by Naomi Novik
That was a bad choice: brief seconds after it had vanished, while we were gaping after it, still shaking with adrenaline, its fading chirps suddenly broke off in a loud shrilling cry and then stopped. A really awful scraping and rattling noise was coming back in its place, getting louder and louder. Before we could pull ourselves together to do anything, Orion came whipping around the corner, surfing down the stairs on a steam tray, and took all of us out like ninepins.
On the bright side, the new steel wall held up very nicely. It had taken on the faintly soapy feeling of warded artifice: the repair had integrated into the school’s overall protection spells and the damage was fixed. I could say so with great confidence, because my cheek was squashed up against the metal so hard that I could literally feel the shrieks and wails fading away as the rest of the waiting mals got chased back down, and the low gronk-chunk-gronk–noise of some kind of protective mechanism going down below.
“Ow,” Liu said, next to me.
“Yeah,” Aadhya groaned, and flopped off us. She’d had to fling herself in our direction to avoid getting knocked into her own still-hot crucible and burnt to a crisp. She sat up and looked at it in dismay: the right corner had been completely accordioned against the wall. “Oh man.”
“Um, sorry,” Orion said, standing over us. He was clutching the dead shrike in one hand and the badly dented steam tray in the other. He had been on top. “I got here as fast as I could.”
“Lake, one of these days I’m going to kill you,” I said, out of the side of my mouth that wasn’t jammed into the wall.
“So,” Liu said to me, a little tentatively, as we limped up the stairs. Orion was behind us lugging the full-sized crucible—it couldn’t be folded up again—and continuously apologizing to Aadhya, who knew how to milk an advantage and was undoubtedly going to come out of this with more than enough supplies to repair her crucible, as well as the shrike corpse, which Orion had already given to her. The beak would likely go into her sirenspider lute, and I’d already given her the argonet tooth for the tuning pegs. It was going to be monstrously powerful by the time she was done. “Your affinity—”
“Just think about the ‘love me and despair’ version,” I said.
“What?” Liu said.
“ ‘All shall love me and despair,’ ” I said. She was eyeing me very dubiously. “Galadriel? In Lord of the Rings?”
“Is that the movie with the hobbits? I’ve never seen that. Is that where your name is from?”
“Liu, I’m so glad we’re friends,” I said, partly because it felt like a safe opportunity to say the word out loud. If she didn’t want it to be true, it could just be a joke. But actually I meant it with great sincerity on both fronts. I’ve never seen the films, either. Mum read me the books out loud from beginning to end once a year from when I was born, but she was disappointed by the violence of the movies and wouldn’t let me see them. Everyone else in the commune has, though. I’ve heard a lot of clever remarks on the contrast.
But Liu gave me a brief, shy smile. “I have the idea,” she said. “But…no malia.” It wasn’t really a question.
“No,” I said, with a deep, gusty sigh. “No malia. At all. I can’t…do it just a little.” I looked over at her, meaningfully.
Her eyes widened a moment, and then she looked down and put her arms around herself, rubbing her upper arms. “No one can,” she said, low. “Not really.”
Chloe actually met us coming down. She had run up to the alchemy floor and got Magnus and two other New York kids out of their lab section and they’d recruited basically the entire class to come and help. Either that or they’d bet on having a big crowd around them for trying to get to the gates and escape. Her total astonishment when she saw us and blurted, “Oh my God, you’re alive!” would have been insulting if she hadn’t sounded half glad about it.
The crowd, all of whom desperately wanted to know what had happened, was so big that none of them found out anything for a while, as they couldn’t hear our explanations over the babble of other voices asking the very same questions. I finally had to cup my hands over my mouth and shout, “The stairwell is sealed. Nothing is coming up!” which answered the most urgent one for most people and calmed things down.
“What happened with the argonet?” Chloe said to me, as we all started moving back upstairs en masse: nobody was going back to their lessons at this point, and it was almost dinnertime by now. She swallowed and added, in a rush, “I’m sorry that—I figured I should get help—” without actually meeting my eyes.
“Liu put a shield up, and Aadhya and I got the wall fixed in time,” I said, and didn’t tell Chloe it was okay, which I’m sure she wanted me to. I’d been right about her not wanting the deal. She’d run away exactly the way that every enclave kid ran away when bad things showed up, letting their entourages take the hit. That was why they had the entourages, and the kids in those entourages were doing it because they were desperate for a way out at graduation, and they had nothing else to offer that would get an enclaver to recruit them. So they made shields out of their bodies, and if they lasted all the way to graduation, at least the most dedicated of them would be offered filler spots in enclave kids’ alliances. And that wasn’t okay, and she could work out for herself it wasn’t okay.
She didn’t ask me for the comforting lie again. She just said, “I’m really glad you’re all right,” quietly, and then fell back in with Magnus.
THE BELL FOR DINNER hadn’t rung yet; the line wasn’t open. But we were such a big crowd that we didn’t even need to worry the way you normally would if you tried to go to the cafeteria alone while classes were still in session. We got six tables together and did perimeters and checks on all of them, and sat down to wait for the food to be served, sharing gossip instead.
