Fullepub 
Chapter 5: Quattria
“Ishould do thisin the lab,” Orion said.
“You don’t need the equipment in front of your face to copy out a clear recipe, Lake, and you needn’t think you’re being clever, either,” I said, because what he really meant was, he should get to wander around the corridors and poke his beaky nose into every room on the alchemy floor until he found some poor unsuspecting half-grown nightcrawler or striga and got to slaughter them. “How you’ve got through three and a quarter years in here without learning when you have to pay attention to your work is beyond me.”
He groaned deeply and put his head down on the desk, which was my old study carrel in the nook of the library. I’d taken great pleasure in using New York mana to clear out the still-waiting booby trap that Magnus had left for me last term; it was one of the first things I’d done when Chloe had given me the power-sharer. Hauling Orion up to the library and shoving him into a dark corner was my latest attempt to actually get him to do his remedial alchemy assignment, which was absolutely going to disintegrate him before the end of the month, along with several innocent bystanders and possibly me if he didn’t actually buckle down to it. I’d started making him show me his progress every evening at dinner, and since there hadn’t been any in the week and a half since the last time he’d nearly got me disintegrated, I’d dragged him out of bed at first bell this fine Saturday morning and marched him upstairs after breakfast.
Even in here, with no distractions, he spent at least ten minutes gazing woebegone at his lab instructions for every one minute he spent actually reading them. “What is wrong with you?” I asked, after another hour and several more heaved sighs. “You weren’t a complete incompetent before. Are you getting senioritis or something?” That’s a highly fatal condition in the Scholomance.
“I’m just tired,” he said. “The mals keep hiding from me, there aren’t enough of them, I’m low on mana all the time—no, I don’t want it!” he added with a snap, when I reached for the power-sharer on my wrist again. “If I could find any mals to use mana on, I wouldn’t need to suck it from the pool!”
“What you need to use mana on is your alchemy assignment, so stop being a numpty, take some, and get it done!” I said.
He ground his teeth and then said sulkily, “Fine, but just give me some, don’t give me the sharer.”
That made less than no sense, since you lose some mana in each transfer. Not loads or anything, but even a little bit was a pointless waste of someone else’s deeply annoying work. “Is this some sort of kinky thing you’ve got going?” I said suspiciously.
“No! You know I can’t have access to the pool.”
“Right, because you’ve got lousy mana discipline and you’ll pull gobs when you’re not paying attention,” I said. I wasn’t going to coddle him about it. “So what? Pay attention for five seconds.”
His alchemy assignment had suddenly developed a powerful fascination, judging by how hard he was staring down at it. “It’s not—it doesn’t work that way.”
“What, if you get access you’ll suck the whole thing dry involuntarily?” I said, sarcastically, except he flushed red as though that was really on the table. “Are you speaking from some kind of experience here, or—”
“I got a power-sharer to practice with six months before induction, like everybody else,” Orion said in totally flat tones. “I sucked the entire enclave’s active reservoir dry in half an hour. Even my mom couldn’t pull me off it.” I gawked at him in disbelief. He didn’t turn his head, just twitched his shoulders in a stiff, brief shrug. “She thinks it’s got something to do with me being able to pull from mals. That it’s the same kind of channel, and I can’t tell the difference.”
I was staring at him in fascination. “Why didn’t you just—pop?” It sounded like filling a water balloon from a firehose. I’ve got what anyone would call a reasonable mana capacity, namely a hundred times the average, and even that couldn’t be a noticeable fraction of the active mana reservoir of the entire New York enclave. He only shrugged impatiently, as if he’d never bothered to give it a thought.
“And what on earth did you use it all for? That much mana, you should still be coasting along for the next ten years even if you were doing major arcana every day.”
“I didn’t want to take the mana! I put it back! As soon as my dad made me the one-way sharer.” He held up his wrist with his narrow band around it. He sounded a little frayed, and it occurred to me: of course those wankers at his enclave had probably made him feel like a maleficer over it, or worse. One of the more common ways that enclaves get taken down is if one of their enemies gets a traitor on the inside to steal a batch of the enclave’s mana pool and hand it over, and then the enemy enclave can destroy them using their own power. It’s happened a handful of times, all of them a popular subject for wizard storytelling, at least among kids who don’t live in enclaves. It might well be how Bangkok had been taken down, in fact.
