Chapter 14: Patience

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 a long way—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 some sleep, 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 about you?” 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 to decide?”

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, she had been 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, “I wanted to 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 Zixuan is. 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.”

Aadhya reached out to her, and I did, too; we put our hands on her, and Liu reached out her own slightly damp hands and gripped ours, one in each, tight. “We’re going home tomorrow,” she said, and kept hold of us determinedly: we’d both flinched. We hadn’t broken that rule. You didn’t say out loud, I’m going to graduate. But Liu held on and said it again. “We’re going home tomorrow. I’m going home. And my mother is going to be so happy, and for a long time, she won’t care about anything, except that I’m back. But then she’s going to want me to want the right things again. The things that the family think are the right things.” She stopped, and took a deep breath and let it out. “But I’m not going to. I’m going to want the things I want, and help them the way I can help them. And those are going to be the right things, too.”

I reached out to Aadhya, and the three of us made a circle together: not anything formal, but still a circle, still the three of us together, holding each other up. Liu squeezed our hands again, smiling at us, her eyes bright but not dripping tears anymore, and we smiled back.

We couldn’t keep sitting there smiling like muppets the whole night, so eventually…I went back to my room—without any side trips; I did manage to resist temptation—only to find Precious sitting in a pile of stuffing in the middle of my bed, sulking ferociously, with a substantial hole dug straight through my already thin pillow. I glared at her and said, “Oh, don’t be a sore loser.” She gave me a narrow look out of her beady eyes and then turned her back and burrowed herself into the comfortable little nest of fluff.

We still weren’t talking the next morning, although with frigid courtesy she allowed me to put her in the bandolier cup to go upstairs to breakfast. She emitted a continuous stream of what I’m fairly certain were rude remarks from the moment Orion joined me, but they didn’t dampen his spirits; he beamed at me with delight and tried to take my hand again. I might have relented and let him have it for a dim stretch of the stairs going up, before we ran into other kids, all streaming up to the cafeteria.

Breakfast wasn’t stuffed crêpes or anything, but there was unburnt French toast and griddled sardines and pickled vegetables and enough of it for everyone: the school giving us all one nice final meal. The freshmen were still wolfing down theirs when Liesel got up and climbed onto her table with the large mindphone she’d talked some artificer into making for her—the school had apparently counted that as helping, too, although I questioned its value. “It is time now to review the final order of departure,” she announced—the message reached my head mostly in English, with a few scattered words of German sneaking in and a whispery echo underneath in Marathi flavored with bits of Sanskrit and Hindi—and began to read off numbers and names as if everyone in the room wasn’t already carrying the information inscribed on their brains in letters of flame.

I wasn’t paying attention, as I really didn’t need to: I knew when my turn was. After everyone else had gone, and I’d pitched Orion through, and I’d ripped up the school’s foundations and it was teetering away into the void like a sequoia getting ready to come down. Then I’d—hopefully—have just enough time to jump before the tidal wave of mals reached me. On paper I would, assuming Orion hadn’t been overwhelmed some time before then—not a remotely safe assumption—and also assuming that Liesel hadn’t fudged the numbers or, less likely, made a mistake.

So I didn’t notice Myrthe Christopher getting up on her own table until she cast her own more straightforward amplification spell and said, “Excuse me!” so loudly she managed to drown out the mindphone even inside my head. “I’m so sorry, excuse me!” I knew her only by osmosis: she’d always ranked as one of the more important enclavers, since her parents were something high up in one of the American enclaves, but it was Santa Barbara, one of the California enclaves that aren’t quite satisfied having New York rule the roost. My uncomfortably acquired circle of enclavers didn’t overlap much with hers, and she’d never stopped by the planning sessions, either.

She waited smilingly until Liesel had lowered her clipboard, then said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t want to be rude,” in a syrupy way that suggested she’d been studying to be rude for weeks. “But, like—we’re not actually doing this?”

“Excuse me?” Liesel said, with a razor-sharp edge that translated into a prickling sensation along the bottom of my skull. It landed into total silence; even the freshmen with any breakfast left on their trays had stopped eating. My own had turned into a strange cold lump in my stomach.

Myrthe cast a wincing smile around, showing how pained she was to have this awkward yet necessary conversation. “I know it’s been really weird this whole year, and we’ve all been freaking out, but, reality check—this plan is literally insane?” She pointed down at the floor. “The graduation hall is empty right now. Empty. And you want us to go wait in line behind all the other kids, the freshmen, everybody,” hilarious, nonsense, “and hand over all our mana, so Queen Galadriel here can summon a billion mals to fill it back up and eat us?” She gave a gurgle of laughter out loud at the absurdity. “No? Just—no? I get it, we had to work on something and make it look good, or else the school was going to screw us, but it’s half an hour to graduation, so I think we’re good at this point. Please don’t get me wrong, I wish we could keep it this good for everybody. We should totally give the other kids all the stuff we can spare, extra mana,” the depths of her generosity, really, “but come on.”

She wasn’t using a mindphone, but she didn’t really need to. If there was anyone who hadn’t followed, they were getting a translation right now, and after all, surely most of them had thought of it. Surely most of them hadn’t been stupid enough to take the idea seriously, had at some point thought to themselves, We’re just killing time until we can leave, aren’t we? I was surprised Liesel hadn’t announced it herself, really; she wasn’t stupid. Seduced by her own spreadsheets, probably.

And I couldn’t even blame them, because the first thing that came into my head was, I couldn’t do it alone. Without all the seniors helping, actively channeling me their mana, I wouldn’t be able to keep the summoning spell running the whole time and break the school away at the end. That was why the seniors had to wait until last to go. So if they quit, if only all the seniors quit, if they refused to help and headed downstairs and out—there wouldn’t be anything for me to do, after all. I’d just have to walk out of the empty hall, and Orion would, too. In half an hour, I’d be hugging Mum, and this time tomorrow he’d be on a plane coming to Wales, and I’d have the whole rest of my life ahead of me, full of good work, and I wouldn’t even have to feel guilty.

