Chapter 8: Slitherjaw

I’d like to sayKhamis improved on acquaintance, but he didn’t. The second week of the obstacle course, we did it properly: I sang the mana-amplification spell before the doors even fully opened and charged in without stopping to let myself look. I went straight into a knee-high snowdrift in a glacial mountain landscape, empty except for massive tall stone boulders jutting out of the ground like pillars, intermittent blasts of snowy wind coming into our faces almost as hard as the boundary blizzard from last time. It was still beautiful, but it was the kind of beautiful that normally you only get to see in person if you spend a week hauling yourself up a mountain with a backpack longer than your torso.

I floundered a few steps in, and then my foot just went out from under me and I headed over backwards. If it hadn’t been for Aadhya’s shield holder—after I’d told her about my little run-in with Liesel, she’d tweaked them to handle accidental falls along with deliberate impact—I’d probably have concussed myself properly that time. As it was, I went down hard, and the snowdrifts on either side of me fell in on top of my head and started actively trying to smother me. Jowani hauled me out of it and put me back on my feet—oh I was glad to have him along—just as the boulders all unfolded themselves into troll shapes like Transformers made out of rock and started flinging chunks at our heads.

We all came out with numb bodies and a lot of bruises, and Chloe had a broken collarbone and cracked shoulder and a bad limp: she’d been hit by one of the flying rocks. Our helpers patched her up a little, while inside the gym the boulders reassembled themselves out of the mass of crushed pebbles and dust that I’d left behind me, but she was going to need more healing than we could expect from the deal. “Let’s get you to your room. We can work in there instead,” Liu said, and Chloe just nodded without saying anything, her eyes lowered and her mouth thin, and Khamis came up and said to her, “You’re the one putting up the mana. Next time, you go in the middle.”

I’d spent the week congratulating myself repeatedly on my self-restraint, but it had run out, and I was about to tell him that actually Liu was bringing at least as much mana, by carrying the mana-amplification spell on the lute the entire time we were running, and also I was going to lay out exactly what I thought of him, and offer some detailed suggestions of where he could shove it, but before I could open my mouth, Aadhya said, “Seriously? A big boy like you, afraid of some scrapes and bruises?” He rounded on her; she just waved a finger back and forth across his chest in over-the-top disdain. “You want to take your first hit when it’s for real, son, you go ahead, keep hiding in the middle. Chloe’s going to be out the doors before you are, for sure.”

Chloe darted a look up at her out of shiny eyes. To be honest, I don’t think she’d thought of it that way any more than I had, but Aadhya was right. Enclavers didn’t get hit, not like the rest of us, not day-to-day. Once a month maybe they’d see a mal, with mana at their fingertips and lots of help and easier targets both close to hand. Enough for practice. Not enough to get hurt. I don’t know that Chloe had ever actually been tagged before. Definitely not the way I had, but not even the way Liu or Aadhya or Jowani or any average loser kid had, at least half a dozen times. It didn’t matter sometimes if you had all the mana in the world, all the equipment in the world. All it took was getting unlucky once. If you got hit hard enough, you went down, and if you didn’t get back on your feet fast enough, you stayed down forever. And you couldn’t learn how to get back on your feet until after you’d been knocked down.

Chloe swallowed and said to Khamis, “Thanks for looking out for me. I’m good with my team.”

He didn’t like it, especially since he probably couldn’t help seeing that Aadhya had an alarmingly good point that he was now going to have to worry about, but he took it, although he gave a snort and looked at Aadhya as if he’d have liked to have a minion push her over in a corridor sometime before he turned around and walked away back to his team.

That said, good point or not, I’d never seen Aadhya have a go at an enclaver before. She wasn’t a committed suck-up like Ibrahim, just too sensible to do anything that—well, that stupid. Unlike certain other people who will remain me. “Wow,” I said to her just under my breath as we went downstairs.

“Yeah, like I had a choice,” she said, with a huff, and gave me a pointed look. I would like to say I felt ashamed of myself for putting her in the position of having to snap someone back just so I wouldn’t try to disembowel them, but I was too unrepentantly happy that someone had told Khamis off. Aadhya sighed. “Just do me a favor, keep a lid on it until the end of the month.”

