by Naomi Novik
You don’t get to choose what comes out, of course. The items are rarely contaminated, as they’re all things in packets, but they’re usually aged, and sometimes inedibly ancient. Once, I got a military ration from World War I. I’d come up that time because I was feeling light-headed, so I was hungry enough to open it, but even then I couldn’t bring myself to risk anything but the biscuit, and by biscuit I mean the kind of hardtack they sent on yearlong sea voyages. Today I got a bag of off-brand crisps, a packet of mostly crumbled peanut butter crackers, and the prize, a Mars bar only three years past the sell-by date. Liu got a bag of salted licorice, which is inexpressibly vile but you can swap it with the Scandinavian kids for almost anything, another packet of crisps, and a slightly questionable box of cured meat. Aadhya got a small packet of halvah, a completely fresh salmon onigiri dated this very morning, amazing, and a whole tin of chestnut spread so large it clanged the whole machine when it came down.
“Let me try and get something to put it on,” I said, and put in another token: when you use a token you’ve saved for a while, usually you get something particularly good or particularly bad. This time I was in luck: out came the glorious orange plastic of a packet of Hobnobs.
We got our little paper cups of tea and coffee from the lukewarm urns and went back to Aadhya’s room to share the lot. She had tapped the gas line of her room lamp to build herself a little Bunsen burner, which we used to boil the meat in an alchemy beaker while we wolfed down the onigiri, and then ate Hobnobs slathered with chestnut spread and topped with halvah and crushed peanut butter crackers. When the meat had cooked long enough, we ate it with the crisps, a feast finished off with celebratory slices of Mars bar. Aadhya sat at the desk, working on the belly of her lute, and Liu and I sat on the bed and worked on our papers.
We didn’t talk very much: none of us had time to waste. But we’d said enough, and shaken hands. While the meat had been cooking, I’d gone to my room and come back with crystals for each of them. After we finished the food and it was getting on a bit, I began on my mana-building crochet, and Liu sat down on the floor and did yoga. Aadhya did sudoku puzzles. When the first bell rang, we went to the bathroom together, and after we had our wash, we went to the stretch of wall between the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms and wrote our three names there together: Liu wrote our names down in Chinese characters, and I did us in Hindi and English. We weren’t the absolute first set, but close to it: there were only three other alliances already written up, nobody I knew. On our way back, Liu waited by her door until I got to mine, we both waited until Aadhya was at hers, too, and we waved to each other before we went inside to bed.
I slept really well. I don’t usually remember dreams, which is probably for the best all things considered, but that morning I woke up just before the bell and while I was lying there in bed I had a vague half dream of Mum sitting in the woods looking at me worried. I said out loud, “It’s all right. I’m all right, Mum, I’m not joining an enclave. You were right,” and I didn’t even mind saying it, because I didn’t want her to be worried, and she was still worried, reaching out to me with her mouth moving silently, trying to say something. “Mum, I have friends. Aadhya and Liu and Orion. I have friends,” and in the dream my eyes were blurry and I was smiling, and I woke up still smiling. It’s supposed to be impossible to communicate with anyone inside the Scholomance, because if message spells could get through, so could some kinds of mals, so I wasn’t sure if I’d really seen Mum, but I hoped so. I wanted her to know.
It’s not that I was suddenly in charity with the whole world or anything. I saw Chloe coming out of her room as I went back to mine after washing up, and I did manage to get angry again. Orion wasn’t at the meeting point, and Ibrahim said he hadn’t seen him in the boys’ that morning, either. I had been absolutely determined that I was never going to wait for him, but with indignation hot in my belly, I said, “Save us two seats, all right?” to Aadhya and Liu, and I went and banged on his door, loudly. I did it once more before I got back the sound of some thumping around, and he opened it without the slightest precaution, shirtless and with his hair sticking up, to blink at me bleary and haggard.
“Come on, Lake, breakfast won’t eat itself,” I told him, and he mumbled something incoherent and then turned back in, shoved his feet into his trainers and got a T-shirt off the floor, dropped it again—there was an enormous blue stain down the front—got a different T-shirt off the floor, pulled it over his head, and staggered off to the loo.
“Did you get high or something last night?” I asked in curiosity as we finally made it up the stairs: I’d had to catch him and give him a shove to get him onto the cafeteria landing, after he’d previously tried to turn off both onto the alchemy lab landing and the sophomore res hall landing.
Whipping up recreational substances is a fairly popular pastime for alchemy-track kids, but Orion said, “No!” in wounded tones like I’d insulted him. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep.” He emphasized the point by yawning so widely that he looked like he was about to unhinge his jaw.
“Right,” I said skeptical. We can all deal with routine sleep deprivation by the end of freshman year, because by then the ones who can’t have been winnowed out. “Too much saving the world to do? Go and sit down with Aadhya and Liu, I’ll get you a tray.”
I wasn’t even that hungry myself today, thanks to our snack bar orgy the night before, so I kept the porridge for myself and let him have the egg and bacon butty I’d been able to snag. But he had to be poked, and then ate it with his eyes half closing, not responding even when Ibrahim asked him a direct question. He put his head straight back down after wolfing down the sandwich.