“How long did it take your dad to make it?” I asked, and Orion’s shoulders hunched.
“A week,” he muttered. I imagine all the grown wizards in New York had really enjoyed a thirteen-year-old walking around with the mana to wreck their entire enclave in his belly, and had made sure he enjoyed that week just as much as they did.
I wanted to go throw rocks at them, and also possibly to put my arms round Orion and hug him, but obviously those were equally impossible, so instead I just gave him a bracing thump on the shoulder and said heartily, “Let’s set you to rights, then.”
I pulled a substantial helping of mana through the power-sharer. I’d only ever been taking mana out of the pool for crisis situations; it felt odd doing it deliberately, without anything threatening me. It wasn’t like getting mana out of the crystals Mum gave me, the mana I stored myself; that mana had a different kind of feel to it, a bit rougher round the edges, like I could still feel the work and pain that I’d put into it. Or maybe it was just that when I did it, I was always thinking of the work and pain I’d have to go through to replace anything I took. It was easier and smoother to pull mana back out of the shared pool, the pool I didn’t have to fill up all by myself, and I was already hopelessly used to it. Orion wasn’t the only greedy one. I could’ve gladly drunk of it until I filled up every empty corner of myself.
But instead I took a carefully measured amount, the amount I usually put in on brewing an alchemy recipe myself, and I put my hand on his chest and nudged it at him. He gave a gasp and shut his eyes, covering my hand with his and pressing it there a moment, and I could feel his chest expanding and his heart beating thump and his skin warm through the thin worn fabric of his t-shirt—at least it was clean, I’d made him change it and shower this morning, but we’d climbed four flights of stairs and I could smell him a bit anyway, except it was a nice smell, and he opened his eyes and stared at me and kept his hand over mine, mana flowing between us, and I was almost certain something was going to happen and that I wasn’t going to stop it happening, and while I was also almost certain that it was a bad idea, it felt like the sort of bad idea that’s great fun at the time, and then Orion yanked his hand back squalling, “Ow!” His thumb was dripping blood. Precious had climbed out of her cup and down my arm without me even noticing and bit him.
I glared at her incredulously while Orion whimpered his way through digging out a plaster from his backpack and covering up the mark of her deeply planted incisors. She sat on the edge of the desk washing her face and whiskers with an air of enormous satisfaction. “I don’t need a chaperone, much less one who’s a mouse,” I hissed at her under my breath. “Aren’t you lot having babies when you’re a month old?” She only twitched her nose at me dismissively.
Orion avoided looking at me at all the rest of the morning, which was quite a trick when we were sitting next to each other. Of course, I managed it myself, too. I wasn’t at all tempted to do otherwise. Even in the moment, whatever we’d been about to do had seemed like a bad idea, and thankfully I wasn’t in the moment anymore. I’d never been in a moment with anyone before and I didn’t like it at all. What business did my brain have coming up with a patently stupid idea like kissing Orion Lake in the stacks instead of doing my classwork? It felt like nothing more than the symptoms of a mindworm infestation, per the description in the sophomore maleficaria textbook: mysterious and uncharacteristic foreign thoughts inserting themselves at unwanted and unpredictable times. If only I had a mindworm infestation. All I had was Orion sitting next to me in his too-small t-shirt from sophomore year that was the only clean one he had left this week and his arm about four inches away from mine.
I spent those three hours staring at my latest poem from Myrddin class, which strangely refused to translate itself. At this rate, soon I’d start failing my own classes. To add insult to injury, when the bell for lunch rang, Orion sat back in his chair and sighed and said, “There, I got it,” and he’d finished the entire worksheet. He’d still have to actually brew the potion, but that wasn’t a horrible burden: it was a reflex-boosting concoction that would make him even more of a terror to mals everywhere. It was an outrageously good remedial assignment. My remedial alchemy assignments are always poisons that kill instantly, kill gruesomely, or sometimes kill instantly and gruesomely.
“Good,” I said sourly, packing up. “Do you need any more help with it, Lake, or do you think you can manage the measuring spoons after lunch without supervision?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, with a glare, and then he remembered that something had almost happened and apparently he didn’t think it had been such a bad idea as all that, because he stopped glaring and blurted, “Unless you want to come,” which was horribly absurd: Want to come help me with my remedial alchemy assignment down in the lab was possibly the worst date ever and he had absolutely no business inviting anyone to do it, and I had absolutely no business even thinking about saying yes.
