Page 9 of The Last Graduate
I took my tray and stalked away across the cafeteria to the table Liu was holding. Orion slunk after me and sat down next to me with both of us still mad—you don’t break up a table in here over anything as minor as a violent quarrel—and we both steamed away in silence for the entire meal. We cleared our trays and walked out of the cafeteria at what I thought was meant to be pointedly different times, since he seemed to be in a rush to get out ahead of me, so I slowed down, and when I came out, I spotted him talking to Magnus just outside the doors, and a moment later Magnus held out his hand and I realized Orion was asking him formana.
“You bag of jumbled screws, you could’vesaidyou were running low,” I said, after giving him a swat across the back of the head when I caught him down the corridor, just before the stairs. “Also, going after mals when you’re low to try and make up for it is even more stupid than your usual line, which is saying something.”
“What? No! I wasn’t—” Orion started, and then he turned round and caught my hard glare and paused, and then looked awkward and said, “Oh,” like he’d just noticed that was in fact exactly what he’d been doing.
“Yes,oh,” I said. “You’reentitledto a fair share of the New York mana! You’ve probably put in loads more thanyourfair share just this past week.”
“I haven’t,” Orion said shortly. “I haven’t been putting anything in at all.”
“What?” I stared at him.
“I haven’t taken out any mals this whole month,” Orion said. “The only ones I’ve even seen are the ones I’ve seenyoutaking out.”
If you can believe it, there was even still a faint accusatory tone in there, but I ignored it in favor of gawping at him. “Are you telling me you haven’t saved anyone all term? Why haven’t I been hearing howls of death and dismay all round the place?”
“There aren’t any!” he said. “They’re all lying low. I think we wiped out too many of them down in the graduation hall,” as if the wordstoo manyhad any business taking up room in that sentence, “and the ones left are still mostly in hiding. I’ve been asking people, but almost nobody’s been seeing mals at all.”
I can’t actually coherently describe the level of indignation I experienced. It was one thing for the school to be out to get me, which I think all of us secretly feel is the case from the moment we arrive, and another for the school to be out to getonlyme, to the exclusion of literally everyone else, including even Orion, even though the school’s hunger was really his fault in the first place. Although I suppose itwasgetting him by keeping mals away from him. “What do you have Wednesdays after work period?” I demanded, when I could get words out past the incoherent rage.
“My senior alchemy seminar,” he said: four levels down from the library. So he couldn’t come up and give me a hand even if he wanted to, as he apparently very much did.
“What are your first periods?”
“Chinese and maths.” As far away from the workshop level as a senior class could get.
“I hate everything,” I said passionately.
“The rest of New York is going to say something if this keeps going,” Chloe said unhappily, perched on Liu’s bed cross-legged with her own mouse cupped in her hands. She’d named him Mistoffeles because he had a single black spot at his throat like a bow tie, which had started looking much more like a bow tie just in the week she’d been holding him. He was also already doing things for her: just yesterday he’d hopped out of her hands and run scampering off into the drain and then come back a few minutes later and offered her a little scrap of only slightly gnawed-on ambergris he’d somehow found down there.
It irritated me: I’d been working on Precious for more than a month and a half now, giving her mana treats and trying to give her instructions, and she still wasn’t doing much but accepting the treats as her due and sitting there on my hand graciously permitting me to pet her. “Shouldn’t you at least be able to turn invisible or something by now?” I’d told her in a grumble under my breath before tipping her back into Liu’s cage. She just ignored me. Even Aadhya had been able to take her mouse Pinky permanently back to her room by now, where she’d built him a massive and elaborate enclosure full of wheels and tunnels that kept getting expanded up the wall. “It just takes time sometimes,” Liu told me, very tactfully, but even she was getting a faintly doubtful expression as the weeks crept on.
Of course, I still wouldn’t have given up a single minute of getting to cuddle Precious even if I could have had them all back a hundredfold in study time. She was so alive and real, her soft fur and her moving lungs and the tiny beat of her heart; she didn’t belong to the Scholomance. She was a part of the world outside, the world I sometimes found myself thinking maybe only existed in the dreams I had of it once in a while. We’d been in the Scholomance for three years, one month, two weeks, and five days.
And in that last one month, two weeks, and five days, nobody but me or the me-adjacent had been attacked by a single mal, as far as we could double-check without making people suspicious. People hadn’t realized yet only because some of the attacks had spilled over into the workshop, which was on the other side of my independent study room, and also it was still early enough in the year that everyone separately thought they were just getting lucky.
“But the other New York kidsaregoing to notice the mana pool getting low,” Chloe said. “Magnus was already asking me the other day if I’d been doing any major workings. I’ve got a right to share power with my allies, but not to let them take it all.”
“We’re all putting as much as we can back,” Aadhya said. “And there’re seven seniors from New York. You have to be putting in loads yourselves. How low is the pool going to get?”
“Well,” Chloe said, in an odd, awkward way, darting a look at me, and then she said haltingly, “We don’t really—I mean—”
“You don’t build mana at all,” I said flatly, from the corner, as I instantly realized what she wasn’t saying. “None of you ever put any mana in the enclave pool, because Orion was putting in enough for all of you.”
Chloe bit her lip and avoided our eyes; Aadhya and Liu were both staring at her, shocked.Everyone’sgot to build mana in here. Even enclave kids. Their big advantage is more time, better conditions, people watching their backs and doing homework for them and giving them little presents of mana and all the other things that the rest of us have to spend mana to get. They all have their own efficient mana stores and power-sharers. So by the time they get to senior year, they’re all way ahead. But never having to build mana atall—never having to do sit-ups or struggle through making some horrible doily, because all of them were just coasting on Orion’s back—
And he had to beg mana fromthemwhen he started to run out.
Chloe didn’t raise her head, and there was color in her cheeks. Mistoffeles made a little anxious chirping noise in her hands. She probably hadn’t even thought about it since freshman year. The way I already wasn’t thinking about it, day-to-day. And I’d sniped at Orion for needing help, after killing monsters with the mana he’d built up over three years of risking his life.
“So what?” Orion said, and sounded like he meant it.
I hadn’t been near his room since last term; I was doing my best to avoid being alone with him at all these days. But I’d put Precious down and walked out of Liu’s room and straight down the corridor to his, without saying another word to Chloe. Orion was there, busy failing to do his alchemy homework, judging by the total blankness of the lab worksheet on his desk. He let me in so nervously that I almost stopped being angry long enough to reconsider being there, but despite him and his mostly futile attempts at straightening up his piles of dirty laundry and books, anger won. It usually does, for me.
I might as well not have bothered, for all he cared when I did tell him. I stared at him, and he stared back. It wasn’t even just him being happy to help the useless wankers out; he sounded like he didn’t understand why I was bothering to mention this odd piece of irrelevant information.
“It’syour mana,” I said through my teeth. “It’sallyour mana. Do you get it, Lake? The whole parasitic lot of them have been clinging on your back for three years and change, never putting in a minute’s worth of effort themselves—”
“I don’t care!” he said. “There’s always more. There’s alwaysbeenmore,” he added, and thatdidcome with an emotion, only it was flat-out whinging.
