Chapter 12: Intermission

On Thursday,four hundred kids showed up for the Chinese run. Afterwards Orion and I dragged ourselves into the library and each crawled onto one of the couches and lay there letting everyone else do the postmortem over our heads. I felt like a sheet of kitchen roll that had been used more than once and wrung out thoroughly in between.

It wasn’t just the larger number: most of the new kids hadn’t learned any of our completely unfamiliar strategies, and apart from that, the obstacle course bloody works. So skipping it for seven weeks had put them substantially behind the rest of us. The only reason there hadn’t been a metric shedload of deaths today was because I had cheated in pure desperation by using Alfie’s evocation to toss bunches of students and mals together out of the obstacle course into the other half of the gym. The mals had then dissolved, as they were just fake constructs. The mals in the graduation hall were not going to dissolve conveniently of their own accord, so it wasn’t going to be a helpful maneuver in the actual event. But I’d had to do something just to get everyone out of practice alive.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the discussion, since everyone agreed the main point was that the new cohort all had to catch up, which was fairly obvious. Yuyan—she’d joined the planning team—suggested letting them run every day for the next two weeks and giving everyone else—except for me and Orion, obviously—more time off. Everyone agreed on this, and then Aadhya said thoughtfully, “Actually, we probably want to have everyone from the Spanish and Hindi runs join up with either English or Chinese anyway pretty soon. We want to start doing five-hundred-person runs—in a month!” she added, when she noticed I’d craned my head up from the couch in outrage.

I put my head down again, briefly mollified, but Liesel gave a loud exasperated sigh, too pointed to miss. I glared at the patched threadbare upholstery just past my nose and gritted out, “Next week for English. The week after that for Chinese.” Orion groaned faintly on the couch perpendicular to mine, but he didn’t argue. We were already looking April in the face. Less than three months left.

I’m not going to claim that I enjoyed the next week, but by Wednesday, the Chinese run was in spitting distance of survivable, and after Friday’s run, Zixuan approached Liu and Aadhya and offered to use his reviser to improve the sirenspider lute. They spent the whole evening in the workshop together, and on Saturday, when Liu struck the first chords and I sang the spell, the mana-amplification wave rolled out over the entire mass of kids and gonged against the gym walls and came back for a second pass that quadrupled the power of everyone’s workings. I didn’t have to cheat once; I wasn’t even exhausted at the end.

“He didn’t make you give it to him?” I muttered to Liu afterwards: everyone was clustered round Zixuan gushing congratulations. I’d just incinerated an entire anima-locust swarm so large that it had blotted out all of the hideously blue sky: they just kept spawning afresh so I had to literally keep a hurricane-sized psychic storm burning over everyone’s heads the entire fifteen minutes of the run, but I was old hat at that by now. Or possibly the storm had been so disturbing that everyone was blocking it aggressively out of their memories; one or the other.

Liu and Aad had already talked over the lute and agreed that Liu’s family would pay Aadhya for it, assuming Liu and it got out. The deal would establish Aadhya’s going rate as an artificer and give her a big chunk of seed resources to start a workshop with, and Liu’s extended clan would have a lot more use for the lute than just Aad and her family. But usually the cost for revising some piece of artifice is three-quarters the value of the result. Zixuan had every right to consider himself majority owner at this point, and since he was a Shanghai enclaver, he could probably buy Liu out a lot easier than she could buy him out.

I was just asking, I didn’t mean anything by it, except to wonder if there were some angle involved. Of course the upgrade was clearly in everyone’s interest, but someone was going to get the lute after, so it would have struck me as odd if there hadn’t been any negotiation on the subject. But Liu turned very red and then compounded the effect by putting her hands over her cheeks as if trying to squish the red out of them, which certainly wasn’t effective if her goal was to stop me gawking at her.

“He asked to come meet my family after we get out,” she said, in a choked, stifled voice. I didn’t gawk any less; that was quite the declaration. It’s not that enclavers—or people as close to becoming enclavers as Liu’s family—all officially arrange dating and marriages or anything, but there’s often some family involvement. All of the wizards in her parents’ generation and the two before had been working themselves to the bone to get the resources to buy the enclave-building spells. And not for a poky old-fashioned little Golden Enclave like the ones out of my sutras, either: they were getting ready to put up towers in the void, another modern star in the Chinese constellation. Once they put together a package with the last of the core spells, they’d take bids from the independent wizards in various Chinese cities. They’d pick the city whose wizards put together the biggest offer, and the mana and resources they provided would get the new enclave put up. The wizards who’d contributed the most would get to move in straightaway; the rest would get in over the next decade or two as the foundations settled and the place expanded.