I couldn’t help that greedy selfish desperate thought, and it stoppered up all the furious words I wanted to stand up and yell at her. I could feel Orion gone rigid next to me, but I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see him outraged, and I didn’t want to see him looking hopefully at me, and I didn’t want to see my own choked feelings in his face. The silence was stretching out into eternities as if Chloe had just sprayed me with the quickening spell again, except some of the younger kids had started to cry, muffled into their hands or buried facedown onto the tables. Everyone was starting to turn their heads, to look at me and Orion, at Aadhya and Liu and Chloe; others were looking at Liesel still up on her own table, all of us bloody fools who had taken the insane absurd plan seriously, much too seriously. The kids in the mezzanine were crowding the railings, peering down anxiously. They were waiting for one of us to say something, and I had to say something, I had to try, but I didn’t have any words, and I knew anyway that it wasn’t going to do any good. Myrthe would just keep smiling, and what was I going to do, threaten to kill her if she wouldn’t risk her life to help me save people from being killed? Was I going to kill everyone who said no? I certainly wouldn’t have enough mana then.

Then the next table over, Cora put her chair back, legs scraping over the floor, and stood up and just said flatly, “I’m still in.”

It was loud in the room, hanging there. For a moment, nobody else said anything, and then abruptly a boy also from Santa Barbara at the other end of Myrthe’s table stood up and said, “Yeah. Fuck off, Myrthe. I’m in, too. Come on, guys,” and as soon as he’d prodded them, the other kids at the table were all moving, shoving back their chairs and getting up, too, until Myrthe was standing red-faced with a growing ring around her, and people all round the room were yelling that they were in, they were still in, and I could have cried—for either reason or both.

People kept piling on until Liesel put the mindphone back up and yelled painfully, “Quiet!” and everyone winced and shut up. “Enough interruptions. There is no more time to review. Everyone find your partners and go down to the senior dormitories right away.”

The whole incident had probably taken less time than Liesel had been about to spend on reading her announcements, but she’d clearly decided to get us into motion before anyone else could throw out a clever idea. It was just as well, because the Scholomance evidently agreed with her. The grinding of the gears that rotate the dormitories down—and send the senior level to the graduation hall—was picking up even as we left the cafeteria, and kids were still pouring down the stairwells when the warning bell for the cleansing started to go, at least half an hour early. The last few came flying in panicked from the landing on the hissing crackle of the mortal flames going, with their shadows huge in front of them in the brilliant blue-white light.

I ran to my room and reached it with the floor beneath me thrumming. Sudarat and three of the Bangkok sophomores were already waiting inside for me, piled onto the bed clinging to one another: we’d divvied the younger kids up among all the seniors for the trip downstairs. I slammed the door shut just in time as a xylophone chorus of pinging started up outside, metal shards and bits scraped off the walls flying through the corridor as we started our violent rattling progress downwards.

We hit some kind of blockage maybe halfway down that made the whole level lock up and start shaking wildly, and the younger kids all shrieked when the gears finally forced us through the obstruction and we lurched several meters onwards in a single violent jerk. My entire desk fell off into the void; thankfully I already had the sutras in their case strapped safely onto my back, and Precious tucked inside her cage inside her cup, also strapped down.

Another roaring started to go, of monstrous fans somewhere, and a hurricane-violent air current began to tear away the outer edges of the room into jagged puzzle pieces, sending them flying upwards where they’d be reassembled into a new, hopefully never-to-be-used freshman dormitory. The floor was crumbling away at an alarming clip, actually, and we still hadn’t reached the bottom. “Get off the bed!” I yelled, but Sudarat and the others hadn’t waited for me to tell them the obvious and were already scrambling off; fortunately, since a moment later my bed tipped off, too. I had to yank the door open again and we all spilled out into the corridor even as it came to a thumping, jaw-rattling halt.

Kids were pouring out of rooms all over, running towards the landing as the rooms kept breaking up around us. The bathrooms were already gaping holes of void, and the tops of the corridor walls were starting to go as well. “Keep together!” I yelled at Sudarat and the other Bangkok kids, and then they were swept away by the current, and a moment later so was I. The corridor floors got in on it and began sliding us all along towards the landing like moving walkways gone mad, dumping us all efficiently into the still-steaming and freshly cleansed graduation hall, all of us in our thousands still dwarfed inside the cavernous space.

Actually this was a sedate graduation by Scholomance standards: normally we’d all have been fighting our way through the first wave of maleficaria to get to our allies by now. And I’d known, I’d literally seen it for myself, but I hadn’t quite believed my own memory until I got my feet under me and was standing there in the empty hall, not a single mal in sight.

The doors weren’t even open yet, so we really were early. It was just as well, since several hundred people would probably have instinctively made a run for it even if they hadn’t intended to. We were all milling round in confusion; people were vomiting—efficiently, we were practiced at that—and sobbing and yelling out names all over, trying to find their friends, and then Liesel was bellowing through the mindphone, “Back! Everyone back! Clear space in front of the doors!”

A gaggle of artificers emerged from the general mass, lugging several big square contraptions I hadn’t even seen before, which fired out a volley of thin colorful streamers that fell to the ground and then attached themselves there and lit up like runways. The artificers kept firing them off over and over, crisscrossing one another to create small sections covering the floor, all color-coded and marked with the numbers Liesel had assigned the teams; everyone started running to their places and lining up.