And I’d also promised Aadhya to help her tune the lute this afternoon, so I couldn’t say yes. Just as well. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said coolly, as I snatched up my last two books. He went sheepish and curled in, and I swept away into the aisle back towards the reading room and the stairs, silently congratulating myself on having stomped on his aspirations, except as we started to clear our trays, Aadhya said to me, “Are we still on for tuning the lute now?” and Orion shot a narrow-eyed look across the table at me like Oh so you would have said yes otherwise wouldn’t you. I avoided his eyes. He didn’t need any more ideas than he already had, and neither did I. Instead I hurried off with Aadhya to an empty classroom to work on the lute, only the instant we got clear of other people she nudged me in the arm and raised her eyebrows and was all, “Wellllll?”
“What?” I said.
She gave me a shove. “Are you dating now?”
“No!”
“Oh, come on, seriously, look me in the face and tell me you didn’t kiss at least once up there,” Aadhya said.
“We didn’t!” I said, in glad and perfect honesty, and at dinner I grudgingly gave Precious the three ripe red grapes out of the fruit cup I’d bagged that was otherwise only full of tired-looking honeydew and pale underripe pineapple chunks that stung in my mouth. “Don’t take this as encouragement,” I told her. She accepted them with smug graciousness and ate all three one after another and went to sleep in her cup with her tiny belly distended.
There’re almost no holidays in the Scholomance. They’d be a pointless fiction, but that’s not why we don’t have them; we don’t have them because we—and the school—can’t afford them. We need to be working, all the time, just to keep the lights on. So there’s only graduation and induction day, on the second of July, and the semesters are divided around the first of January, which is also when the senior class rankings get posted and the winter cleansing happens. But that leaves one extra day in the first semester, which the Americans decided was a terrible problem that obviously had to be addressed. So one day each fall, after the last of the remedial post-midterms work has been turned in—or not—we have Field Day.
It is a notable milestone in the year: it marks the start of the killing season. By then, all the mals that go into hibernation or reproductive phases after graduation have woken up and are finding ways back upstairs, or their adorable new babies have squirmed their own way up, and the competition among them gets more aggressive. Roughly one in seven freshmen die between Field Day and New Year’s, as I’d loudly and repeatedly informed all of mine, whose names had all got into my head at this point despite my best efforts. It’s never a good idea to get attached to freshmen, and doing it this early in the year was an invitation to misery, but after they’d saved me and Orion from blundering around almost choking ourselves to death, it had worn off enough of the cold-aloof-senior mystique I’d cultivated that they’d started talking to me. Even my most aggressive snappishness wasn’t discouraging them sufficiently anymore.
I gather that the usual purpose of a Field Day is to build school spirit by letting people run around doing sport in the fresh air and cheering each other on in their achievements. We don’t have any fresh air or school spirit, so instead we all gather together down in the gymnasium and cheer each other on for having stayed alive long enough to experience another Field Day. Attendance is mandatory, and enforced by the cafeteria being closed all day, so the only place to get food is the buffet that gets laid on in the gym in an enormous bank of antique Automat-style cases that are trundled out for the occasion. I have no idea where they go the rest of the time. You can only unlock them by feeding in tokens, which you can only get by participating in the various delightful games like relay races and dodgeball. To add to the festive atmosphere, normally at least one or two kids get eaten on the way down to the gym, since there are enough mals out there who can remember dates and know there’s going to be a buffet laid on for them along the stairs and corridors.
When the Scholomance first opened back in 1880, there were several really complex multilayered spells on the gym to give students the illusion of being outside in nature, complete with trees and open skies above that would go from day to night. It was the masterpiece of a crack team of artificers from Kyoto. Even at the time, Kyoto was powerful enough that Manchester couldn’t afford to just blow them off completely when the school was being constructed, so instead Manchester fobbed them off with the gym. Kyoto took revenge by making it so spectacular that everyone who got to tour the place couldn’t talk of anything else. There are several raving accounts framed up on the walls amid the blueprints, with antique photos that are supposedly of the gymnasium but look exactly like photos from a guidebook to the Japanese countryside.