Liu had been born into that project, and she was expected and expecting to contribute. And anyone she so much as dated was absolutely going to be evaluated as a potential part of it, too. Her family might not be planning to get actively involved with the process, but they’d certainly be pleased if she brought home an impressive candidate. Which an artificer from Shanghai who was already good enough to whip up a reviser in school certainly would be.

“So is that…good?” I prompted.

Liu stared at me with a half-bewildered expression, as if she didn’t know what it was, then looked over at him and then back. “He’s—he’s nice? And he’s very cute?” as if she were asking me. She’d never had a crush that I knew of; I suspect she’d considered it as much a long-shot as I had, all those years she was on the maleficer track. Maleficer relationships tend to go Bonnie-and-Clyde or Frankenstein-and-Igor: not very appealing. So now she was opening a newly delivered box and peeking under the lid for the first time.

“I see,” I said, solemnly, so obviously I stuck round until the very end. I felt it was my job as her friend to observe closely and also my chance to revenge a lot of giggling at my expense.

Liu might not have been sure about Zixuan, but she was definitely sure that I should go away and stop making her squirm and kept whispering that I could leave. I kept pretending not to understand her while the crowd very slowly ebbed away from round Zixuan, until he managed to politely detach from the last few hangers-on, at which point I casually edged back from Liu but not so far away I couldn’t hear as he came over and asked her to walk to the library with him.

Liu did turn to me and ask, “El, are you coming?”

“You go ahead,” I told her, and beamed at her as obnoxiously as I could. She turned red again and made a quick face at me, then smoothed herself down to calm dignity before she turned back to him. I was smiling the whole time as I watched them walk away; it was just—so normal, an ordinary fumbling towards a future outside this horrible place.

I suppose you could say the same of my own complicated dating situation, but it felt a lot more uncertain and dramatic and fraught when I was the one inside it, not to mention more impractical, seeing as me dragging Orion off to join a quixotic project of building tiny enclaves round the world was a lot less likely to be acceptable to his family. This was a happy ordinary human thing I could actually enjoy, and it felt like the perfect period to that magical run.

For the first time, I almost felt that I could even let myself believe in the plan—so much that when they’d gone out of sight, I gave a huff of laughter out loud and turned back to the gym doors and said exultantly, “Still think you’re going to stop me? You’re not. I am getting them out. I’m getting them all out, and nothing you do is going to make me leave any of them behind. You’re not going to get a single one of them. I’m going to beat you, I’m going to win, do you hear me?”

“Who are you talking to?” Sudarat asked.

She gave me a bad start, which I entirely deserved since I’d been so enthusiastic about my stupid ranting that I hadn’t noticed her, and when I’d calmed down my racing heart and shoved down the sixteen different killing spells that had instantly leapt to mind, I said with an attempt at being cool and collected, “Nothing, I was only thinking out loud. What are you doing down here?”

Then I looked at the little bundle she was carrying with the end of a loaf of bread poking out of it, and realized, appalled, that she was of Orion’s mindset about picnics in the gym. “You’ve got to be joking,” I said, revolted. “Didn’t I yell enough? You’re only going to mess your own head about, if you don’t get yourself killed. You’ve been in here long enough by now, you must’ve started to understand. It’s not the real thing.”

She just stood there and took the lecture, small with her shoulders hunched forward, gripping the handle of her little carrysack with both hands, and then she said softly, “My mother used to tell me for a graduation present she would take me to see the cherry blossom festival in Kyoto. But I will never see it now.”

I stopped talking, stopped breathing more or less. She paused, but when I didn’t say anything else, she said, “In my school—in the enclave—they taught us how to pick out the smart kids, the good ones, the best ones to help us. So I know what the good ones are like. And I’m not very good. And nobody wants to be my friend. The enclave kids are all afraid. They don’t know what happened in Bangkok. And I don’t know, either. Everyone thinks I’m lying, but I don’t. I took my grandmother’s dog out for a walk and then we came back and the door—the door to the enclave didn’t work anymore. It was just a door to an empty apartment. And everyone was gone.” She swallowed visibly. “My auntie was working in Shanghai, she came home and took care of me. She gave me everything she could spare. But it isn’t enough to save someone who isn’t very good, that nobody likes. I know it’s not.”