“Then what?” I said.

“Then he can’t walk away anymore with Nkoyo, hello.”

My turn to sigh. “Yeah, all right.” Sometimes when your friends are right, you’re pleased, and sometimes it’s unbearably annoying.

But she was right, so I bit my tongue repeatedly over the next weeks while the last alliances got locked down and we invested enough mana and time in our collaboration that he really couldn’t just flounce off and find himself another arrangement, dragging Nkoyo and her friends with him. The jerk even started taking a partially exposed position on our second runs, trying to arrange himself just the right amount of pain.

I was counting down the minutes until I’d get to slag him off properly when we started our fifth week. All the runs so far had been varied winter wonderlands of death: a thick forest, deep and hushed; a wide frozen lake stretching so far we couldn’t see the other bank. Today it was a wide snowy meadow scattered with placid ordinary shrubs and tiny blue flowers peeking out from the snow—and absolutely nothing came at us. We ran to the wall of trees at the far end and back like we were doing an ordinary sprint, and then just as I’d made it to the doors, there was a deep rumbling noise and the snowfield split open maybe ten meters behind us and what seemed like a thousand spiked thornbush vines burst lashing up out of it.

Almost everyone had made it to the other side of the split by then; it was only Yaakov and Nkoyo still behind the line. Yaakov was close enough that he just yelled and threw himself over before the vines got high enough; he fell down on the other side with them grabbing at his legs and trying to pull him back. Cora and Nadia were close enough to slash through the vines with their swords while Ibrahim and Jamaal grabbed his arms and hauled him away.

But Nkoyo had been one step further back, and that one step had put a solid wall of vines between her and the gates. I tried to cast a spell of putrefying rot at the vines, which ought to have wiped them out along with most of the rest of the landscape, but instead nothing happened, and I looked down and realized I hadn’t just made it clear, I was out: I was standing in the corridor, just outside the gym doors. I couldn’t help Nkoyo any more than I’d be able to help her in the graduation hall once I’d passed through the gates and was standing back in Wales.

But if I’d gone through the gates downstairs, I also wouldn’t have still been standing there to watch my friend get torn to shreds. Nkoyo was casting withering spells, whirling-quick touch spells, but she could only do them one vine at a time, and she was running out of both mana and breath. She couldn’t make an opening big enough to jump across the chasm without being pulled down, and the vines kept coming and coming. One of them made a darting lunge out of the mass and got round her throat and started to strangle her so she couldn’t cast anymore, blood running down her neck and her arms from the thorns as she grappled with it desperately.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wasn’t going to stand there. Even though I would have to do something real, something permanent—as bad as what I’d done to the gym in the first place. The mana was at my hands and the spell was on my breath, my tongue curling around the words: a spell of destruction and tearing-down, a spell to rip the obstacle-course machinery apart, bring the whole gym down if I had to—

And then that absolute wankstain Khamis went back for her. He poured a bottle of green liquid out over several writhing nests of vines, and they burst into flames and burnt up in a single roaring instant, opening up a wide gap in front of her. He jumped through, grabbed Nkoyo under her armpits and knees, and more or less threw her bodily through the opening—he was a big boy—before he jumped after her and shoved her along the rest of the way ahead of him through the doors, staggering as the last vines grabbed and clawed at his own legs, leaving a trail of fresh blood drips on the churned snow before the doors slammed shut on his heels.

And yeah, you never wanted to lose a member of your alliance this close to graduation, and it was Nkoyo’s team more than it was his; he’d just agreed to put up the resources and a shedload of mana, and she’d pulled everyone else together out of her big network, the loads of people who were happy to join up with her. But that work was done, and she wasn’t irreplaceable as an incanter by a long shot. In fact there were enough losers left floating around without an alliance that he could have subbed in two kids as replacements, who’d be desperate enough by now to agree to an even more exposed position further in the rear and a smaller share of team resources.

Instead he’d put himself as far out as anyone would go, just to save her. Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.