Alchemists were painting wider stripes on the outside of the queue area, imbued with spells of protection and warding that threw up hazy shimmery walls. Zixuan already had a team helping him check over the speaker cables that had been rigged from the ceiling, doing tests from the mouthpiece and making sure the sound was coming out again from the massive first speaker dangling down in front of the doors. Another large group were going over the massive barricades that they’d built around the second shaft, the one coming down, and Orion was there near them just tossing his whip-sword in his hand lightly.

He looked over and caught me watching him and smiled so blithely that I immediately wanted to run over just to punch him in the mouth, or just possibly kiss him one last time, but before I could put either plan into action, Precious knocked open the top of her protective egg and gave an urgent squeak. I jumped and looked round to see Aadhya and Liu beckoning to me wildly from the raised platform set up to one side of the doors, where the wide mouthpiece of the speaker system had been mounted onto a stand. Liu was saying something to her own familiar Xiao Xing in his cup on her chest, presumably Tell Precious to get her stupid mistress over here.

I ran over, dodging the other kids racing to their places in all directions, and as soon as I reached them, training took over, and we were just working, the same routine we’d practiced for weeks. Aadhya quickly tuned up the lute, and Liu and I ran through a few scales together. Chloe joined us with three prepared dropper vials nestled in a small velvet-lined case: I sang warm-ups while she mixed them carefully together into a small silver cup, stirring with a narrow stick of diamond glowing with mana, and gave the shimmering pink liquid to me. I gargled with it twice and then swallowed it, and all the raspy adrenaline tightness in my throat smoothed away, my lungs swelling with air as if someone had put a bellows into my mouth. I sang out a few more practice notes and they echoed around the room in an ominous ringing way, like the tolling of a bell, and everyone in their places shuffled back from the platform a bit. Probably just as well, in case anyone had thought of having a dash at the gates in the last minute.

“Ready?” I said to Liu. She nodded, and we stepped up to the mouthpiece together. Aadhya and Chloe had already run to their own places in the queue; everyone else was there, too. I took a deep breath, and Liu picked out the opening line, and then I started singing.

I was immediately glad for every last second we’d spent practicing, because I hadn’t quite realized until that very moment that we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves. The speaker system grabbed the sound and sucked it completely in, and then carried it off through the miles and miles of speaker cable wound through the school.

Which obviously was what we wanted, of course—if the song was audibly coming from me, the mals would just stay right here and come at me; we needed the sound to come out of that last speaker right in front of the gates, and from there lead the mals to chase it down that long, long line, so they’d fill the school up before they ended up back down at the gates Orion was guarding. But it was just as well that I had every word and phrase deeply embedded in my brain and my throat and lungs, as otherwise I would have bungled the incantation completely a minute later when the first notes I’d made finally boomed out of the speaker in front of the actual doors.

The younger kids all set up a chorus of yelps and small shrieks as larval mals started to drop from the ceiling and pop out of cracks in the floor and from under bits of rubble to chase the alluring call. Real screams started a moment later as a panel of the floor popped off and a really decrepit-looking voracitor crawled out. The thing was so antique it must have been at least two centuries old, all creaking wood and antique bloodstained cast-iron machinery held together with bundles of intestine-like flesh, with long spindly arms and fingers; it had probably been hiding down there snatching students and other mals almost since the school had opened.

It was near the front of the queue, amid a crowd of freshmen. The panicking and running didn’t have a chance to get under way properly, however, because it ignored them all, fixed its dozen eyes on the line of speakers hanging from the ceiling, and set off crawling along their direction at a good healthy clip. It would presumably have kept going on into the shaft and into the school, only it didn’t have the chance, as Orion dashed over from his station and pounced on it before it got halfway.

There was some more yelling after that, too, but just a few kids who’d been splattered with the gore, and then they were drowned out by loads of people yelling and pointing and gasping: behind me, the doors had cracked. The first coruscating glimmer of the gateway spell spilled out over the steps like the light on the bottom of a swimming pool, a faint staticky crackle going and thin tendrils of the maelstrom wisping out over the floor like a hungry eldritch mal. I couldn’t be angry at Myrthe, I couldn’t; I wanted to turn and jump through more than anything in the world. I pressed my hands hard over my ears and kept singing my silent song, concentrating on the familiar feeling in my throat.

Liesel was booming out, “Group one!” before the doors had even opened fully, and the first three kids ran up the stairs holding hands, a cluster of freshmen from Paris, and vanished out of my peripheral vision. Everyone sighed a little and leaned in, and then recoiled again as a kerberoi bounded in through the gates—what one of those was doing in Paris, I’d like to know—with its heads snapping wildly. The ones on either side had a go at biting, but their teeth skidded off the protective spells the alchemists had put up, and the middle head and the body weren’t paying any mind to anything except bolting along the cable after the speakers. It was running so fast that Orion didn’t manage to get it in time; it galloped into the shaft and was gone.

But it didn’t matter, because more mals were coming, bucketloads of them, mostly dripping wet and trailing stinking sewer water. You can’t have an induction point anywhere that mundanes might see it; if you get spotted, you don’t get inducted, because the amount of mana the school would have to spend to force a portal open for you in the face of a disbelieving mundane would be absolutely insane. Which leads to having induction points in awkward out-of-the-way places, which in turn as you might imagine get ringed round by hungry mals that don’t dare attack a prepared group of grown wizards, but very much want to get into the school.

That had all been part of the plan, of course, only I hadn’t realized how sure I’d been that the plan somehow wasn’t going to work, until apparently it was working. What looked like a hundred mals had already come through even by the time Liesel yelled, “Group two!” and the second group—actually just a single freshman from the far outback of Australia—went for the gate. He had to literally leap into the gate over a river of animated bones that hadn’t stopped long enough to assemble themselves back into skeletons and were just clattering along.