She stopped. I still couldn’t manage a word. After a moment I suppose she got tired of hanging about in the corridor with a mute statue, and she went politely past me and pushed the doors open. She went a decent way in: not so far that she didn’t have several good escape routes, but far enough that she was clear of the area round the doors. She settled herself at the base of a tree putting on an immense display, dark boughs sagging with bloom, and took a small box of strawberries out of her bag, which she must have wasted gobs of mana enchanting out of some dingy fruit from the cafeteria. She sat there eating them and reading a book, making a picture straight out of the freshman orientation handbook, with tiny petals drifting across the scene like pink snow. Living as much as she could, because she wasn’t going to get much more of a chance.

The doors swung shut over the scene, wafting a sweet fragrance into my face as they banged shut, and I said to them stupidly, “No,” which obviously helped loads, and then I just laughed out loud at myself, high-pitched and jeering. “God, I’m stupid, I’m so stupid, I can’t believe,” and I couldn’t go on. I put my hands over my face and sobbed a couple of times, and then I lifted my face and screamed at the doors, at the school, “Why did you even try to stop me? Why bother? There’s no use. There’s never been any use at all.”

Like an answer, there was an immense crash of glass and cracking wood behind me. I whipped round instantly. I’d been training for my Olympic-class event in uselessness so hard, so earnestly, that it wasn’t a voluntary reaction; I’d programmed my muscles so they could skip past my brain and just get on with it, with saving all those lives, all one thousand of those fantastically insignificant lives, so I whirled and my hands came up in casting position and the adrenaline was already flowing like a smooth-running river in my bloodstream before I even saw that the crash was just one of the heavy framed blueprints off the corridor wall that had come down behind me, a glitter of shards sprayed all round and the frame broken into kindling sticks, pale where the dusty gilt-slathered wood had splintered apart.

I dropped my hands as soon as conscious thought was involved in keeping them up, gulping for breath between the sobs and the instinctive alarm. “So why shouldn’t I just give up after all—is that what you’re trying to say?” I said, just a girl talking to myself in the hallway, a stupid girl pretending she was a hero because she was going to save a thousand kids before she then went skipping merrily through the gates, leaving behind—what were the numbers? Twelve hundred kids dead out of every year, and it’s been 140 years, which worked out to a number I couldn’t fix even if I stayed behind to guard the gates for my entire life. However many ticking minutes I had left, I’d still only ever be a girl with her finger stuck into a hole in the dike, and whenever I finally fell down, here the torrent would come.

“Is that what you wanted me to learn?” I said savagely to the pale blank square on the metal wall where the frame had been, a window through the grime of a century and more. “You should’ve done it quicker. At this point, I might as well save everyone as not,” and then I looked down, and the crashed frame wasn’t a blueprint. It was the front page from the May 10, 1880, issue of The London Whisper, dominated by a large photograph of a gaggle of men in Victorian suits, a grandly mustachioed blond one out in front with his arms cocked out from his hips and a self-congratulatory air. There were copies of that all over the building, too. For years I’d been reading it without paying attention, in droning history lectures and the cafeteria queue, the way you read the back of cereal boxes while you’re eating because you haven’t anything else to do with your eyes.

But now I picked it up and looked at it properly. The men were standing in a small and familiar wood-paneled room, lined with bookcases and full of small heavy cast-iron chairs with wooden desks, and at the very edge of the photograph a thick scroll covered with signatures was lying upon a massive roll-top wooden desk. It was my own special classroom, up at the very top of the school.

The article said, The final Scholomance binding spells were successfully laid today through what must be considered the most extraordinary circle working ever conceived by the mind of man, with fully twenty-one representatives of the foremost enclaves of the world, uniting their wills and the marshaled resources of all their several domains under the visionary leadership of Sir Alfred Cooper Browning of Manchester, for the singular goal of establishing an institution beyond all quarrels and disputes, whose fundamental purpose shall be to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world.

I read it again and again, until I couldn’t possibly avoid understanding it anymore. I knew all the words already, of course; I could probably have recited it from memory. The same photo was literally in the freshman orientation handbook they sent us before we came in, the exact same self-aggrandizing article was on the wall in a dozen of my classrooms and in the history textbooks. The words are even engraved on the stairway railings and the upper molding of the library reading room, those precise words: to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world, only absolutely nobody ever took them seriously. Even Sir Alfred Cooper Browning and all his fellow smug waistcoats didn’t believe their own nonsense at the time. They didn’t let in any children from outside their enclaves until they had to, and when they did have to, they did everything they could think of to give their own every possible advantage, and certainly not a single student ever got through a single day in here believing them. No one thought it was true.