No one’s seen the illusions working in more than a hundred years. After Patience and Fortitude, our resident maw-mouths, first made themselves at home in the graduation hall, and all the maintenance started being done by students, the whole thing fell apart. The plants all died so long ago that there’s not even dirt left, just the empty ironwork planters, and the color has faded out of the distant shifting murals of hills and mountains, so now they look like a landscape out of the afterlife. There’s one week in springtime when a scattering of bleached-white ghostly scraps come drifting down mysteriously—all that’s left of the cherry blossom experience. Occasionally stark bare trees sprout up, and there’s a small pagoda that occasionally appears and vanishes again. I don’t think anyone’s ever been mad enough to go inside, but if they have, they’ve never come out again to report.
But the sunlamps still work, and at least there’s wide-open room to run around and move, with an enormously high ceiling that lets you see mals dropping on you with plenty of warning. Most kids love the gym. I’ve avoided the place for virtually my entire Scholomance career. Mals come to the gym all the time; it’s on the lowest floor, so it’s the first stop for any of them who have managed to squirm past the wards from below. It’s a bad place to be a solitary zebra. And if I ever tried to join anything as casual as a game of tag, within a few minutes everyone else in the group had mysteriously decided they were moving on to something else that involved picking teams, and I’d always be odd one out. I did try to go running on my own instead, but that made me just a bit of an appealing target, and the other kids would make things worse. They’d deliberately move their game or some piece of equipment they’d cobbled together so that I’d have to run through a narrow lane near the walls, or cross some convoluted bit of greyish landscaping just right for mals to hide in. It wasn’t simply out of pure dislike. Not that they didn’t dislike me, but anything that got me would be something that didn’t get them.
So I don’t go to the gym. Instead I exercise alone in my room to build mana, and it’s always good for a boost if I first dwell on why I’ve got to do it alone in my room, and being rejected and outcast. That’s the kind of thing that makes you really not want to exercise and just lie on your bed and eat ice cream, except there’s no ice cream to be had in the Scholomance, which makes you feel worse, and if you can force yourself to exercise anyway despite being miserable and not wanting to, voilà, extra mana.
But I’ve gone to every Field Day. I could never afford to miss a day of eating, much less one of the best days of eating we get each year. At least on Field Day, the activities are set and you just queue up to do each one, so I couldn’t be left out comprehensively. And because of all that exercise I do alone in my room, I usually come out with a fair haul of tokens. And an even larger haul of resentment, since I’m clearly a good choice for teams and still never get picked.
Even this year, going into the gym I was ready, automatically, for Aadhya and Liu to ditch me. I don’t mean I expected that to happen—it would’ve been a horrid surprise—but some part of my brain was planning for it anyway, working out the kind of strategy I’ve always needed to have for Field Day. First I’d go for the rope climb, because everyone avoids it early on, when there still might be some mals hiding in the ceiling panels or camouflaged against the dingy mottled grey that was once the sky. So the queue is short and you can get the tickets quick, and while you’re up there, you take a look round and see which other activities have the short queues, because if you don’t have allies watching your back, overall your best odds are to take a few risks up front and get enough tickets to spend the rest of the day eating and performing perfunctory cheers until people start to head back to their rooms.
So I was primed and ready to be abandoned and left on the sidelines. What I wasn’t ready for was Magnus. Oh, I’d have reacted at speed if he’d tried to slip me some kind of contact poison or if he’d sent some minor gnawing construct to chew through a rope while I was on it. I was, however, completely unprepared for what he actually did.
A shoving match started while I was queued up with Aadhya and Liu and Chloe for the relay race, and a bunch of big senior boys went tumbling across the queue, cutting me and Chloe off. It turned into everyone shoving angrily, trying to keep their places or get better ones in the confusion, and we ended up pushed out of the queue and staring at Aadhya and Liu across a messy knot of people. We’d already been queuing for twenty minutes, and the line had grown a lot longer in that time. If Aadhya and Liu gave up the spot and came back to us, we’d all end up losing the time for a full activity or two. But everyone in the queue was keyed up, and no one was going to let us get back to our original places without a fight.
“Chloe!” Magnus yelled from the nearest queue, where he was about to go into the tug-of-war. “That’s Jaclyn and Sung behind your allies, let them have your spots and come over here!” Aadhya was already waving a thumbs-up at us from over the sea of heads, and Chloe grabbed my hand and ran with me over to where Magnus and Jermaine had stiff-armed a couple of juniors in the queue behind them, who weren’t brave enough to start arguing when they let us in.
