Page 10 of The Last Graduate
“I’m sorry, are youbored?” I snarled at him. “Are you missing the good fun of saving people’s lives six times a day, the regular dose of adoration?”
“I miss themana!” he yelled at me.
“So take it back!” I said, and yanked the power-sharer off my wrist and shoved it at him. “Takeallof it back! You want more mana, it’s yours, it’s all yours, they haven’t a right to a single drop.”
He stared down at the power-sharer, a half-hungry expression flitting over his face, then he shook his head hard with a jerk. “No!” he said, and shoved his hands in his hair, which hadn’t grown back long enough yet to support the drama of the gesture, and muttered, “I don’t know what todowith myself,” plaintively.
“I know what to do with you,” I said, by which I meant kicking him into next week where maybe he’d have got over himself, only he actually had the nerve to say, “Yeah?” in a challenging, pretending-to-be-suave double-entendre sort of way that lasted only long enough for him to hear it coming out of his own mouth, at which point he went red and embarrassed and then darted a look around the room with nobody but us in it and turned even more red, and I went out of the place like a shot and ran straight back to Liu’s just to escape.
Where I came back in with all of them still sitting there and the power-sharer still in my hand. Chloe jerked her head up and looked at me anxiously. But as far as I was concerned, she could discuss it with Orion herself if she wanted to know what he thought about it. “So what now?” I said, holding it out to her instead. “You want out?”
“No!” Chloe said, and then Aadhya actually hauled a book out of her school bag, the thick kind we call larva-killers, and threw it at me with enough intent behind it that I had to jump aside or it would’ve nailed me in the bum.
“Stop it!” she said. “I think that’s like the third time you’ve asked to be ditched. You’re like one of those puffer fish, the second anyone touches you a little wrong you go allbwoomp,” she illustrated with her hands, “trying to make them let go. We’ll let you know, how’s that?”
I put the power-sharer back on more or less sullenly—let’s be honest, more—and sat back down on the floor with my arms wrapped round my knees. Liu said after a moment, “So the real problem isn’t that you’re using mana. The problem is that Orion’s not putting any in.”
“Yes, all we need to do is find a surefire way to lure him some mals,” I muttered. “If only we had a bunch of tasty adolescent wizards all in the same place. Oh, wait.”
“I’ve got more things to throw over here,” Aadhya said, waving another deadly book—this one had some actual suspicious splotches on its cover—threateningly.
“Maybe we could build a honeypot, like they do for construction sites?” Chloe said.
“Like who does for what?” Aadhya said, and Chloe looked around like she expected me or Liu to be any less confused.
“A honeypot?” she said, more tentatively. “Is there another word for it? You know, when there’s a major project for a circle of wizards, and they’re going to be working for a long time, days, and you don’t want mals to be coming for them? So you have to lure all the nearby mals out and clean them up, like the week before? New York used one for the Tri-State Gateway expansion a couple of years back.”
It certainlysoundedbrilliant, but only in the sense that it was clearly too good to be true. “If you can lure them places, why wouldn’t you do it all the time?” I said. “Just stick one of these honeypots in the middle of a trap, and no more mals around ever.”
“You’ve still got todosomething with them!” Chloe said. “What kind of trap is going to hold a thousand giant mals? We had to hire a team of three hundred guards just for the one week.” That was starting to sound a bit more plausible, and worth considering, and then she added, “Anyway, you can’t just keep a honeypot going all the time, it’s too expensive to run.”
We all stared at her. She stared back. “It’stoo expensive,” I said pointedly. “ForNew York.” I’d seen Orion toss fistfuls of mana-infused diamond dust into his homework assignment potions like it was all-purpose flour. He didn’t even bother to sweep up the leavings from his lab bench afterwards.
Chloe bit her lip, but then Liu said, “But it can’t be that hard to lure mals. They want to come for us anyway, you’re just reinforcing their existing desire.”
“Oh, hey,” Aadhya said abruptly. “Howfar awaydid you lure mals from?”
“We covered all of Gramercy Park and one block out in each direction,” Chloe said, which meant nothing to me, but Aadhya was nodding.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Any artifice is going to be crazy expensive to run when you try to push the effect out over six city blocks. But we don’t want to lureallthe mals in the school.” We very much didn’t; in fact we all cringed instinctively just because she’d said it out loud. “We just want a few of them for Orion.” She rummaged round in her bag and dug out a copy of the blueprints that she must have made at some point in her career: artificers often get assigned to do detailed studies of the school, since it helps reinforce the workings. “Here.” She pointed to a spot on the first floor. “There’s a major pipe junction here running through the workshop wall. If we build a honeypot and set it next to the nearest drain and run it from there, I bet we’ll catch him plenty of mals even if we only cover a two-foot radius.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “So how does one of these honeypots work?”
We all looked at Chloe. “Um, there’s a container—you need to put in some kind of bait, and then the artifice blows the scent out…” She trailed off unspecifically and shrugged. “I’m sorry, I only know about it because my mom had to do the presentation for the requisition process.”
“The requisition process,” I said even more pointedly, because anything that New York bothered to make yourequisitionhad to be insanely complicated on top of expensive.
But Aadhya was waving it away. “That’s enough to go on. Liu’s right, it can’t be that hard. You just brew up some bait that smells like teenage wizard, and I’ll see what I can come up with to disperse it.”
Chloe was nodding. “How fast do you think you can do it?” she asked anxiously.
“No clue,” Aadhya said, with a shrug.
“And in the meantime, all of New York has to start building mana,” Liu said. “If Orion can’t put in mana anymore, and none of you are, you’re going to run out sooner or later anyway. You don’t want to find out that the honeypot doesn’t work in three months, just when it’s time to start doing obstacle-course runs.”
“But if I tell everyone that we have to start putting in mana because Orion can’t anymore, the first thing Magnus will want to do is run an audit on our power-sharers to see how much everyone is using,” Chloe said. “Then they’ll know why it’s going to besooner.”
“I don’t think he’ll insist on an audit,” Liu said, with a glance towards me. “Not if you tell them the right way.”