After the first moment of what just happened, the rest of our crew gathered round the two of them in the corridor, a yammering of noise and congratulations; even the next group of seniors just waiting their turn to go crowded in: they were helping gladly this time, offering bandages, handkerchiefs, good salves. We’re all fans of near escapes, of far escapes, of any escapes at all; we want so much to believe in them, even after all these years in here. Nkoyo just sank down on her knees on the ground in front of the doors, her eyes shut with two fat streaks of tears running shiny down her face; her other allies Janice and Fareeda were holding up her limp arms to bandage them. Khamis was sitting next to her staring at the bloodstained gashes in his trousers and shoes. He seemed roughly as shocked as anyone that he’d done it.

I’d got out of the way at some point, I don’t remember when; I’d backed up from the doors to make room for everyone helping, the crowd of them framed in the archway of the big metal gym doors. Only Ibrahim was off a little way down the corridor with Yaakov, their foreheads together and his hands cupping Yaakov’s face, tears streaming down his own; he jerked in to snatch a fast desperate kiss that made Yaakov lose it and shut his eyes and start crying, too.

I stood there with my back against the far side of the corridor, well away from them all, the working of destruction still alive in my mouth and the mana I’d pulled still churning inside me. We’d been running the obstacle courses for a month and we were already so much better, so much faster. We needed the gym, we needed the course. If I’d smashed the whole thing to save Nkoyo, I’d have been making another bargain with the lives of people I didn’t know, faces I wasn’t looking at, the way I’d traded those kids from Shanghai for the ones the quattria ate.

I didn’t have the right to do that. I didn’t have the right to do anything except the one thing I had the right to do—to get out of the gates—because we all agreed that we had that right. We all agreed we had the right to get out any way we could, within the one narrow limit of actually killing each other—and even that could be handwaved off as long as you did it unobtrusively enough. It was understood that you only promised to help other people because they’d help you back, and it was understood that your promises stopped counting when you got close enough to the gates, and nobody would ever blame you for going through as soon as you could, even if everyone else on your team died. Nobody would ever expect you to turn back and nobody would promise to do it.

If you even tried, nobody would believe you, because maybe you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but you could know that. If you turned back, you didn’t save anyone, you just died along with them. At best you died instead of them; you put yourself into a maw-mouth for eternity to get them out the doors instead of you. That’s all anyone could reasonably hope to do, so it wasn’t something you could ask anyone to do. You could ask people to be brave, you could ask them to be kind, you could ask them to care, you could ask them to help; you could ask them for a thousand hard and painful things. But not when it was so obviously useless. You couldn’t ask someone to deliberately trade themselves away completely, everything they had and might ever be, just to give you a chance, when in the end—and the gates were the end, the very end of things—you knew you weren’t any more special than they were. It wasn’t even heroism; it was just a bad equation that didn’t balance.

Except for me. I could turn back. With just an ordinary amount of nerve, not even as much as Khamis Mwinyi had dug up out of his own guts with no advance warning to anyone, I could turn around at the gates and wave everyone on my team through and wreak destruction on every mal that came in range, until all of my friends were safe. So I had to. Of course I had to. I couldn’t go running through the gates to safety, to the green woods of Wales and Mum hugging me tight, while anyone I loved was still behind me. I had to turn back and keep the gates clear for them until they all made it through. They hadn’t asked me, they wouldn’t ask me, because that went against the rules we all understood, but I’d do it anyway, because I could. I could save Aadhya and Liu and Chloe and Jowani, and I’d save Nkoyo and Ibrahim and Yaakov and Nadia.

And then, once I’d done that, then I could go through the gates myself. I’d rescue the people I cared about, and then—I could turn my back on everyone else. I could go through, and leave them to find their own way out or die. I didn’t owe them. I didn’t love them. They’d done nothing for me. Except Khamis, who was sitting on the floor there shaky with blood trickling over his legs in rivulets and puddling beneath him, blood he’d spent to save Nkoyo when I couldn’t. I’d save Khamis. I’d keep standing by the gates long enough to save Khamis, who I didn’t love in the least, because how could I do anything else now?