I was so completely bewildered by Magnus going out of his way to be helpful that I had my hands on the big rope before I worked out that the whole thing had been a setup: his ally Sung had definitely been one of the kids in the shoving match, and I was sure a couple of the others had also been New York hangers-on. I craned over for a look at the other queue: Aadhya and Liu were still another five minutes back from the start of the relay races, which meant that when we had finished here, in order to hook back up with them, Chloe and I would have to waste that time just standing around like target mannequins. It would make much more obvious sense for them to stick with Jaclyn and Sung and for us to go on to something else—with Magnus, who apparently now wanted my company. Or rather wanted to cut me away from Aadhya and Liu, and make sure I was firmly embedded in the New York crowd.
“Tebow, if no one’s ever told you, you’re a soggy dishcloth,” I told Magnus when we got off the tug-of-war—our side had won; I’d yanked with a lot of vengeful fury involved. He stopped open-mouthed in the start of whatever hurrah-go-team speech he’d been about to deliver, so likely no one ever had, even though the resemblance was uncanny in my opinion: cold, useless, clings when all you want is to shake it off. “Sorry, Rasmussen, I’m not spending all day with this wanker,” I told Chloe, and marched off towards the long line for the egg-and-spoon races. Those are always popular, despite being possibly the stupidest activity a human being could engage in, since even if a spoon turns out to be a mimic or an egg hatches something unpleasant halfway through the race, they usually can’t be very terrible if they’re only the size of a spoon.
Chloe joined me on the line a moment later, with a beleaguered expression that annoyed me by reminding me of the similar look Mum occasionally gets when she’s been trying to make peace between me and the most recently irritated commune-dweller. At least Chloe didn’t try to persuade me that I ought to try and see things from Magnus’s side, and call forth his understanding by offering my own, et cetera. She was still trying to think of what she did want to say—I don’t know why Americans won’t just talk about the weather like reasonable people—when Mistoffeles suddenly put his head out of the little cup on her chest and emitted a few alarmed squeaks, at which point I noticed that eight kids from Shanghai enclave had casually been drifting off the lines on either side of ours and were now very-not-casually closing in around us. And one of them was already muttering away at an incantation for something unpleasant that he was about to throw in our faces.
Chloe darted a scared look over towards Aadhya and Liu—deep in the relay race and not even glancing our way—and then looked around for anyone else from New York, except Orion wasn’t anywhere to be seen, I presume too busy hunting the mals in the stairways and corridors, and of course Magnus the Magnificent had flounced off with the rest of his pals to huddle on the other side of the gym and discuss what to do about my refusal to accept their wide-armed welcome.
“A filthy soggy dishcloth,” I said, trying to vent enough of my fury to think through the situation. It wasn’t the numbers: I can handle a thousand enemies as easily as seven, as long as by handle you mean “kill in a grisly fashion.” I hadn’t any idea what to do about them otherwise. I do have a top-notch spell to seize total control over the minds of a group of people, only there isn’t a constraint on the size of the crowd: you have to cast it on a defined physical space isolated by things like walls, and then it grabs everyone in it. In this case, we were inside the gym that was holding literally every kid in the school. Also, the spell was quite vague on the aftereffects on the minds in question.
I could just have waited until the other kid threw his spell, and then caught it and thrown it back at him. It’s hard to describe how that works, and in fact it doesn’t work for most people; the first-year incantations textbook informed us firmly that you’re much better off either doing a defensive spell or trying to get your own offensive spell out before the other wizard fires off theirs. But I’m brilliant at reflecting as long as the spell being thrown at me is malicious or destructive enough, and I had a strong presentiment that wasn’t going to be a problem in this case.
And then I would have the pleasure of watching up-close while his skin flew off his body, or his intestines exploded out of his mouth or his brains dribbled out his ears or whatever horrible thing he meant to do to us, and it would just be the purest self-defense; no one would even criticize me for it. Not to my face, at any rate.
I would really have liked to be angry at them right then. I often haven’t any difficulty in contemplating extreme violence and even murder when I’m angry, and I can get angry at an enclaver at the drop of a hat. But I couldn’t be angry at them, not that way, not with that helpful burning righteous rage, because I’m really very good at knowing the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, and picking a fight to the death with a wizard who’s capable of killing with a wave of her hand isn’t it. If I was dangerous enough to warrant killing, the smart selfish enclaver thing for them to do was to keep the bloody hell away from me, as far as possible. They ought to have kept their heads down, got out safely as they were all sure to do, and then gone home to tell their parents about me. They were teenagers; they had every right to let me be the grown-ups’ problem.