The second he’d gone through, a huge eldritch-infested dingo came through, so fast that it had to have been literally standing at his induction point—presumably guarding it, since it had a binding collar round its throat. A rather dangerous strategy for protection against mals: so much of its fur had fallen off to expose the glowing vapors inside that his family couldn’t possibly have kept it under control for more than another three years at most. But they clearly had needed the help: a horde of red speckled grelspiders came pouring through almost right behind it, their talons clattering over the marble floor as they skittered alongside the line of speakers. They overtook one of the Parisian preycats along the way, and managed to devour it without actually stopping, leaving a hollowed-out furry bag of bones behind them to be crushed flat a few moments later when the radriga came stomping through after the two kids going home to Panama City had jumped.

A team of the best maths students had laid out the order of departure to maximize the flow of mals into the school. A pile of incomprehensible graphs and charts had appeared thirty seconds after the one and only time I’d asked to have the details explained to me, but I did know the general idea was to keep the open portals as far apart from one another as possible, so the turns were deliberately hopscotching round the world. Whatever the artificers had done to keep the portals open was working, too; the distinctly Australian ones kept coming for nearly two minutes.

Everything was working. The whole plan. I felt I could keep singing without a pause for weeks. I couldn’t hear even the delayed music anymore over the roaring tide of maleficaria streaming in, but the mana was flowing into me and out again into the spell. The song was meant to be a beckoning, Come, please come, a banquet waits for you, an alluring invitation, but I didn’t want to just hold open a hospitable door. I wanted to suck in every last mal of the world, and I didn’t deliberately start singing something else, but as I got properly stuck in, the spell I couldn’t hear seemed to become something harder in my mouth, a ruthless demand: Come now, come all of you. I don’t know if I’d changed the words, or if I’d just gone wordless entirely, but the maleficaria were answering: more and more of them were coming, a solid wave of bodies streaming in. Orion wasn’t even fighting any of them anymore, he was just randomly sticking his sword or firing attacks off into the mass, and some of them were falling down dead. The rest kept running along the line of speakers and going headlong up into the school.

I did start to worry that with so many mals coming in, they’d get in the way of the kids trying to get out. I couldn’t do anything about it, the only thing I could do was the calling spell, but I didn’t need to: someone else was doing something about it. Alfie had got all the London seniors to come out of their place in queue with him. They joined hands and made a circle for him, and with them at his back helping, pouring mana into him, he raised up his evocation of refusal and shaped it into a narrow corridor between the front of the queue and the gates, so it let kids go running through and shunted the mals off to the side instead.

Other kids started jumping out of the queue to freshen up the protection spells, or to help the kids on the edges when one of the mals tried to snatch themselves a bite for the road. We hadn’t planned on that, hadn’t practiced it. We hadn’t realized it would be a problem. But there were so many mals that some of them were being pushed to the edges of the widening current and bumping up against the queue area, close enough that the tasty young freshman in the hand was able to overcome the tantalizing lie of the infinite banquet in the bush. But seniors were jumping out of the queue to help, fighting the mals off and pushing them back into the torrent; the younger kids were healing scratches for one another, giving sips of potions to anyone injured.

Liesel started picking up the pace, too: I think she realized that getting enough mals wasn’t going to be a problem. She began firing off the freshmen at a much more rapid clip, waving them through almost without a pause, just yelling, “Go! Go!” The tide of incoming mals didn’t slow any, but the queue began to melt away. Zheng and Min waved to Liu and me before they jumped; maybe two minutes later, Sudarat called, “El, El, thank you!” and ran through with the Bangkok sophomores.

I really hoped they had got clear of their induction point in a hurry, because not a minute later, a truly gigantic naga squeezed its widemouthed hissing head in—or rather its first head, which was followed by two others, before the rest of it muscled in. The heads nearly stretched the entire length from floor to ceiling, endangering the speaker cable. There were lots of yells: it might well have been what had taken out Bangkok. Naga that size are definitely potential enclave-killers, because if you don’t stop them before they get inside your wards, then once they’re in they’ll start thrashing wildly to rip the place apart.

Which it would certainly have done here if given half a chance. I was about to frantically wave Liu in for an instrumental section, which had been our plan if I needed to stop long enough to kill anything especially gruesome, but before I could, Orion took a flying leap from the floor and straight into the middle head’s mouth. It paused and then a moment later he shredded his way out of the base of the neck in a whirlwind, hailing unpleasantly fishy bits and bones and ichor in all directions. All three heads toppled into the still-flowing tide of other maleficaria, and sank beneath it, devoured in less than a minute.

Orion landed in the full churning current still whirling off the detritus, and the mals actually split to go around him as he just stood there, bright-eyed and not breathing particularly hard, and cracked his neck to one side like he’d just got warmed up properly. He even gave me a quick infuriating grin before he plunged back into the fray.

Five minutes later, the very last of the freshmen were gone, and we were well into the sophomores. The mals had squeezed Alfie’s tunnel of access until it was barely big enough to go one across, and we only had fifteen minutes left, so the pacing had been thrown to the winds and everyone was just running at the gates as soon as they came to the head of the queue. I didn’t know any of the kids going now: they were a river of faces that I’d never talked to, never shared a classroom with. Even if I’d sat with them at table in the years before this one, taking a desperation seat with younger kids, I would have kept my head down; I didn’t remember them.

Some of them looked at me as they came up close to the head of the queue, and I saw my reflection in their faces: the ocean-green light flickering round me, the mana shining out from beneath my skin, tinted golden-bronze except where it escaped around my eyes and fingernails and mouth, turning me into a glowing lamp upon my pedestal. They ducked their heads and hurried by, and I thought of Orion saying There are normal people and we’re not, and maybe he was right, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t know those normal kids and maybe I’d never know them, but each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn’t been written yet, and in its place I’d inscribed one line with my own hand: And then they graduated from the Scholomance.

