me, but she didn’t push for details: Aadhya isn’t a time-waster. She collected her bathroom stuff, so we could go brush teeth right after, and then together we went to Liu’s room. She was down on our level, now.
Everyone gets a private room in here, so to squash in each year’s delivery of freshmen, the rooms are arranged cellblock-style, stacked on top of one another with a narrow iron walkway outside the upper rooms. But at the end of term, as the res halls rotate down to their new levels, any empty rooms disappear and the space gets parceled out to the survivors. Often not in useful ways. I’ve had a delightfully creepy and useless double-height room since the start of sophomore year. Liu’s had extended down in this last round, so we didn’t have to climb up one of the squeaking spiral staircases to see her anymore.
She let us in and gave each of us our familiars-in-training to hold while we sat on her bed. I stroked the tiny mouse’s white fur while she sat up in the palm of my hand nibbling a treat and looking around with bright and increasingly green eyes. I was still trying hard to name her Chandra, but the day I’d been thinking of names, Aadhya had said, “You should call her Precious,” then laughed her head off while I whacked her with a pillow, and Precious was unfortunately sticking. Mum’s never actually come out and apologized for saddling me with Galadriel, but I’m reasonably sure she knows she should be ashamed of herself. Anyway they kept forgetting Chandra and calling her Precious—all right, to be fair,Ikept forgetting it myself—and pretty soon I was going to have to give up and accept it.
Assuming I was going to have her at all. I stared down at her in my hand because it was better than looking at their faces, and I said, “I’m falling really behind on mana.”
I had to tell them. They were counting on me to be able to pull my weight when it came time for graduation. If I wasn’t going to be able to, they had the right to back out. They didn’t owe anything to a bunch of freshmen they hadn’t even met. Liu might have felt she owed me something for Zheng, but I could be saving just Zhengwithoutlaying out a week’s worth of mana I didn’t actually have saved up, and meanwhile she was breaking her back building mana for our team herself.
At this rate, I was going to be lucky if I had enough mana for maybe three medium-power spells, and I didn’t evenhaveany good medium-power spells. The only really useful spell I’ve got that doesn’t need absolute heaps of mana is the phase-control spell I got out of Purochana’s book, and it’s not a great crisis option, since it’s a good five minutes to prep the casting. I’veusedit in a crisis, but only when I had Orion thoroughly distracting the underlying cause for those five minutes, and he’s going to be a bit busy come graduation killing monsters for everyone.
“Zheng told me about Wednesdays,” Liu said quietly, and I looked up. She didn’t look surprised; actually she looked kind of worried.
“This is your weirdo library session? What’s going on?” Aadhya said, and Liu said, “It’s her and eight freshmen, and they keep getting hit with major mals.”
“In thelibrary?” Aadhya said, and then she said, “Wait, this is ontopof that horrible independent study and the three other seminars? Does the school have it in for you or something?”
We all fell silent. The question answered itself in the asking, really. My throat felt knotted up right around the tonsils, awful and choking. I hadn’t even thought about it that way before, but it was obviously true. And that was worse, so much worse, than just being unlucky.
The Scholomance has been hurting for power almost as much as I have. It’s not cheap to keep this place working. It’s easy to forget from our perspective when we’re suffering through this place and getting hit with mals on a regular basis, but they’d be coming at every last one of us in a continuous stream, and lots more of them, if it weren’t for all those incredibly powerful wards on every single air vent and plumbing pipe, and all the highly improbable artifice that makes sure there are almost none of those openings in the first place, and despite that we’re all breathing and drinking and bathing and eating, and all of that takes mana, mana, mana.
Sure, the story is, the enclaves put in some mana, and our parents all put in some mana if they can afford it, and we put in mana with our work, but we all know that’s a story. The single biggest source of the school’s mana isus.We’re all trying to save mana for graduation; everyone’s working on it all the time. The mana we grudgingly put into our schoolwork and our maintenance shifts is nothing compared with the amounts we put away for that rainiest of rainy days. And when the mals tear us apart, of course we grab for all that nice juicy power we’ve desperately been saving up, and they suck it out of us, only built up more by all our terror and final agony and struggles to live. The Scholomance gets the spillover, and then thanks to all those wards, it kills off a good healthy number of the mals, too, and it all ends up in the school’s mana stores—where it goes to keep the rest of us luckier ones alive.
So when an enthusiastic hero—read, Orion—shows up and starts saving lives, and the mals start to starve, the school starts to starve, too. And at the same time, has more of us alive in here, breathing and drinking et cetera. It’s all a pyramid scheme, and if there aren’t enough of us on the bottom being eaten, there’s not enough for the ones at the top.
That’swhywe had to go down and fix the cleansing mechanisms in the graduation hall: all those starving mals down there, waiting in the one place Orion wasn’t, getting ready to tear the entire graduating class apart because they hadn’t had enough to eat for the last three years. They were on the verge of breaking into the rest of the school because they were all so desperate that they started collectively pounding on the wards at the bottom of the stairwells.
And Orion—well, Orion’s from the New York enclave, with a power-sharer on his wrist, and his affinity for combat somehow lets him suck power out of the mals he kills anyway. They don’t even come after him, because he has a bottomless supply of mana and an almost equally infinite supply of fantastic combat spells.
But I don’t. I’m the girl destined to makeupfor him, but who’s obstinately kept refusing to become a maleficer and start killing kids by the double handful, and now I’ve gone the other way entirely. I stopped a maw-mouth heading for the freshman hall. I helped Orion keep the mals from breaking into the school. I was down there in the graduation hall with him, helping to hold up a shield so the senior artificers could fix the cleansing equipment. And now I’m even copycatting his stupid noble-hero routine one day a week.
Of course the school was going to come after me.