Except, apparently, the Scholomance itself. And fair enough: twenty-one of the most powerful wizards in the world had made a circle and forced the words into the very bones of the place—the words they’d wrangled among themselves into a warm mealymouthed lie they could all agree to tell together. They built the Scholomance and told it very firmly that its fundamental purpose was to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world.

And perhaps the school hasn’t been able to do that very successfully, but apparently it still wanted to be—something besides a lesser evil.

I can’t pretend that I completely understood at first; quite the opposite. I got the first vague inkling of the idea and then dropped the article back onto the heap of broken frame and walked away down the corridor. I was moving aimlessly, a cloudy blob of static from ear to ear, and anything at all could have killed me. But nothing came at me, even though I kept wandering along. I couldn’t have told you where I was, until the door I was passing slammed open, loudly, and I saw it was the corridor going to my delightful private seminar room, the one where I’d been attacked relentlessly the first two months of the year.

Which suddenly took on a very different light. I stopped and stared down the passage. The school hadn’t been trying to kill me, and it hadn’t been trying to make me go maleficer. It didn’t want me to suck everyone dry and fly out to darken the earth. So what did it want from me?

I went down to the room. The door was waiting open. I paused at the threshold looking inside, and with a bang, one of the outer wall panels next to the sink literally fell in, exposing a narrow shaft with a ladder, tucked into the wall. I knew what it was: I’d been inside it at the end of last year, for another one of the delightfully unique school experiences I hoped never to relive. It was the maintenance shaft that went down to the graduation hall.

The message was extremely clear. My head wasn’t, which is why I didn’t think as hard as I probably ought to have before I went and got on the ladder and started climbing down, in the dark. But I didn’t even hear any sounds of maleficaria, no scuttling or rasping or hisses or breath; only the gurgles and bangs of the school itself, the vast conglomeration of artifice running on, steadily pumping air and water and cafeteria slop and wastes all round, the low burring hum of mana being channeled into the wards. The climb didn’t take very long: the school wanted me to get there quickly, and my brain was so empty that it didn’t insist on the climb taking a rational amount of time. It felt like only a few minutes, and then I was climbing down off the ladder into the skinny maintenance chamber at the bottom, the place from which we’d sallied forth on our grand mission to repair the cleansing machinery.

I made a light. It shone onto the blank, curved metal wall—dented a bit from the outside, as if the mals had beaten on it trying to get through after we’d made our yanked escape. The graduation hall was on the other side, along with whatever the school had been preparing us all—preparing me—to deal with. This whole term, all the endless outrageously horrible unsurvivable runs, pushing and pushing and pushing all of us to find completely new strategies, to learn to work as a single enormous alliance, to defeat—whatever was on the other side. That’s what we had to overcome.

And apparently, it was time for me to face it. I didn’t have a maintenance hatch with me, but one of the metal wall panels just popped itself open, rivets pinging out of the seam and onto the floor one after another. I just stood there and watched. The two panels of the wall fell open with an enormous clanging, one towards me and one away.

Nothing came through the opening.

It wasn’t especially shocking; I’d understood by then. I knew what was on the other side waiting, and they weren’t going to bother coming after one measly student. I’d known all along what it was going to be, really, no matter how hard I’d pretended I didn’t. It wasn’t going to be evil glaciers, or an anima-locust swarm, or a castigator demon. The school had been treating me gently, with kid gloves, bringing me along little by little, but time was running out now, and I had to face it, so I could be ready on graduation day. I’d promised, after all. I’d promised Khamis, and Aadhya, and Liu, and Chloe, and everyone in the entire school.

I couldn’t make myself step through. Even if it was safe right now, in some ridiculous sense of the word, I didn’t want to go look. I didn’t want to have to go back upstairs and tell everyone what we were up against. I didn’t want to spend the next three months thinking about them every single day, making plans, discussing strategies for me to relive the most horrible thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to huddle into a ball against the back of the chamber. I wanted to sob for Mum, for Orion, for anyone at all to save me, and there wasn’t anyone. There was only me. And them. Patience and Fortitude, waiting by the gates, so hungry that they’d licked the entire graduation hall clean.

I knew I had to go look at them, so I couldn’t go back up the ladder—if the school would even have let me run away—but I couldn’t move forward, either. I stayed down there for a very long time. I think it had been close to an hour when there was a small anxious chirp from the shaft, and Precious poked her tiny nose out, clinging to the last rung of the ladder.

I put my hands up to get her, and I cupped her in my hands and put her against my cheek, and my whole face crumpled like discarded classwork and I just sobbed a few times, getting her fur wet with leaking tears. She just poked at me with her nose and put up with it. When I managed to get myself under control, she climbed onto my shoulder, tucked behind my ear, and made soft small encouraging squeaks. I took a deep breath in through my nose and made myself go out into the hall before I could lock up again.