Aadhya and I had been discussing the demo I was going to do in shop class today; she paused, eyeing him, and asked, “Is he high or something?” Orion didn’t register any protest this time.
I shrugged. “He said not. Just no sleep.”
Fortunately he was in language lab first thing this morning, so I was able to shepherd him along and get him tucked into the booth next to mine. He promptly put his head down on the desk and fell asleep to the sweet lulling murmur of voices singing of violent death in French. There was only a single worksheet in his folder, dead easy, so I filled it in for him. He looked a bit more functional when I shook him awake at the end of class. “Thanks?” he said uncertainly when he saw the worksheet, but he got it and mine to the slot and managed to submit them without cutting off his own fingers or anything.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Are you going to be all right getting to your next lesson?”
“Yeah?” he said, in even more doubtful tones.
“Do you need to be walked?” I asked, eyeing him.
“No, I don’t need—what are you doing?” he burst out.
“What?”
“Why are you being this nice?” he said. “Are you mad at me for something?”
“No!” I said, and was about to inform him that I was a decent human being and nice quite regularly or at least once in a while, and it wasn’t a sign I was angry, and then I realized that actually he was right, only it was his useless enclaver friends I was angry at; I was feeling sorry for him. Which I would have hated myself, with a violent passion. “Am I allowed to be in a good mood occasionally, or do I need to register this madness with the authorities first?” I snapped instead. “Go on and fall into the rubbish chute if you like. I’m off to the workshop.” He looked relieved as I huffed off away from him.
The shop is never fun this near to graduation, and today was no exception: the floor trembled approximately every fifteen minutes, and it was so hot in the room that some of the boys were taking off their shirts. Almost anyone who could had finished off their final projects and was skipping class, so it would normally have been very thin of company, but a reasonably big crowd had shown for my demonstration. Aadhya sorted everyone out for best views, prioritizing seniors: what she r
eally wanted was to get five seniors with top bids and then do a second auction after the term ended and the five original buyers were gone.
Meanwhile, I did a careful and slightly painful stretching routine to raise a bit of mana—the slight pain helped—and then I picked up the piece of wood that I was going to work with. I didn’t want to waste the effort, so I was using the demo to start on the chest I’d promised the sutras I would make to hold them. It was going to be only just large enough to hold the one book: aside from conveying how special they were to me, I needed it to be light enough for me to carry out of the graduation hall next year. Aadhya and I had worked out a design that would end up shaped like a slightly larger version of the book itself, only carved of wood, and she’d given me a really nice piece of purpleheart wood to make the spine.
“I’m going to use the spell to liquefy the lignin in the wood, so we can bend it into a curve,” I told everyone, and passed around the wood so they could all make sure it was real and actually the perfectly straight and solid piece of half-inch-thick wood that it appeared to be. When it got back to me, I held it in my hands, visualized, and recited the incantation. Aadhya had told me lignin was just the bit in the walls of wood cells that makes them hard, and I’m guessing it wasn’t a huge amount of stuff that had to be changed, but even so, it was amazing how little mana the spell needed. It didn’t even consume half of what I’d raised, and the wood literally went pliable in my hands. I bent it over the wide steel pipe we were using to shape it, and Aadhya and I clamped it into place; then I used the spell to make the lignin solid again. We unclamped it and just like that, the plank was a tidy curve; the spine of the sutras nestled into it beautifully. The whole thing took only a few minutes.
Everyone was murmuring and excited as we passed the curved plank around. For the second demo, Aadhya used an engraving tool and carved a little design in the very top of the plank, then set up a tiny funnel with a strip of silver out of her supply stash. I turned the silver liquid, and she poured it into the design. I even experimented a bit: I tried turning it back solid in a continuous process, just as it landed in the carving, so that it wouldn’t overflow the edges. It worked brilliantly.
People started asking if I’d show them something more, and I didn’t see any reason not to: I still had some mana left. Aadhya and I were trying to decide what we should do, and then a senior girl in the alchemy track suddenly came up with the idea of trying to turn some nitrogen liquid, straight out of the air around us. That could obviously be amazingly useful, although we weren’t sure what would happen with the nitrogen after I did it: wouldn’t it just instantly evaporate away again? But everyone was so excited about the idea that a couple of senior boys volunteered to climb up on a bench to get one of the metal canisters from the high shelves along the wall, if we let them keep whatever was left inside after. I agreed; that was fair when they’d be the ones sticking their heads that close to the ceiling without knowing if there was going to be any real return.
The first one climbed up, and then the next round of grinding vibrations hit, except this time it didn’t stop; instead it got worse, a lot worse, almost graduation-day bad, and things started falling off the walls and shelves and then even the stools started falling over. The boy on the bench had crouched down for balance already, but he had to jump for it, grabbing for his friend’s hand just in time as three of the canisters came crashing down on the table. One popped open and a writhing mass of baby copper-gnawers came spilling out on the floor, like the unwanted prize in a shell game.