I stepped back from the knot of people gathered round him and Nkoyo, the strangers helping someone I cared about, in the small ways they could afford. I took another step back, and another, and turned, and three breaths later I was halfway down the corridor and running, running like the gates were up ahead of me and I could make it out, I could escape. There were more seniors heading for the gym by then. Their heads turned, anxious to follow me as I passed, wondering what was I running from, only I was running from them, from any of them who might turn out to be a decent person, who might turn out to be just as special as the people I loved. Who might deserve to live just as much as they did.

I sped up even more, which I could do because for the last five weeks I’d been sprinting for my life on a near-daily basis, only that turned out to be a terrible idea because I ran straight into Magnus. He was coming off the stairs to go practice with his own team: a pack of five boys who took up nearly the full width of the archway so I couldn’t dodge round them and had to pull up hard instead, and he reached out instinctively to steady me and said, “El? What happened? Is Chloe okay?” as if even he had a thought to spare for another human being, as long as she was someone he’d grown up with. Or maybe as long as he could risk caring about her because he knew the odds were she wasn’t going to die before her eighteenth birthday.

“Oh, I hate you,” I said, childishly stupid; I was about to burst, into tears, into something else, I have no idea what, when Orion got literally bowled down the stairs and knocked all six of us off our feet like a perfect strike. A monstrous roaring slitherjaw, thrashing squid-sucker tentacles around a prehistoric-shark mouth, came humping down the stairs after him, gargling and grabbing, and all of the boys screamed and tried to get away, which was hard to do when we were tangled up on the floor in a heap.

At least Magnus didn’t do anything heroic; he scrabbled wildly for escape just like the rest of them. There wasn’t any, though; it was on us, arms already grabbing Orion and all of Magnus’s teammates and dragging them towards its gnashing mouth, more coming for him and me, but after it pulled Magnus off me, I sat up and screamed at it, “Shrivel up and die, you putrescent sack of larva!”

Those weren’t actually the right words of the rotting spell that I had been trying to cast on the vines, but apparently that didn’t matter, because the slitherjaw obeyed me without the slightest hesitation, its skin shrinking down until it popped along seams that unleashed a writhing mass of tiny horrible maggot-like grubs all over the floor, half burying the boys as it dropped them—still screaming, possibly even louder—in its disintegration. They all flung themselves out of it and went wildly careening into the corridor, frenziedly shaking off grubs in every direction and crushing them underfoot as they went grape-stomping around. Except for Orion, who just surfaced out of the sea of maggot-things, shook himself off without an iota of decent horror—they were in his hair—and looked around at the rapidly disappearing remains of the mal: the larvae were fleeing down the drains en masse, leaving behind nothing but the two enormous bony jaws full of serrated teeth, hanging still wide-open on the floor like something out of a natural history museum.

He didn’t have the nerve to reproach me, but he did heave a faintly disappointed sigh. “Don’t even start, Lake,” I said. I felt better; maybe because I’d blown away my gathered mana forcing a new spell into existence, or maybe it was just the same kind of calm as going through a crying jag and coming out the other side, where you know nothing’s changed and it’s all still horrible but you can’t cry forever, so there’s nothing to do but go on. “Tell me something, what’s the plan? Is there one, or were you just going to improvise the whole thing?”

“Uh, the plan?” Orion said.

“Graduation,” I said, making sure to enunciate every syllable in case he missed one. “Taking out the mals. Before they eat everyone.”

He glared at me. “I don’t need a plan!”

“In other words, you can’t be arsed to think of one besides ‘run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.’ Well, too bad for you, that’s not what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing?” he said after a moment, warily.

“Well, look at you,” I said, making a condescending wave to take in the still-writhing mess of the stairs. “If I let you clear the hall on your own, you’ll trip over your own feet and get yourself eaten by a grue in five minutes; it’ll just be embarrassing.”

He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be offended more than he wanted to be pleased, and he obviously also had a brief thought about making a chivalric protest of the no you mustn’t do something so dangerous variety, but he thought better of that and shut his mouth before it escaped him. Instead he folded his arms over his chest and said, coolly, “So what’s your plan? Turn all the mals into maggots? That would be fun for everyone.”

“They’d take it and say thanks if they knew what was good for them,” I said.

I hadn’t any better plan to offer, in fact, than “run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.” I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going through. I wasn’t going through until everyone was out.