The hall wasn’t completely empty: a family of mature agglos, their tidy shells glittering with mana-infused jewels, bits of glowing artifice, and tiny jars and vials of potions and unguents, had been sleeping peacefully against the far wall, near the cleansing machinery we’d repaired last year. They all woke up at the sound of my footsteps and started humping away into dark corners at top speed, which in the case of adult agglos is about a quarter mile per hour.

The floor was crunchy with amphisbaena scales and the dried-up moltings of juvenile digesters, none bigger than a handkerchief. None of them were actually in sight. The ceiling had faint dark lines patterned across it, the ghosts of the century-old sirenspider webs that had been incinerated in the cleansing. The only things left of the sirenspiders themselves were a few hard melted lumps stuck to the ceiling among them, the stubs of legs poking out in a few places. There was nothing left of other mals at all except a few droppings and skeletons; a few construct mals had collapsed in mechanical heaps here and there, out of mana. A few more scuttling larval things ran away from me, so small I couldn’t even identify them, as I clenched both my hands tight and turned myself bodily to face the gates.

“But,” I said, after a moment, out loud. I stood there stupidly until Precious gave me a nudge, and then I walked across the whole graduation hall, directly up to the massive double doors, the gates to the school. There were two enormous scorch marks on the floor to either side, blackened outlines where the maw-mouths had been, like a police tape to show the position of a removed corpse. The marks had ripples: you could see the mortal flame had burnt off a good few layers, although there had certainly been plenty left of them afterwards.

I’d been half right. The cleansing had worked. Patience and Fortitude hadn’t been killed, but they’d been burnt and blinded, probably thrashing wildly, while the seniors ran out. They had missed their one annual meal. Afterwards, they’d recovered and tried to fill their hollow bellies by devouring all the rest of the surviving mals instead. But after they did that—when there was nothing at all left for them to eat, they’d—gone.

I had no idea where. Had they hidden away somewhere inside the school? They certainly hadn’t got into the main levels—we’d all have heard the screaming. There’re pockets of dead space, many of them, in the hollow area between the top of the graduation hall and the bottom of the workshop floor, and those aren’t really warded, so they could have crawled in there, but they still wouldn’t have had anything to eat. Maw-mouths don’t generally hide, anyway. Had they left entirely? They could have; the wards stop maleficaria from coming in, not going out, and if Patience and Fortitude had gone off to roam the world and trouble enclaves for their suppers, we wouldn’t hear about it until after we got out ourselves.

Which we’d apparently be able to do with no trouble at all. None of us needed a day’s practice, not a single run. We could stroll right out.

I stared up at the enormous doors, cast from solid bronze. There were diagrams and paintings of them scattered all round, like the blueprints, all a bit different from one another. But I can’t imagine anyone had actually spent as much as a millisecond looking at them since the day the school first opened to students. A massive seal in the middle was engraved with the school motto In Sapienta Umbraculum—In Wisdom, Shelter—and nested circles round the seal were engraved with a warding spell that had been layered through languages: so the same spell in English and Middle English and Old English, one after another, all going round in a ring. It wasn’t just English, either; there were rings of the same spell in dozens of languages, and all the ones I knew well enough to recognize had multiple versions, too—there was modern Arabic and medieval, modern French and Old French and Latin.

Translating a spell and actually getting a spell on the other end is almost impossible; it had probably taken a genius poet or a team of twelve for every version of every language, and only possible at all because they weren’t very complex spells: all the ones I could make out without a dictionary were just one or two lines and a variation on Don’t let anything evil through these doors. The English inscription was Malice, keep far, this gate wisdom’s shelter guards, tied to the motto, obviously not a coincidence; some version of the phrase was there in all the other languages I knew.

And they weren’t just an inscription. The letters had been engraved all the way through the top layer of bronze, and some kind of illuminated alchemical substance was being piped through behind them so the light shone out through. They weren’t just glowing steadily, either: the light moved through each inscription, at the speed and rhythm you’d have used to speak each spell. It was effectively casting the incantations over and over again, renewing them steadily. And the separate spells were even synchronized somehow—I couldn’t follow it exactly, but I could tell that several of them started or ended at the same time, new ones began as previous ones went out. Like a massive choral piece with a few dozen separate lines of music going at once.