But we were all running for the door by then. Thankfully I had never taken the book-sling off. I grabbed the newly inlaid spine of my chest on the way, and Aadhya and I made it out into the corridor in the middle of the pack of fleeing kids. We all dashed for the stairs. Getting to higher ground is the sensible thing to do when there’s a disturbance from below, so of course I saw Orion go flying past the stairwell heading downward instead. The only place down from here was the senior dorms, and the stairs past that were the ones that would soon be opening up to the graduation hall.
“Lake, you utter wanker, go up!” I yelled, but he had already gone; he didn’t even break stride. I clenched my jaw and looked at Aadhya, who stared back at me, and then I said grimly, “Can you take this?” and ducked my head out from under the sling.
“He’s going to be fine!” Aadhya said, but she was grabbing the sling from me as she said it. She even took the purpleheart piece.
“No, he’s not, I’m going to bash his head in with a brick,” I said, and then we were in the stairwell and I fought my way out of the current running upstream and headed down after him. The grinding felt a lot worse as soon as I was out of the crowd; the stairwell walls were actually vibrating so much they were humming out loud. “Orion!” I yelled again, but there was no sight of him, and he probably couldn’t have heard me over the sound.
As I wasn’t myself a noble hero with a limitless store of mana and all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair, I went down slowly and cautiously. Nobody came up past me: it was the middle of the school day, and this close to end of term the seniors were only in their res hall after curfew anyway. The grinding was even louder after I passed their landing: it was clearly coming from the bottom of the stairs, and I was horribly sure that I was going to find Orion down there with it.
I was nearly down to the next turn in the stairs when he came flying back up towards me, literally: he’d been thrown bodily through the air. He smashed into the wall and fell almost exactly at my feet, gasping. He stared up at me puzzled, and then a gigantic jellyfish-translucent tentacle came groping up around the corner, feeling for him, and he sat up and slashed at it with the thin metal rod he was clutching in his hand. If you would like to envision the dramatic results, get a very large bowl, fill it with jelly, take a toothpick, and very gently press it into the surface and lift it away. If the indentation stays for longer than a second, you’ve had more of an effect than he did.
Orion looked at the rod with a confused and betrayed expression: it had to be some artifact that had switched off. The tentacle was going straight for his arm in return. I had to reach out and touch it—I used the very tip of my left little finger—and shock it with the electrical-charge spell I’d got from Nkoyo. It recoiled long enough for me to grab Orion by the arm and help him scramble to his feet, and also to drag him up a few steps. Then I met resistance. “No, I have to—” he said.
“Get your brains beaten out against the stairwell?” I snarled at him, and pulled his head down as the tentacle lashed back over our heads.
“Allumez!” he said, and the rod burst into blazing white-hot flames between us. It nearly took off my eyelashes. I fell back on my bum and skidded down the stairs all the way round the next turning myself, where I got an absolutely beautiful view down the staircase into a horrible mass of writhing jelly tentacles at the very bottom. They had got themselves wound around everything that could be gripped, every inch of the railing and into the vents. They were straining to the utmost to pull the rest of whatever the mal was through a tiny cockroach-sized gap in the lower bottom corner of the stairwell. Which meant it was effectively trying to rip the staircase open. I couldn’t remember ever noticing on the blueprints what was on the other side of the staircase wall over here, but at the moment, there was a graduation mal on the other side, which meant that somehow there was a path for mals to make it up here from the hall, despite all the wards and barriers along the way, and the staircase was our last line of defense. If this one made it through, all its friends would follow. It would effectively start graduation early. Except, since the senior hall hadn’t been separated from the rest of the school yet, the waiting mals would instantly come pouring up for all of us.
After my first moment of pure aaiiugh, I noticed the deflated blobs littering the bottom of the stairs and howled, “No, wait!” but it was too late. Orion had just sliced off the tentacle still bashing
at his head. The enormous chunk of the end fell down, sizzling, and the rest recoiled down to the mass, where it pressed the cut end into the middle of the knot, turning into a lovely bowed curve, and split itself elegantly into four tentacles, each already starting to swell into the size of the original one, and all of which went grabbing for more things to yank on.
Orion staggered down and pulled me to my feet. “Get out of here!” he said, and was about to sail right back into it. I had to grab his hair and yank. “Ow!” he yelled, and nearly took my arm off with the flaming sword. “What are you—”
“It’s a grogler, you brainless cod!” I yelled at him.
“No, it’s a hyd—oh shit, it’s a grogler,” Orion said, and just stood there for a dazed, gaping moment. Which we had to spare, since the grogler was currently ignoring us in favor of continuing its straining efforts to rip open the delicious extra-large snack pack for itself and every other mal down in the graduation hall.
“How aren’t you dead yet?” I said, bitterly. To be fair to Orion, not that I felt like being fair to him, the grogler was so big that you couldn’t see the thin pink cords running through the center of the tentacles, or the big red knot that was presumably somewhere in the middle of that mass. It had likely broken a million tentacles just bashing them against things, long before Orion had got himself down here. Groglers aren’t known for patience or long-term strategy, but apparently sufficient hunger was sufficiently motivating. “Well?”