“What happened to our senior friends?” I asked Orion.
“Hiding out somewhere in the library, I guess,” Orion said. “I managed to get out of the yanker spell on the landing on this level, but they kept going up the stairs.”
“They’ll be back downstairs trying to bash through your work ten minutes after dinner,” Magnus said. He and Chloe had taken seats at our table. He was talking to Orion only, though; English might inconveniently leave the pronoun ambiguous, but in this case the your in your work was very clearly intended to be singular. “We should call a tribunal on them.”
However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another. People do lose it all the time, but if you lose it for any length of time, something hungry finds it and you, too. If anyone tries to organize anything especially alarming, like a gang of maleficers, and other kids find out about it but don’t have the firepower to stop it on their own, they can call a tribunal, which is just a pretentious word for standing on a table in the cafeteria at mealtime and yelling out that Tom, Dick, or Kylo has gone over to the dark side and asking everyone to help take them down.
But that’s not justice. There’s no hand of the law that comes down to ceremonially spank you if you’ve been bad. Todd was still around, going to classes, eating; presumably sleeping, although hopefully not very well. If someone’s giving you a hard time, that’s your problem; if you’re giving someone a hard time, that’s their problem. And everyone else will ignore any situation that’s remotely ignorable, because they’ve all got problems of their own. It’s only worth calling a tribunal if you can reasonably expect that everyone else in the school is going to instantly agree that there’s a very clear, very imminent threat to their lives from the person you’re accusing.
Which wasn’t the case in this situation. “The seniors will be on their side,” Aadhya said, since Magnus apparently needed it said.
He didn’t like it at all. I imagine he had always blith
ely operated on the assumption that he could call a tribunal if ever he saw an imminent threat to his life, and naturally everyone would agree: like Chloe and her maintenance requests. “The seniors can’t take the whole rest of the school,” he said defensively. “And they can’t afford a fight the week before graduation anyway.”
“We can’t either,” I said. “What’s it going to get us? Those five kids are graduating in a week. Do you want to punish them for wanting to improve their odds at someone else’s expense? I could think of some people in our year who’d do the same.” He gawked at me, shocked that I’d even hint at a parallel.
Orion didn’t weigh in himself; he was getting up from the table. The line had just opened, and we all headed in for the reward of virtue, namely being first into the buffet loaded with fresh hot food. Orion checked the line ahead of us all, taking out a couple of mals on the way, and we all came out with our trays crammed full. Nobody talked for the rest of dinner: it was probably the best meal any of us had eaten in a year, even the enclavers, if not in the last three years.
The rest of the school came in round us. Perhaps halfway through the meal, our ambitious group of seniors even warily came back down from the library: they’d got tired of waiting for the general screaming and slaughter to begin, I suppose. They stared at us from the door and then slowly headed to the line themselves after a quick discussion. They were in for a lot of hostile looks along the way, as by then everyone knew what they’d tried to do. But Aadhya had been absolutely right: none of the hostile looks came from the other seniors. In fact, by the time they came out, room had been made for all of them at prime tables, and they ate with other seniors watching their backs, the sort of thing you do for someone who’s at least taken a shot at helping you.
“They are going to try and do something,” Magnus said, throwing a hard look at me. “If the new wall is going to hold, they’ll hit the other stairwells. And if we don’t make it hurt, all the seniors are going to help.”
“No, they won’t,” Orion said quietly. He put his hands on the table and started to stand up, but I was ready for it; I kicked him right in the back of the knee, and he gave a sharp, loud gasp and fell back into his chair clutching at it, panting. “El, that freaking hurt!” he squalled out.
“Yeah? But did it hurt like getting pasted into a wall with a steam tray?” I said through my teeth. “Just put the theatrics to rest for once, Lake. You’re not graduating early.”
The half of our table that had begun glaring at me turned to stare at Orion instead, and he was red and obvious by then. Anyone’s welcome to graduate early: you just make sure you’re in the senior dorms when the curtain comes down. It’s about as good an idea as skipping out on school entirely, but you’re welcome to do it.
Orion’s mouth had gone mulish. “I’m the one who’s set them up—”
“And you’ll also be the one who’s set us up, if you starve the mals of half this year’s graduating class,” I said. “How is that better? Even assuming you don’t just get yourself killed.”
“Look, even if the seniors don’t break the stairwells open, the mals are going to break them open. If not now, then next term, probably next quarter. If they’ve got hungry and desperate enough to start hitting the wards, they’ll keep at it. I’m not planning to just get the seniors out. I’m going to cull the graduation mals.”
“The gates are open for half an hour at most. Even if Patience and Fortitude don’t do you in, you can’t possibly kill enough mals in that time to do anything but open up some space for the little ones to grow,” I said. “Or were you planning to take up permanent residence? You’d get quite hungry living in the graduation hall, unless you want to start eating mals instead of just sucking out their power. I know you’re just waiting for us to put your statue up, but that’s no reason to carry on like a slab of solid rock.”
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m listening,” he shot back.
“I don’t need a better idea to know yours is completely rubbish!” I said.