They were out, so many kids were safely out, and so many mals were still pouring in—mals that wouldn’t be out there to kill anyone else. I wanted them ferociously, wanted them beneath my command, and my desire fueled the spell even more. The mana should have been running low by then: the juniors were more than half gone, and taking their mana with them. But even as I felt the flow waver a little, the first sense of the tide beginning to ebb away, a fresh wave overflowed the banks. I didn’t know what it was at first, and then through my muffled ears I heard people yelling in dismay, and I looked up: the tide of mals had made it through the school, and the first ones had come crashing into the barricade.

I had to keep singing, but I watched them hit, clenched with fear: it was too soon, ten minutes too soon. First there were two or three, and then there were ten, and then almost instantly there was a solid thrashing wall of malice backed up, roaring and hissing and clawing each other in their hunger to get to Orion, and through him to us. Everyone still in the room tensed, and if they hadn’t been packed into the queue by then, with a torrent of mals going by on the other side, people would have broken; I’m sure of it. We’d hoped, we’d planned, for Orion to hold the barricade for just a minute or two, no longer, but we still had more than a quarter of the queue waiting, and it wasn’t possible for anyone to hold off that mass. It wasn’t the graduation horde, it was orders of magnitude built upon it, unstoppable, and he’d simply be smothered and overrun.

Except he wasn’t.

The first wave of mals came at him and died so fast that I didn’t even see how he killed them, and I was watching with unblinking desperation, already tensing in agony, getting ready to do—something, anything, as wild as I’d been watching Nkoyo from the other side of the gymnasium doors. The next wave swept over him, and a handful of them made it past, but only a few steps past; he broke out of the mass of already collapsing corpses, still alight with stupid grinning satisfaction, and caught the last running sherve by its skinny rat tail and dragged it still flailing wildly along behind him as he plunged without a pause back into the fight.

Mana was surging into me; more than a wave, an ocean. “Oh my God,” I heard Chloe say, sounding choked, and when I darted a glance over, I saw she and Magnus and the other New York seniors were all staggering, all their allies too. The power-sharer on my wrist was glowing vividly, like all of theirs, and they were all clutching at any kids round them who would take a handout, literally flinging mana at them—the mana that Orion was suddenly pouring into the shared power supply. The mals were still dying so fast it didn’t seem real, as if they were coming apart even as they got to him.

I hadn’t quite believed, even after Chloe had told me, that literally all the kids from New York had just coasted along for three solid years on the mana Orion had supplied them; I hadn’t understood his whinging about how low he was. But now he was finally being filled up again, enough to share, and it was coming in what felt like a limitless flood. He hadn’t let on how bad it really was, I realized belatedly; he’d only taken the bare minimum. Everything he’d done this year, he’d done starved as low as ever I’d been, in the days before I’d put Chloe’s sharer on my wrist. He’d spent his senior year, the year when our powers really bloom, without enough mana to do what he could do.

And now that he finally had it, I thought I might understand better what he’d told me, because it was so effortless for him. He wasn’t locked in a grim, desperate struggle for his life, counting every drop of mana like a tumbling grain of sand in an hourglass. His every movement, each graceful killing sweep of his sword-whip, every spell he cast, every effort he put forth, they all fed him back, and you couldn’t help but feel, watching it, that he was doing what he was meant for—something so perfectly aligned with his nature that it was as easy as breathing. It made sense suddenly that you’d like it, that it would be everything you wanted to do, if there were something you were this good at, and it rewarded you with endless buckets of mana on top. Your own body would teach you to want it more than anything—want it so much you’d have to learn to want anything else.

Orion didn’t look over at me again, even when he surfaced in between the killing waves; he was too busy. It was just as well, because if he’d looked over at me, I’d have smiled stupidly back at him. I was glad, so glad, even pinned down in this room with all the monsters in the world trying to come at me, at Orion, because it wasn’t despair in his way after all; it was just the clumsiness of learning. He could want other things. I wasn’t the only thing he’d ever want; I was just the first other thing he’d wanted.

The mals were still pouring in, a sea of horrors, and as the seniors started to go, even bigger ones started to come as well: these were the mals who’d been further away from the portals, who’d caught the song calling them in when freshmen or sophomores had first gone through, and now had reached the same induction point and were making it through. Some of them were so monstrous you could barely stand to look at them: zjevarras and eidolons, pharmeths and kaidens, deep nightmare creatures that lurked beneath enclaves waiting for a chance to devour. But even when the worst twisted unreal things came in, there wasn’t any screaming or panic anymore. It was only seniors left now, and we were the survivors of a nightmare ourselves, the ones who’d endured the Scholomance—the last ones who would ever endure it. That wasn’t just a dream anymore; I could see that hope being made real in the sheer number of mals coming through, and Orion was making room for more almost as fast as I could bring them in.

I was starting to believe that it was going to work. I didn’t want to; I was fighting hope away as fiercely as Orion was fighting mals. But I couldn’t help it. The golden seconds were counting away—Liesel had inscribed the timing midair in letters of fire so we could all watch them going. When they reached the two minute mark, that was when I’d stop singing and strike the final blow instead. Only seven and a half minutes left, only seven minutes left, and then Aadhya was calling, “El!” and I looked over and found her: she was almost at the front of the swiftly moving queue. She was smiling at me, her face wet with tears, and in their shine I wasn’t a glowing marvel after all, I was just me, just El, and I wanted to climb down and run to hug her, but all I could do was smile back from up on the platform, and as she took the last few steps forward, she pointed at me and then held her palm against her face: Call me! Her phone number, and Liu’s and Chloe’s and Orion’s, were all inscribed on the thin bookmark that held my place inside the sutras. I didn’t have a phone, and neither did Mum, but I’d promised I’d find a way to call her, if we made it—

And then, the promise was different. It was only if I made it: Aadhya took the last few steps up the dais, and she went through the doors, and she was—out. She was out, she was safe, she had made it.