Instead here they were, all of them gambling with their safe, sheltered lives—they had to assume I’d take out at least one of them, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t even have loser allies along with them to take that mortal blow. The boy in front getting ready to cast was an enclaver: his face was vaguely familiar from the language lab, round and spotty with a mustache he’d valiantly been trying to grow for the last two years. We’d never studied any of the same languages; I didn’t know his name. But Liu might: her mum and dad had worked for the enclave a few times. Their parents might know each other.
And I did know the girl backing him up, Wang Yuyan, because everyone in languages track knew her: she was doing twelve languages, which no enclave kid needed to do. Either she was ambitious or she loved languages madly or maybe she was just a tremendous masochist, I had no idea. I didn’t really know her, we’d never had a conversation or anything. But we’d been in the same Sanskrit section sophomore year, and one time I’d had a dictionary she needed—when you’re trying to get the meaning of a more obscure word, you often need to chase it down through three or four dictionaries until you end up in a language you’re fluent in—and she’d asked me to look the word up for her in a perfectly civil way, and offered to look one up for me in return.
That might not sound like much, but for comparison’s sake, in freshman year an enclave kid from Sydney glanced down at the really good French–English dictionary I’d found that week in the library and said, “Let’s have that, there’s a good girl,” not even asking. And because I told him exactly where he could hop off, at the end of class he had two of his minion-friends trip me going out of the room while another grabbed my entire bag and ran down the corridor shaking all my things out, yelling, “Free supplies!” while everyone laughed and grabbed.
I got up in the doorway with my lip bleeding and my forehead bruised. He was standing right there with two more of his pals to enjoy the show, all of them grinning, and then I turned and looked him in the face and thought in a red haze of all the things I could have done to him, so he stopped grinning and they fled the other way. Ever since, he’s firmly ignored my existence. Ah, the advantages of being a monstrous dark sorceress in embryonic form.
But he wouldn’t have stopped on his own. That’s what enclavers are like, most of them. Like Magnus, who was the reason we were exposed and also the reason the Shanghai kids were putting themselves on the line to take me out. Because they could imagine what someone like that would do with the kind of power I had.
And probably, maybe, at least half of those enclaver kids closing in round us were like Magnus themselves, but Yuyan wasn’t. I knew that much about her, and I also knew what she was casting, because I’d overheard people talking about this fantastic spell she’d got in her languages seminar that allowed you to get behind someone else’s spell and push, meaning that whatever spotty mustache boy was about to throw at us, she’d double it. That meant that when I flung it back, she’d get hit with the reflection, too. And maybe she deserved it, but I didn’t want to give it to her, to any of those kids getting ready to kill us for no reason other than being absolutely terrified of me and what I might do. It felt like making them right to have come after me.
But I even less wanted to let them kill me and Chloe, so I was just steeling my gut to go ahead and reflect the spell back anyway, when Chloe pulled a tiny plastic spray bottle filled with blue sparkling stuff from her pocket and spritzed it in the air all round us. On the other side of the glimmering, the whole room slowed down like everyone but the two of us was moving through mud—which meant of course she’d sped the two of us up; much easier.
“Do you have enough for us to run for it?” I asked her, but she shook her head, holding it up for me to see: the reservoir was the size of an underfed caterpillar, and there was barely any of the blue stuff left in the bottom.
“I just couldn’t think of anything else to do that would be quick enough,” she said. “I’ve got a blinding spray on me, but if I use it on those two incanters, Hu Zixuan in the back is going to hit us, and I’m almost sure that thing he has is a reviser. We’ve heard rumors about him working on one since he got here, and he’ll have it powered up by the time they go down—”
She was pointing at a kid all the way in the back of the group on the other side. I hadn’t paid much attention to him, because he was so shrimpy he looked like a sophomore at best; I’d assumed he was just helping to provide mana. But as soon as Chloe pointed him out, I realized it was the other way round: the five people fanned out in front of him were screening him and feeding mana back to him. Zixuan had a small pale-green rod almost completely hidden in his hand, which was connected by a thin gold wire to what had to be the rest of the artifact in his pocket: I could see slowed-down light gleaming along the line.