It mesmerized me; I could almost hear the spells going, and then I realized I really was hearing them: there were bands of tiny perforations in the metal, what I’d thought were just decorative dots, and when I leaned close and peeked I could see there was a bit of artifice behind them that opened and closed each hole individually. And when one of them opened, a puff of air came through with a sound like a single letter or syllable, breathed out, and each sound matched one of the characters being lit up at the time. I could barely hear the whisper over the faint metronome ticking of the machinery that was controlling the vents, the shushing and gurgle of the liquid being pumped through, but they were there.

I’d never seen anything like it before, even inside the school. I know from much droning in our history lessons that Sir Alfred had talked the other major enclaves into building the school in stages—the expense of the thing was as ruinous as you might imagine. He initially proposed just building an ordinary enclave for kids to live in, just with these really powerful doors. After the doors were built, that’s when he showed everyone the rest of his even more elaborate plans, and supposedly they looked at the doors and signed on for the rest. Standing here, I wasn’t surprised. I’d spent nearly four years living inside the school, nearly dying over and over, and I still almost believed it, believed that these doors would keep out all evil, keep out the monsters and keep us all safe.

And obviously they had, more or less. I couldn’t even imagine how many maleficaria would have been coming at us without them. The Scholomance was a honeypot, the most alluring honeypot you could imagine: all the most tender, mana-plumpest wizard children in the world gathered in a single place. Any mal that so much as gets a whiff of this place would try to get in. And some of them would make it, even with the doors. Every once in a while, a letter didn’t light up, a puff of air didn’t make it through; there were surely a few places in the massive composition that were a little weaker, where the spells didn’t quite sound right at the same time, making cracks in the warding where a really determined mal could make an effort and wriggle through, like poking a loose brick out of the fortress wall. More than enough had made it through, even in the first few years, to make this hall into a slaughterhouse. The doors weren’t impenetrable.

But they were close. So after the mortal flame had actually worked last year—and after Patience and Fortitude had eaten their way through everything else—and after Orion had done for every mal that had dared to poke its nose into the classroom levels—the whole room had been cleared. For one shining moment, our one unbelievably lucky year, we’d be able to come down here and walk straight to safety, the first class in the history of the Scholomance to make it through graduation without a single death.

And then—the mals would all come back. Every single portal that opened up to send one of us home would make an opening in the wards; two or three mals would squirm through for every one of us that left. More of them would tag along later that day with the newly inducted freshmen. Psychic mals would follow a parent’s worried dream of their child; the eldritch and gaseous mals would float up through the ventilation shafts, and the amorphous ones would pour themselves through the plumbing.

And sooner or later, if Patience or Fortitude didn’t come back, a new maw-mouth would ooze in through one of those openings and settle into pride of place by the gates. The cleansing would break again. The death rate would likely be back to normal by the time the current freshmen were graduating, or at best a year or two later. Sudarat and Zheng and my other freshmen wouldn’t get a free ride. That boy from Manchester, Aaron, who’d brought me my tiny scrap of a note from Mum, for nothing. All the kids I barely knew or didn’t know or had never met or who hadn’t been born yet.

That’s what the school had been working me up towards, all this time. Luring me onwards with one crumb of power after another to teach me that it wasn’t useless for me to care, that I could let myself care about my friends, and about their allies, and then even about everyone in my year, and once it had got me over that hump, now it was showing me that I didn’t need to worry about any of them after all, so surely now I had the spare capacity to care about—everyone else.

“But what do you want me to do?” I said, staring up at the doors. Surely the Scholomance didn’t want to save one year’s worth of kids, or even four years’. The school had already chewed up a hundred thousand children during its relentless triage operation. No human who cared enough to try could have stood it. But the school wasn’t human, wasn’t soft. It didn’t love us. It just wanted to do its job properly, and here we were, dying all the time on its watch, inexorably, three-quarters of every class lost. It wanted us to take this wide-open shining window of opportunity and—“Fix you?” It was the only thing I could think of, but it didn’t actually provide any direction. I looked round the empty killing field: even the bones had been cleared away. “How?”

No answer came. I didn’t get any more helpful guidance, except from Precious, who gave a chirp and prodded me with her nose, wanting to go back. “I don’t understand!” I yelled at the doors. They went on placidly ticking away: the work of an army of geniuses with all the time and mana in the world at their fingertips, trying to build the safest and most clever school in the world for their children, and that hadn’t been good enough, so what did the Scholomance expect me to do?