I knew all the faces going out now. Some of them didn’t like me; Myrthe stalked past without looking towards me, chin up and mouth tight, except as the last kid in front of her went, and she saw the gateway seething right in front of her, her whole face crumpled into sobs and she was fighting to keep her eyes open even while she ran headlong out, and I was glad, I was glad for her, glad that she’d made it, too; I wanted them all to make it. I’d missed Khamis going, and Jowani and Cora; they were already gone. Nkoyo blew me a kiss with both hands before she ran up the steps and out. I didn’t spot Ibrahim, I’d missed him going out, but I saw Yaakov go past with his head bowed and rocking slightly, wearing a beautiful worn prayer shawl whose fringe was shining with light, his lips still moving even as he walked, and when he passed me, he looked up and I felt a warmth like the feeling of Mum’s hand stroking over my hair, calming and steadying.

The New York seniors were coming up: Chloe waved wildly to catch my eye and put up heart-hands in the air before she went through, and right behind her, Magnus gave me a thumbs-up, condescending to the last, and I didn’t even mind. I’d got them out. I was going to get everyone out. There were only maybe a hundred kids left in the queue—ninety—eighty—no one left I knew, except Liesel going hoarse and Liu beside me playing steadily on, the guiding notes I couldn’t hear but felt in my feet, and Alfie and Sarah and the rest of the London seniors—who should have gone by now; I knew they’d got a higher number than New York in the lottery. But they’d all stayed back, to help Alfie hold the aisle for everyone else.

I wouldn’t have expected it of them, of enclave kids; they’d been raised to do the opposite, to get themselves the hell out. But they’d also been raised on the party line, hadn’t they: they’d been told, just like the school itself, that Manchester and London and their heroic allies had built the Scholomance out of generosity and care, trying to save the wizard children of the world; and maybe just like the school, it had sunk in more than their parents might have wanted. Or maybe if you only gave someone a reasonable chance of doing some good, even an enclave kid might take it.

I didn’t know anyone else, but we were coming to the very end of the line, and the last group of enclavers, going to Argentina; they’d drawn one of the lowest numbers of the lottery, but they hadn’t kicked up a fuss and demanded to be jumped ahead, or else; and because they hadn’t, none of the other unlucky enclavers had been able to complain. There were four of them, and they went through single-file and fast, one after another, except the last one recoiled screaming—the first screaming I’d heard for a while—as a maw-mouth came rolling in through the gates.

There wasn’t any question about where it had come from, horribly. The boy from Argentina who’d just gone out of the portal was caught, struggling and screaming, begging for help, for mercy, to be let out, in absolute and familiar terror, as the maw-mouth went on gulping up his body, even as it came through.

I must have stopped singing. I don’t think I could’ve kept singing. It wasn’t a very big maw-mouth. It might even have been smaller than the last one, the first one, the only one I’d ever seen or touched before—the one that would keep living in me for every last minute of the rest of my life. It only had a cluster of eyes, almost all of them brown and black, fringed with dark lashes, horribly like the eyes of the boy being swallowed, and some of them were still conscious enough to be full of horror. Some of its mouths were still whimpering faintly, and others sobbing or gagging.

But it was going to get bigger. It caught three other mals even before it was all the way inside, and reeled them in and swallowed them—even before it had finished engulfing the boy, despite their own thrashing; they didn’t have enclaver-quality shields to hold it off. And the boy would go too, soon enough; as soon as the last of his mana ran out.

“Tomas, Tomas!” the Argentine girl was sobbing, but she wasn’t trying to reach out to him. No one tried to touch a maw-mouth. Not even other mals, not even the mindless most-hungry ones, as if even they could sense what would happen to them if they did.

There was bile climbing up my throat. Liu was still playing; she’d thrown a quick horrified look up at me, but she’d kept going. Alfie was still holding the aisle, with all the London kids behind him, even though surely all they wanted was to flee out the gates, to run for more than their lives, because the worst thing a maw-mouth did was never kill you.

I’d asked them all to help me, and they had; I’d asked them to be brave, to do the good thing that they had a chance of doing, and I hadn’t the right to ask them to do it if I wasn’t going to do it myself. So I had to go down to the maw-mouth. I had to, but I couldn’t, except past it, far down the hall, at the barricade, I could see Orion’s head turn round. If I didn’t go down, he’d come. He’d leave the barricade, let the tidal wave of mals come in behind him, and come for the maw-mouth, because Tomas was screaming, screaming in rising desperation, as the maw-mouth’s tendrils began to creep inquisitively up his chest, towards his mouth and eyes.

I stepped down from the platform and crossed the dais. The last kids in the queue parted to let me through, staring at me as I went, and the shimmer of the alchemical wards ran like water over my skin as I went through it. The mals were still coming through the portal, but they were parting in a wide circle around the maw-mouth, which had paused perhaps for a little digesting, and to feel around inside the scorched outline that Patience had left behind, as if it was considering where to make itself at home. It was like a tiny little inkblot inside that monstrous outline. It couldn’t have had that many lives inside it yet. And I had my own shield up, Mum’s simple brilliant shielding spell that she’d given away to everyone in the world who wanted it, and all it took was mana that you’d built yourself, or that a loving friend had freely given, and Orion was still pouring power into me like a waterfall.