“Right,” I said grimly. “Go ahead and blind the incanters. Is it permanent?”
“You really want me to explain how it works now?” Chloe said. “It’s a migraine inducer, and maybe they’ll keep having them for the rest of their lives, and they’re about to fry us!”
“Yes, all right!” I said hastily. I was in fact perfectly all right with giving someone migraines in exchange for attempted murder. “Go after the boy with the mustache: Yuyan’s just doing an amplification; if you get him, her casting won’t do anything.”
“But what about the reviser?” Chloe said.
“That I can handle,” I said, and I really hoped I wasn’t lying, but anyway we were out of time. Chloe threw me one last desperate look that also hoped I wasn’t lying as she got out the blinding spray, and then the blue haze was settling down and my throat was hurting as if I’d been shrieking at the top of my lungs. The people on either side of us in the line were cringing away, so probably that’s about what our conversation had sounded like. Chloe was already lunging with a last bit of unnatural quickness across the empty space towards mustache boy, whose eyes went wide in alarm but stayed resolute. He’d known he was going to pull the first attack, brave bastard, although he screamed and crumpled when the spray hit him in the face just the same.
I turned towards the other group just as they parted and Zixuan, owlish with his eyes magnified behind enormous farsighted lenses, brought the jade rod up to mouth level and sang a single clear line at it. I couldn’t understand his request, as he was casting in Shanghainese, but I could take a reasonable guess: it was probably something on the order of please alter the floor so it no longer encloses this girl.
I’d only seen a reviser in illustrations before. They’re used all the time, but only in major enclave projects. It’s a generic device that allows artificers to create vastly more complicated and difficult pieces of artifice—something that no one person could keep in their heads—by starting with a completed piece and then making it more complex, little by little. The first ones were used to help build the Scholomance, in fact.
It was quite a clever approach to take against me. Dropping me out into the void beneath the gym would certainly remove me as a problem, and I couldn’t stop it with any kind of shield or even throwing the spell back, because he wasn’t actually aiming a spell at me; he was aiming it at the school itself. It was a small enough edit that he could get away with it, too. And I couldn’t exactly destroy the piece of artifice he was using it on, at least not without dumping us all into the void.
Fortunately, I knew what to do in this situation, because I’d had to spend two months in my freshman year translating a charming cautionary tale in French all about a truly horrible maleficer who maintained herself in gory evil for about a decade at the expense of many wizard children in her vicinity. Her shielding was so good that she was effectively invincible in a fight, so she killed all the wizards who attempted to end her reign and mounted their heads on the parapet of her elaborate and well-warded tower. She finally got taken out by a young artificer she’d snatched: a boy with an affinity for stoneworking. He didn’t try to attack her; instead he cast a working on the stone of her tower, and walled her up with all her six layers of shielding, so closely that she couldn’t move, and left her entombed to suffocate.
The school then assigned me a long essay—in French—explaining what I would do in the same situation. It even flat-out failed my first half-arsed attempt in which I suggested running away and not killing any more children, so I had to spend a week in the library doing research for the makeup.
The answer I found was, when facing an artificer who’s about to turn the environment against you, kill them first. But if that’s not an option you like, your second best chance is to try and intercept the spell power, and then override their alteration with your own.
Chloe wasn’t wrong to be worried about my doing that, however, because if two wizards start wrestling over the same piece of artifice—which in this case was the school itself—almost always the better artificer is the one who ends up in charge.
If Zixuan could make a reviser of his own—you can’t bring one in with you through induction, because they’ve got to be fed with a tiny thread of mana constantly or they burn out—he had to be an absolutely brilliant artificer. And I’m not good at artifice myself. Artifice is fundamentally about giving the universe a long and complicated story complete with attractive props in order to coax it to accommodate your wishes. I’m really more about shouting the universe into compliance with mine.
But there was some tidy coaxing right at hand that had already been done for me, more than a hundred years ago, by a whole pack of artificers far more skilled than any senior kid could be. So when the green wave of power came towards me, ready to revise the floor beneath my feet out of existence, I stepped into it and spread my arms to greet it and said, “Set this right instead, why don’t you?” then just heaved it up at the gym ceiling, with a push of extra mana to help it along.