Precious gave another squeak, vaguely exasperated, and poked me again. I thumped the left door resentfully with my fist, and then wished I hadn’t: it moved a little. Not really, not actually enough to go ajar or anything, it just trembled, barely, under my fist, enough that I could tell that if I braced myself on something and put my back and legs into it, I could have opened it. It wasn’t held shut from this side. The outer edges of the gates were stained with green and black mold, and the puffs of air coming in were coming in from outside. This was the one place where the school wasn’t just floating in the void. The real world was there, right there on the other side. If I pushed the doors open, I could walk out, into whatever secret hidden place the enclaves had chosen as the anchor point, and that would be a real place, somewhere on the Earth, with a GPS location and everything, and surely I could find someone in a day’s walk with a mobile who’d let me ring the main line of the commune and talk to Mum.

It would be an absolutely stupid thing to do, because I wouldn’t have graduated—we don’t march through the doors to get in, since if you turned the physical doors into a single point of entry, all the mals in the world would eventually be massed round it, and not a single freshman would survive the gauntlet long enough to get inside. My vague understanding of the induction spell is that we’re borrowed into here with the same kind of spells that enclaves use to borrow space from the real world, and when we go through the gates, what actually happens is we’re being paid back with interest, through a portal that sends us right back where we were taken from in the first place. If I hopped out the doors into the real world instead of going back out through the proper portal, I’d more or less be making off without paying the debt. I have no idea what the consequences would be, but they were bound to be unpleasant.

But I could do it. It was the opposite of everything that was unbearably horrible about the gym. The other side of the doors was undoubtedly deep underground in some unpleasant and probably dangerously spiky place to discourage both mals and mundanes from coming near; the smell coming through had the thick mucky stink of a stagnant sewer—an entirely likely location—and absolutely none of that mattered because it would be real, it would be outside, and I wanted to go so badly that I turned round and ran back to the maintenance shaft without letting myself look round even one more time.

The climb up was not abbreviated. It felt more as if I were paying back the speed from the earlier climb. But Precious was along with me, a warm lump on my shoulder, or scampering up a few rungs ahead of me, her white fur bright even in the dim light I’d cast on my hands. I finally crawled out of the shaft and lay flat on the floor in the seminar room with my arms and legs starfished out round me, too tired to groan more than faintly. She sat on my chest washing her whiskers fastidiously and keeping an eye out, if that was even necessary. The school was obviously looking out for me really hard. It had only sent just the right level of mals to make me swallow the indigestible lump of my pride and take mana from Chloe. If it hadn’t gone after me, Aadhya and Liu and I would’ve spent this year working so hard to build a decent pot of mana that I certainly wouldn’t have had the time and energy—much less the mana—to imagine saving anyone else. And no one else would’ve listened to me even if I had.

I stared up at the stained ceiling overhead as that thought sank in, and with an effort lifted my still-leaden arm with the power-sharer up in front of my eyes. I’d got so used to it by now I didn’t think about it anymore. But I had been pulling oceans of mana with every run, even at the discounted gym levels. Magnus and the other New York kids had probably gone round to the other enclaves at some point and demanded that they share the burden—implying that I’d kick them out of the runs if they didn’t.

No one would have listened to me if I’d gone to them with a crazy plan to get us all out together. The school had made them listen, had made them all come to me, by laying out one unsurvivable run after another. It had forced everyone to give me those oceans of mana, to put their lives into my hands. None of them had wanted to do that. So the moment I told everyone that there was nothing down there at all, that we could sail right out—

“Mu-uum,” I groaned faintly, as if she were there for me to argue with violently, but she was only inside my head, looking at me with all the desperate worry in the world furrowing her face. Keep away from Orion Lake. Was this what she’d seen? Had she caught some glimpse of what it would mean to stack me and Orion up together in a single year, and what I’d have to do in order to pay it off? Because of course I wouldn’t be able to do a thing if everyone took back their mana. But if I took their mana with a lie—it wouldn’t be freely given, after all.

Which wouldn’t hurt me in any obvious way, not the way outright maleficers get hurt. If Prasong’s little freshman-flaying scheme had worked, his anima would’ve been scarred so badly he’d probably never have been able to build mana of his own again even if he’d spent the rest of his life trying to atone and purify himself. That wouldn’t happen to me; I wouldn’t even get black nails and a faint cloud of disquiet, like Liu had, punishment for sacrificing a couple of defenseless mice to survive on. Maleficers got that kind of damage because they were yanking mana out of something that was actively fighting them, resisting them. That’s what turned it into malia. But when you got someone to hand you their mana—it didn’t hurt. You could trick someone, pressure them, lie to them, all you wanted. It wasn’t going to damage you in any way that anyone else would ever see.