I had to shut my eyes so I wasn’t looking at it, and then I pretended that the gates were in front of me, the gates with Mum on the other side, Mum and my whole future, and that was true, because I couldn’t get there until I’d gone through this, because the bloody horrible universe wanted me to suffer, and I jumped forward into the maw-mouth. Even as the horrible surface of it closed over me, I cast La Main de la Mort with all my rage and the mana of a thousand mals behind it, and I cast it again, and again, and again, my whole face and body clenched tight, and I don’t know how long it was, it was forever, it was three seconds, it was my entire life stretched out to infinity, and then it was over and Liu was yelling at me, “El! El, look out!”

I opened my eyes, kneeling in wet, and turned just in time to cast my killing spell one more time, automatically, right at the slavering horka that had just erupted in through the portal. It tumbled instantly dead, and its corpse went sliding past me down the steps, riding the horrible putrescent gush still draining out of the translucent skin of the maw-mouth, and three other kids were—they were yanking Tomas up, out of the puddle of its remains. His legs where the maw-mouth had enveloped him and started trying to unspool him were raw and bloody in patches, and the power-sharer still on his wrist was crackling; he’d probably overloaded it, pulling enough mana to shield himself. Sarah pulled it off his wrist and flung it away from him; it vanished into the streaming mals and the minor explosion was muffled by their bodies.

I knelt there staring at them, shaking. I didn’t quite believe I’d done it, and I didn’t quite believe it was over, the whole world gone unreal and blurry for me: the streaming mals still going by, Liu’s music still carrying our song.

“Get up!” Liesel was yelling at me. “Get up, you stupid girl! It is time! There are only two minutes left!”

It worked, and I managed to get my feet back under me roughly at the same time poor Tomas did. One of the others had given him a drink of potion, and he was looking very calm and glazed; the last girl from Argentina had got his arm over her shoulders and was helping him balance. Then I realized why Liesel had been yelling so vigorously: Alfie had moved the evocation to cover us, to save us from simply being overrun, but that meant no one else could go. He was trying to force it back into place, against the pressure of the mals still pouring in, and the clock was almost down to the final minute.

But there were only twenty kids left. I didn’t go back into the honeypot calling spell with Liu. Instead I went to Alfie and put my hand on his shoulder, then put my hands beneath his, to take the evocation over from him; he slowly and carefully eased his hands out, and gasped and nearly fell over with release as it came off him. I got a secure grip on it, and then I pushed mana into it, the mana that was roaring endlessly into me, and widened the evocation, shoving mals aside, to make an archway to the gates.

“Go!” I said, and the London kids were gone, and the rest of the line behind them; Liesel jumped down from the platform herself, shoved the mindphone into my hand—I resisted it for a moment, what was the point with everyone gone, but she so determinedly wrapped my hand around it that I gave up and took it, and then she was gone.

The queue was empty. Liu picked the last few notes, letting them fade away so the song-spell would end gracefully, and then she jumped down from the platform with the lute and ran past me through the gateway without wasting a moment on goodbye: the gift of leaving me every last second of the one precious minute we had left, with the music still winding its way through the speakers, before the mals all broke loose from the honeypot enchantment; she only reached out a hand and brushed her fingertips against my arm as she flew by.

And then it was the end. It was just me and Orion—Orion who was still fighting in the mouth of the barricade. The mals were trying and trying to get inside, to get past him, but he’d held them back. The endless tide of them would overwhelm and smother him eventually, even him. There were hours of them—days and weeks of them—already built up; sooner or later he’d fall down for sheer exhaustion, for thirst and hunger and lack of sleep, and they’d have him. But he didn’t need to hold them off for hours, for days, for weeks. He only needed one minute and twenty-six seconds.

“Orion!” I called to him—of course he didn’t do anything as sensible as look over, much less come running—and then, with a half-annoyed, half-grateful thought to Liesel, I yanked up the mindphone and yelled into it. “Orion!” Even though he was fighting, he jerked and looked back at me, and then he killed six more mals and threw a sprinting spell on his feet and put on a flaming burst of speed and skidded to a stop beside me.

“Go through!” I said, but he didn’t even bother to say no, just swung round and put himself between me and the mals now pouring into the hall through the barricade. They weren’t even coming for us right away. I doubt any of them wanted to come at Orion after the last fifteen minutes of slaughter, and the music had already stopped for them, the promised banquet vanished before they’d even reached it. They were only spilling in now because they hadn’t anywhere else to go, with all the pressure pent up behind them.

I planted my feet on the dais and started in on the supervolcano incantation. The first ley lines spiked out from under my feet, running to all the walls like the coronal lines of a sunburst, and then long curving lines went swinging back and forth over the floor after them. When the whole floor was covered, all of them shot together up the walls and through the ceiling, and for a moment I could feel the whole building in my hands, yielding to me—

Yielding the same way the gym floor had yielded to me, that day with all the enclavers ready to fight each other. Yielding—to give me a chance to stop the killing. To save more children.

I hadn’t expected to feel sorry. I hadn’t allowed myself to expect that I’d even make it to this moment, so I hadn’t imagined what it would be like if I did, but even if I had, I don’t think I could have imagined that. But for a moment, I was sorry: the Scholomance had done everything it could for us, given us ungrateful sods everything it had, like that awful story about the giving tree, and here I was about to chop it down. I paused, in that moment between the two parts of the incantation, and though I had to clench every hardened muscle in my gut to keep from flying apart with the potential of the spell gathered in me, I managed to say, softly, “Thank you.” Then I plunged over the line.

I’d never completely cast the spell before, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I’ll ever cast it again. As soon as I was inside it, I knew it wasn’t really a spell for a supervolcano: that was just an example. It was for devastation, for the shattering of a world. I’d felt instinctively that it would work to take the school down; now I knew that it would.

And the mals knew, too. They did come at us, then—not to kill us but to escape. The honeypot spell had died out, and the last portals had closed; no more of them were coming through the gates. But the whole school was crammed full of them, every last nook and cranny jam-packed, and all of them could feel the end coming: the warning pillar of ash and fire going up into their sky, the spreading grey cloud.