“I’ve got a better idea.” It wasn’t anyone at our table talking: Clarita Acevedo-Cruz had crossed over to us and was standing at the end of our table. I’d never spoken to her before, but we all recognized her anyway: she was the senior valedictorian.
In the early years, the school used to post academic rankings frequently. There are four enormous gilt-edged placards on the wall of the cafeteria, one for each class with our graduation year on top in shining letters, and at the end of each quarter, the names would march elaborately onto each one in order. However, the practice encouraged bad behavior, such as murdering the kids doing better than you. So now it’s only the very final senior ranking that’s put up, at New Year’s, and the rest of the placards stay blank. And all the kids who are going for valedictorian—and no one gets it without deliberately going for it—do their best to hide their marks. You can guess who’s trying by how much intensity they put into their schoolwork, but it’s hard to know for sure how well they’re doing. The kids who get anywhere in sniffing distance of valedictorian almost have to have massive egos as well as the drive of champion thoroughbreds, and if they aren’t also mad geniuses, they’re such brutally hard workers that they’ve made up for it.
Clarita hadn’t just made valedictorian, she’d played it so close to the vest that nobody had even suspected she was in the running. She had even picked up the occasional spare shift from maintenance-track kids who needed some free time, so most people assumed she was in maintenance track herself. Including the twenty kids who’d ended up directly below her in the rankings, having spent their own academic careers in savage and occasionally violent rivalry, snooping on each other’s exams and sabotaging each other’s projects. After the list had finally gone up with her name at the top, the news had gone buzzing round the school for days. The thing everyone had said was some variation on, “That dull girl from—” and insert a random Spanish-speaking country. She was actually from Argentina, where her mum did occasional maintenance work for the enclave in Salta, but it took about two weeks before the accurate information finally worked its way around, because hardly anyone knew anything at all about her. Until then, she’d been easy to overlook: short and thin and hard-faced, and she’d always worn—deliberately, in retrospect—dull beige and grey clothing.
It was a brilliant strategy. Even if she had only made top ten in the end, the surprise of her showing up out of nowhere would’ve made her look better than someone who’d visibly been going for the top spot the whole time. Three and a half years of hiding your light under a bushel, doing the odd maintenance shift on top of your classwork, without ever once bragging about a mark on a project or an exam—that was more discipline than most teenagers have when marks are the only thing in school you care about. Well, apart from surviving.
Her discipline had paid off with a guaranteed spot in New York. Nobody cared if you were dull if you could cast six major arcana workings in a row, which she’d done for the final project in her senior seminar. We all knew about that, too, because after the rankings finally went up, she’d mounted a binder on the wall next to her door with literally every mark she’d received in the past three and a half years, so anyone could come and look through it and see them in detail, possibly to make up for all the bragging she hadn’t done before then.
Too bad for her that she was now also stuck with Todd on her team. Orion hadn’t wanted to talk about it much, but I’d gathered that Todd’s dad was indeed high up on the enclave council, and despite what Chloe had promised me in the library, the other New York seniors on his team were apparently reluctant to ditch his darling boy. Very likely he had control of at least one or two of the better defensive artifacts they were planning to use. And Clarita didn’t get a vote, unless she wanted to ditch the entire alliance herself—along with her guaranteed spot, which she wasn’t going to be able to replace this close to graduation.
But be
ing saddled with Todd wasn’t her fault, and none of us needed any incentive to take her seriously. Everyone at the tables nearby had stopped whispering and was straining over to listen to her. “I’ve worked out the numbers,” she said to Orion. “There’re records in the library of inducted students and graduated students. You’ve saved six hundred lives since you started school.” The quiet spread further out, followed by a ripple of whispers as people repeated the information. I’d known he was saving ridiculous numbers of us, but I hadn’t known it was that much. “More than three hundred just this one year. That’s why we’re all hungry, not just the maleficaria. The food trays aren’t supposed to be empty if you get here before the bell rings.”
Orion stood up and faced her, his jaw tight. “I’m not sorry.”
“I’m not sorry, either,” she said. “Only a bastard would be sorry. But that is the mana we have to pay back. There are nine hundred seniors left. An ordinary year, half of us can expect to get out. But if we alone have to pay back all the lives you’ve saved this year on top of that, we’re talking less than a hundred survivors. It’s not fair for our class to bear that burden.”
“So we should let the mals into the school?” Chloe said. “Then you all make it out, the freshmen all die, and they keep dying until the school gets shut down completely so they can do a full extermination on the place, if they even can. How is that fair, either?”
“Of course it’s not,” Clarita said cuttingly. “If we got out that way, over your bodies, that’s malia whether or not we took the hit for it directly. Most of us don’t want that.” She didn’t actually turn and glare at Todd across the room, but the emphasis didn’t escape any of us. I would’ve been furiously angry with him in her place: three and a half years slogging to the very top of the mountain, and this was what she’d got for it. Not only did she have to worry about just how expendable Todd was going to consider her, she was going to come out with her reputation attached to him. Everyone would always think of her as the valedictorian who’d chosen to stick with a poacher, however little choice she really had.