“A lot,” I said to Cora, dryly. “The place was crammed, and they were all ravenous.” She swallowed, biting her lip, but nodded. Then I told Nkoyo, “The senior artificers thought they’d got it, anyway. And it took them an hour and change, so I hope they weren’t just faffing around.”
She nodded, her whole face intent. It wasn’t at all an academic question. If we really had fixed the equipment down in the graduation hall, then the same engines that run the cleansing up here twice a year, to burn out the mals infesting the corridors and classrooms, ran down there, too, and presumably wiped out a substantial number of the much larger and worse mals hanging round in the hall waiting for the graduation feast of seniors. Which meant that probably loads of the graduating class had made it. And much more to the point, that loads of our graduating class would have a better chance to make it.
“Do you think they really made it out okay? Clarita and the others?” Orion said, frowning into the churned mess of potatoes and peas and beef he was making out of what the cafeteria had called shepherd’s pie but was thankfully just cottage pie. On a bad day it would turn out to be made of shepherd. Regardless of name, it was actually still hot enough to steam, not that Orion was appreciating its miraculous state.
“We’ll find out at the end of term, when it’s our turn through the mill,” I said. If we hadn’t got it working, of course, then instead the seniors in front of us had been dumped into a starving and worked-up horde of already-vicious maleficaria, and had probably been ripped apart en masse before ever getting to the doors. And our class would have just as good a time of it, in three hundred sixty-five days and counting. Which was a delightful thought, and I was telling myself as much as Orion when I added, “And since we can’t find out sooner, there’s absolutely no point brooding about it, so will you stop mangling your innocent dinner? It’s putting me off mine.”
He rolled his eyes at me and shoved a giant heaped spoonful into his mouth dramatically by way of response, but that gave his brain a chance to notice that he was an underfed teenage boy, and he began hoovering his plate clean with real attention.
“If it did work, how long do you think it will last?” one of Nkoyo’s other friends asked, a girl from Lagos enclave who’d taken a seat one from the end of the table just to have access. Another good question I hadn’t any answer to, since I wasn’t an artificer myself. The only thing I’d known about the work going on behind my back—in Chinese, which I didn’t speak—was the rate of words coming out of the artificers that had sounded like profanity. Orion hadn’t known that much: he’d been out in front of us all, killing mals by the dozen.
Aadhya answered for me. “The times Manchester enclave repaired the graduation hall machinery, the repairs held up for at least two years, sometimes three. I’d bet on it working this year at least, and maybe the one after.”
“But not…more than that,” Liu said softly, looking across the room at her cousins, who were at their own table now, along with Aaron and Pamyla, the girl who’d brought in Aadhya’s letter, and a good, solid crowd of other freshmen kids clustered around them: the kind of group that mostly only enclave kids got. Which surprised me, until I realized they’d picked up some glow-by-association from getting that close to Orion, hero of the hour. And then it occurred to me, possibly even a bit of glow might have come from me, since to all of the freshmen I was now a lofty senior who’d also been on the run down to the hall, and not the creepy outcast of my year.
And—I wasn’t the creepy outcast by anyone’s standards anymore. I had a graduation alliance with Aadhya and Liu, one of the first formed in our year. I’d been invited to sit at one of the safest tables in the cafeteria, by someone who had other choices. I had friends. Which felt even more unreal than surviving long enough to become a senior, and I owed that, I owed every last bit of it, to Orion Lake, and I didn’t care, actually, what the price tag was going to be. There’d be one, no question. Mum hadn’t warned me for no reason. But I didn’t care. I’d pay it back, whatever it was.
As soon as I put it in those terms inside my head, I stopped worrying over my note. I didn’t even have to wish anymore that Mum hadn’t sent it. Mum had to send it, because she loved me and she didn’t know Orion from a cold welshcake; she couldn’t help but warn me off if she knew I was on a bad road for his sake. And I could hold her love close to me and feel it, and still decide I was ready to pay. I put my fingers into my pocket to touch the last scrap I’d saved, the piece that said courage, and I ate it that night before I went to sleep, lying in my narrow bed on the lowest floor of the Scholomance, and I dreamed of being small again, running in a wide-open field of overgrown grass and tall purple-belled flowers around me, knowing Mum was nearby and watching me and glad that I was happy.
* * *
The lovely warm feeling lasted five seconds into the next morning, which is how long it took me to finish waking up. In most schools, you get holidays after term-end. Here, it’s graduation in the morning, induction in the evening, you congratulate yourself and your surviving friends that you’ve all lived that long, and the next day it’s the start of the new term. The Scholomance isn’t really conducive to holiday-making, to be fair.
On the first day of term, we have to go to our new homeroom and get our schedules lined up before breakfast. I was still feeling like moldy bread: it tends to slightly aggravate a half-healed gut wound when you get yourself bungeed around by yanker spells et cetera. I’d deliberately set an alarm to wake me five minutes before the end of morning curfew, because I was absolutely sure that wherever I was assigned for homeroom, it was going to take forever getting there. And sure enough, when the slip of paper with my assignment slid under my door at 5:59 a.m., it was for room 5013. I glared at it. Seniors hardly ever get any classroom assignments above the third floor, so you might think I should have been pleased, except it was only homeroom, and I was sure I’d never get a real class assigned that high. As far as I knew, there weren’t any classrooms on that floor—fifth floor is the library. Probably I was being sent to some filing closet deep in the stacks with a handful of other luckless strangers.
I didn’t even clean my teeth. I just swished my mouth out with water from my jug and started off on the slog while the first other seniors up were still shambling off to the loo. I didn’t bother asking round to see if anyone else was going the same way: I was sure nobody I knew well enough to speak to would be. I just waved to Aadhya in passing as she came out of her room with her bathroom bag, and she nodded back in immediate understanding and gave me a thumbs-up for encouragement as she continued on to collect up Liu: we’re all sadly familiar with the hazard of a long slog to a classroom, and our year now had the longest slogs of all.
There was no more down for us: yesterday, just as the seniors’ res hall went rotating down to the graduation hall, ours had followed to take their place, at the lowest level of the school. I had to trot round to the stairway landing, then make my extremely cautious way through the workshop level—yes, it was the day after the cleansing, but it’s never a good thing to be first onto a classroom floor in the morning—and then begin on the five steep double flights of stairs straight up.