Which is why that’s what enclavers did. And then they pretended it wasn’t malia, but it was. There’s a long distance between cheating someone out of a scrap of mana they didn’t urgently need, and turning into a slavering murderous vampire who couldn’t do anything decent ever again, but it’s all on the same road. Mum taught me that, spent her whole life teaching me that, and it had taken a while, but the lesson had stuck.

I knew what she’d say to the idea of doing it for someone’s own good, much less for the sake of future generations. I was only alive because she would never make that bargain. She’d been told flat-out that I was going to be a monstrous killing scourge by people who hadn’t been lying to her, and she hadn’t refused to hand me over because she didn’t believe them. She hadn’t even refused because she loved me: if that had been the only reason, she’d have taken me to live in an enclave when I was nine years old and mals started to come for me, almost five years ahead of schedule. She hadn’t done that either. She’d only refused because she wouldn’t take the first wrong step.

So maybe this was what she’d seen. Me with a beautiful gold-paved road Orion had laid out in front of me, with all the best intentions in the world, while never doing a wrong thing himself. But if I took my first wrong step onto it, who knew how far I’d go? No one could stop me flying down it at top speed, once I got started.

I sat up slowly. Precious scrambled up onto my knees as I folded myself up and twitched her nose at me anxiously. “Well,” I said to her, “let’s go and see.”

I put her into her cup and slogged up to the library. Half the reading room had more or less been turned into a war room. Everyone else from our half-official planning committee was up there: lunch had finished and Liu and Zixuan were telling them all about the upgraded effects of the lute, with pleased and happy—and massively relieved—faces all round. Orion was snoozing on a couch with his mouth hanging open and one arm dangling off limp.

“El!” Aadhya said, when I walked in. “You missed lunch, are you okay?”

Liesel didn’t wait for me to answer, just gave a quick exasperated flick of her eyes as if to say You were skiving off, weren’t you, and said to me sternly, “We have more work to do now, not less. We still do not know how far the lute will reach. It may be able to amplify everyone’s mana, but to find out, we must make an attempt at a full run sooner rather than later.”

“No,” I said. “We don’t need to do any more runs.” Everyone stopped and stared at me—most of them with absolute terror on their faces; I suppose they thought aha, it was time for the curtain to pull back from the monster or something. One girl from Mumbai enclave who I suspected had joined the planning committee to keep an eye on me even started doing a shielding spell. “Not like that,” I said crossly to her, and let the irritation help me say it. “I’ve just been down to the graduation hall. There’s nothing there.”

She paused with her hands in midair. Everyone else just gawked at me in total confusion. They’d probably have felt more sure of themselves if I had given out a maniacal cackle and told them to run for their lives.

Aadhya said tentatively, “So it’s just Patience and Fortitude…?”

“No,” I said. “They’re gone, too. There’s nothing at all. The whole place is cleared out.”

“What?” Orion had sat up and was staring at me. He sounded actually dismayed, which was a bit much, and got most people to look at him sidelong—and then actually take the idea into their own heads, to think about what it would mean, if there literally wasn’t anything—

“Are you sure?” Liesel demanded peremptorily. “How did you go down? How close did you—”

“I kicked the bloody doors, Liesel; I’m sure. Anyone who doesn’t care to take my word for it can go down themselves for the price of a ladder climb,” I said. “The shaft’s in my seminar room, other side of the north wall of the workshop. The school just popped it wide open and sent me down there to see.”

That got variations on “What?” coming out of roughly thirty mouths, and then Chloe said, “The school sent you? Why did it—but it’s been making the runs this hard, it’s been making us do all this—”

A sudden roaring of wind blew through the room, the ordinarily murmuring ventilation fans suddenly starting up loud as jet engines, and the blueprints spread out on the table—the big central table, the largest one in the reading room—all went flying off in every direction along with the sketches and plans in a gigantic blizzard of paper, to expose the silver letters inlaid into the old scarred wood: To Offer Sanctuary and Protection to All the Wise-Gifted Children of the World, and at the same time all the lights in the reading room dropped to nothing except for four angled lamps that swiveled to hit the letters with broad beams that made them shine out as if they’d been lit up from inside.

Everyone was silent, staring down at the message the school had given me, given us all. “It wants to do a better job,” I said. “It wants us to help. And before you ask, I don’t know how. I don’t think it knows how. But I’m going to try.” I looked up at Aadhya, and she was staring back at me still stunned, but I said straight to her, “Please help me,” and she gave a snort-gasp kind of a laugh and said, “Holy shit, El,” and then she sank down in a chair like her knees had given out.