The power went boiling up from my arms into the mottled-grey ceiling. It ran cascading down over the domed surface with the wild frothing of a power washer, trickles of green dripping down and kids screaming and running everywhere around me trying to dodge the rain. I was only vaguely aware of them, deep in the breathless shock like standing under a waterfall, having to look straight up into the flow with my whole face desperately scrunched up, barely able to see or breathe or hear for the rushing fury of it. Zixuan and the other kids had put a lot of power behind his working: if I had stopped redirecting for a second, his original instructions would have been carried out, too.
I didn’t notice when the screaming and running stopped around me; I was still in the middle of the torrent, and I had to stay there until the last reluctant trickling flowed through and I sank out of it gasping, to find Chloe standing there in front of me with her hands over her mouth, crying in just a shocking way—outright blubbing with her mouth turned down like a clown. I couldn’t see Zixuan or any of the other Shanghai kids anymore, or anyone else I knew. Everyone had been scattered around the gym like giant hands had gathered them up in a sack and then shaken them out into the room again at random, except for the small area right around me.
Almost all of the kids were crying, the older kids especially, or huddled up on the floor like they wanted to be curled into a fetal position but they couldn’t bear to put their heads down. All of us under the crisp blue of an autumn sky, dry leaves on the air and crunchy under us, sunlight dappling in a slant through the leaves of dark maple trees in a mix of brilliant crimson and yellow and green around the edges of the room that was suddenly a forest clearing, the faint gurgle of water running over stones somewhere not far away like a promise, large grey stones emerging like islands from a carpet of moss and leaves, while in the far misty distance a hill climbed a little way above the tree line, with the wooden balcony and roof of a pavilion just peeking out from more cascading colors.
I stood there stupid for a minute or two and then a bird called from somewhere and I started blubbing myself, too. It was horrible. It was almost the most horrible thing that had happened to me in here; it wasn’t exactly as bad as the maw-mouth, but it was hard to compare because it was horrible in such a completely different way. I have no idea what they were thinking when they’d made it, except of course I do. They wanted to make a room that would look charming on tours and impress other wizards, and make them all say how lovely it would be for the kids to have such a nice place to come to for exercise, how lovely to have this to make up for being trapped inside the school for four years without ever seeing the sun or feeling the wind or seeing a single green leaf, all the water you drink tasting faintly of sour metal, all the food the regurgitated slop of massive kettles filled with different vitamins and barely there enchantments to fool you into believing it’s something else, knowing the whole time you’re probably never coming out again, and it didn’t make up for any of that at all.
People started running out of the gym in droves. The only ones who didn’t were the stupid freshmen, who were all wandering around burbling out nonsense like, “Wow,” and “Look, there’s a nest!” and “It’s so pretty!” and making everyone who’d been in here for more than five minutes during the safest year on record want to stab them with knives. I would have gone running out myself, only my legs were as mushy as if I’d just been born, and so I just sat down on one of the picturesque rocks sobbing until Orion was there grabbing me by the shoulders saying, “El! El, what happened, what’s wrong?” I waved my hand frantically and he looked around with his face only confused, and then he said, “I don’t get it, you fixed the gym? But why are you crying over that? I gave up hunting a quattria to come back here!” in a faintly accusatory voice.
It did help. I got a breath and told him flatly through my snot and tears, “Lake, I’ve just saved your life again.”
“Oh for—I can take a quattria!” he snapped.
“You can’t take me,” I spat at him, and I heaved myself up onto my feet and stormed out on the energy of pure fury, which at least carried me out the doors and away from the grotesque lie of the grove.
I lurched away down the corridor, wiping my streaming nose on the hem of my t-shirt—his t-shirt actually, the New York one he’d given me, which I’d stupidly worn today, like a declaration; maybe that had been part of why the Shanghai kids had come at me. Because they were afraid of what I would help New York do to their enclave, their families, and why wouldn’t they be afraid? I could do anything.
There were kids crying in huddles scattered around the corridors. I went into the labyrinth and all the way to my seminar classroom, where at least I could be alone except for any maleficaria that wanted to try to jump me, which I’d have really appreciated at that moment. I went down the narrow corridor into the room and shut the door and put my head down on the ugly massive desk, and through the vent a faint breath of autumn leaves came into the room, and I cried for another two hours without anything at all trying to kill me.