But Orion had flipped his sword-wand-thing open into a long, whiplike length, and he was keeping the whole dais clear; any mal that tried to set so much as a toe on the steps, he killed, and none of them wanted to come up. Little ones tried to dart out through the sides; he killed them with rapid flicks that my eyes couldn’t even follow. I was chanting the final verses of the incantation, and the floor was beginning to heave beneath us. I could feel walls parting, pipes bursting, all through the school, and the low groaning of the floor as it began to separate from the dais. The seam all round was opening up, and a thin black line of empty void was beginning to show through.

The mals were going into a frenzy: they stopped being reluctant, and Orion was fighting furiously, killing them in every direction: nightflyers and shrikes diving at us, ghauls howling in the air, eldritch horrors whispering frantically. There was a squealing of metal behind me, too: the doors were starting to swing shut again. The fiery letters in the air were counting down: forty-one seconds left, and time to go. If a few mals did escape now, after we were gone, it didn’t matter. The job was done; we’d done it. I deliberately stopped on the last syllable but one, and let the spell go. The air around me rippled with the shudder of the spell traveling out—not quite finished, but so close that it would tip over to completion on its own in another moment. I laughed in sheer triumph and cast the evocation of refusal round us and shoved it outward, tumbling the mals away from me and Orion down the steps.

Orion wobbled himself, on the lowest step, and looked round wildly at the mals that had just been pushed out of his reach. “Let’s go!” I shouted to him, and he turned and stared up at me, blankly.

And then the whole floor shook beneath us, and it wasn’t because of my spell. The ocean of mals surrounding us parted like the Red Sea, frantically frothing away to either side as a titanic shape bigger than the doors themselves erupted out of the shaft and came surging towards us, so enormous I couldn’t even recognize it as a maw-mouth at first: the endless eyes and mouths so tiny they were only speckles scattered like stars over its bulk. Any mal that couldn’t get out of its way was consumed without a pause; it just rolled over them and they were gone.

It wasn’t Patience; it wasn’t just Patience. It was Patience and Fortitude. Scorched and starved, their graduation hall picked completely clean, they’d finally turned on each other. They’d chased each other through the dark underbelly of the school—the school had surely opened spaces up for them deliberately, luring them away from the gates to clear the hall for our escape—until one of them had devoured the other and settled in to quietly digest its enormous meal in peace, a century of feeding in a single go, only to be stirred up into a panic when it had felt the school beginning to topple.

All my triumph fell away from me like a long tail of ashes crumbling off the end of a stick of incense. I’d been getting ready to be proud of myself, self-satisfied: I’d done it, I’d saved everyone, I’d purged the world of maleficaria, I’d faced my greatest fear and I’d come through it. I’d been ready to go through the door and boast to Mum of what I’d done, to wait with queenly grace for my knight in shining armor to come and receive my hand, his reward and mine, and set out on our crusade to save any tarnished bits of the world that still needed to be polished up.

I actually laughed out loud, I think, I’m not sure; I couldn’t hear myself, but it felt like a mad frightened giggle in my throat. It was just so utterly hilarious that I’d ever imagined I could face this. I couldn’t form any words, any coherent plan. Patience slammed into the evocation of refusal like a tidal wave hitting a seawall, sloshing fully over it like a dome encasing us; eyes smushed up against the surface and staring down at us blankly. It slid back down and came at us again: mana roared through me with the impact, blinding. I couldn’t have cast a killing spell even if I could have done anything whatsoever: it was taking everything I had to keep the evocation up, against a monstrosity that wouldn’t ever take no for an answer.

Then Precious put her head out and gave a shrill squeak, and I realized—I didn’t have to. “Orion!” I screamed. “Orion, come on!” He was standing there staring up at Patience through the shimmery dome evocation. I didn’t actually wait for him to respond; even while I was screaming I had already grabbed him by the arm. I pulled him back with me up the stairs, towards the doors. They were grinding a bit; they had just started to swing slowly shut. The crack around the base of the dais was widening.

Patience slammed into the evocation again, and I nearly fell over, prickling starbursts filling my eyes. I was hanging on Orion’s arm when my vision cleared; he hadn’t moved. I didn’t speak again, just yanked on him, dragging him one more step back.

But he wasn’t taking his eyes off Patience. There was a fierce terrible light in his face, that hunger I’d seen in him before, wanting a thing dead. And I couldn’t blame him: if anything in the universe wanted killing, it was that thing, that horrible monstrous thing; it needed to die. And the crack around the base of the dais was still widening, but it was going just a little bit more slowly than the doors were closing.

It wouldn’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things if ten or twenty other mals made it out, but it would matter if Patience made it out, if that sack of endless death escaped, to keep gnawing eternally on its victims’ bones and gobble up who knew how many countless others, unstoppable and forever.

But our time was running out: the hanging numbers of flame were counting down the last seconds. “We can’t!” I yelled at him, and turning braced my whole body and flung one hand out, at the end of a stiff arm, to hold Patience off again through one more thundering blow. I gulped air and turned back to haul Orion up one more step, to the very edge of the gateway, and then I let go of his arm and caught his face in both hands and pulled him round to look at me. “Orion! We’re going!”

He stared down at me. The seething colors of the gateway were shining in his eyes, mottling his skin, and he leaned in towards me, like he wanted to kiss me. “Do you want to get kneed again? Because I will!” I snarled at him, in outrage.

He jerked back from me, more ordinary color flushing into his cheeks. His eyes cleared for a moment; he looked back at Patience, and then he laughed once—he laughed, a short laugh, and it was awful. He turned to me and said, “El, I love you so much.”

And then he shoved me through the gate.