by Naomi Novik
“Um,” he said. “I’m thinking.”
“About what?” I said. “Freeze it, why don’t you!”
“I don’t have a good freezing spell!”
“What do you mean, you don’t have a good freezing spell?” I said, glaring at him. “You’re from New York.”
He looked guilty and muttered, “I can’t get mana out of the mals if I freeze them.”
The whole stairwell trembled around us.
“Who cares!” I said. “Get mana out of the next one!”
“So I haven’t learned any!” he yelled.
“Oh, for the love of the Great Mother Goddess,” I said, with all the heartfelt disgust I could produce, which that phrase itself induces in me to begin with, and I grabbed my crystal and started to put together a picture in my head while I tapped into my already badly depleted store of mana: in the shop, the senior girl had been telling me that nitrogen was more than half of the air, so I envisioned it condensing into a solid shell over the grogler’s skin, just a few millimeters thick.
“What are you doing?” he said. I ignored him completely; my gut hurt like crazy from falling down the stairs, enough to bring tears to my eyes, and my scraped elbow and skinned knee stung, too, and it was an immense effort to keep my focus. He gave me up as a bad cause and ran down the stairwell and started grabbing tentacles one after another, pulling them loose from their grips and putting binding spells on them, trying to squash the whole thing into a single ball while it bulged out in one direction and another like a giant angry amoeba.
“I’m ready,” I croaked.
“What?” he said, through gritted teeth, as he wrestled another tentacle into the mass.
“Get back from it!” I said louder, through gritted teeth. Orion glanced back at me, and the tentacle managed to half pull free and thump him, knocking him halfway up the stairs. Good enough to get him clear, and well deserved. I chanted out the phase-control spell, and tried to make the nitrogen in my vision liquid.
I’m reasonably sure I was successful, since the mana certainly went somewhere: half my laboriously refilled crystal, gone in a gulp. I guess the nitrogen did boil away again instantly, because there was no visual effect; maybe a faint whoosh of coldish air moving, but that was all. Except for one minor detail: the grogler’s skin instantly frosted over, and then cracked up all at once like the surface of a pond in spring. The whole thing collapsed, the liquidy guts inside all spilling into a single giant puddle that drained away through the grating at the bottom of the stairs, going down in a brief whirlpool with a final loud gurgling slurp. The only thing left behind was the tiny core tentacle that had wriggled through the corner of the stairwell in the first place, like a spider plant budding off. That looked exactly like the classic illustration in the third chapter of the freshman-year textbook, iridescent jelly around a neon-pink vein. It pulled itself right back through the hole like a piece of spaghetti getting sucked up.
Orion sat up. “Hah!” he croaked out, like he’d done it, and looked up the stairs at me triumphantly.
“Lake, I hate you more than words can possibly express,” I told him, fervently, and sat down and leaned against the wall and wrapped my arms around my aching belly. He got up a little sheepishly and filled the hole in the wall with some putty out of his pocket, did a quick make-and-mend, and then he came over and I think was about to try and carry me. I gave him a death glare and made him just help me up instead.
And after all that, he was yawning again even before we were at the senior hall landing, like he didn’t have a drop of adrenaline running through his system. I was in more than minor pain and I still felt at least ten times as alert as he looked. I eyed him as we limped onwards. “Why are you this wiped out? Have you been having really incredible nightmares or—” But I was figuring it out even as he darted a half-guilty look towards me. “You moron, you’ve been staying up patrolling? Because of that pathetic murderous gob whining at you?”
Orion wouldn’t meet my eyes. “He wasn’t wrong,” he said, low.
“What?”
“The mals in the graduation hall,” he said. “It wasn’t just the grogler. They must’ve forced a hole through the wards, down there, and now they’re all trying to make it through into the school. It’s worse at night. I’ve mended that same wall seven times so far—”
“And you haven’t slept in fifty-five hours, which does explain why you spent ten straight minutes hacking tentacles off a grogler,” I said.
“It was twice as big as any grogler’s supposed to be!” he said defensively. “I thought it was a hydra-class mal!”
“A justifiable mistake right up until you’ve hacked off the first tentacle,” I said. “How many had you done, seven? And you were still going strong when I got there. If it had yanked the stairwell open, no question you’d have earned an assist.” His mouth went into a hard line, and I could feel his body tense with the desire to go storming away from me, which he’d probably have done, except at the moment it would’ve involved dragging me right along with him. “What’s the point of this exercise exactly? Even if you’re really set on going out in a blaze of glory, you won’t get one if you go down at the start of the inundation.”
“Will you stop? I don’t care about glory!” he said. “I just—it’s my fault! You told me it was. I screwed with the principle of balance, and—”
“Oh, now you’re ready to accept the basic laws of reality,” I said. “Shut up, Lake. We all know you don’t get anything for free. Nobody complained when you were saving their lives, did they?”
“Only you,” he said, dryly.
“I’ll remember to be really smug about that as I’m getting eaten by the graduation horde,” I said. “You’ve been white-knighting as hard as you can for three full years. You’re not going to fix the consequences by white-knighting a little bit harder over the course of a single week. That’s the principle of balance, too.”
“Well, you’ve convinced me. I guess I’ll just go take a nap, then. That’s going to help a lot,” he said, with a wealth of sarcasm.
I glared at him. “It would beat helping a grogler rip open the school.” He scowled back at me. And then yawned again.
LUNCH WAS almost over by the time we got back up. Everyone was in the cafeteria as usual despite the earlier panic in the shop: very few things are allowed to interfere with getting food, and the horrible grinding and vibrations had stopped, anyway. Aadhya and Liu had saved us seats, and even some food on their own trays, even though it meant they’d been sitting at an almost empty table by the time we got there. Keeping two seats open for kids who hadn’t even made it to the cafeteria before the line closed was a lot, especially when there was a potential disaster going below. I even had to be grudgingly glad for Ibrahim, who had actually stuck it out with them even after most of his friends had made excuses and ditched for other tables. But he took care of that sentiment fast.
“It couldn’t have just been an ordinary grogler,” he said positively, after we filled them in. “It must have been some new kind of variant.” Because otherwise his darling Orion might have made a stupid mistake, which was obviously inconceivable. If I’d had any food or any breath to spare, I’d have thrown some at him. As it was, I was too sore.
Thankfully, there were some people of sense at the table, who focused on the most important bits. “How exactly have you been patching the damage in the stairwell?” Aadhya asked Orion. “Just make-and-mend?”
“Yeah,” Orion said tiredly. “With my dad’s filler recipe.” He stopped shoveling in leftovers and took out the lump of putty and showed it to her.
Aadhya took a bit of it in her fingers and stretched it into a square, holding it up to the light and then pushing down onto the table, folding it a few ways and kneading it, rolling it out and coiling it up again before she gave it back to him. “Don’t get me wrong, this is amazing stuff, but
it’s still generic. And you’ve done a lot of separate repairs?” She shook her head. “There’s no way that’s going to hold through the end-of-term rotation. Honestly, I’d worry it’ll come apart as soon as the first-tier gears engage this Sunday.”
“We’re not going to make it to Sunday if the mals down there keep pounding on it,” I muttered from where I was barely clearing the surface of my mash. I was giving serious thought to just licking it up like ice cream instead of sitting up again to get a utensil that I would have to use muscles in my body to move from the plate to my mouth. “We’re going to have to find a way to hold them back long enough to fix the damage properly. And we’ll need some ridiculous number of people helping to raise the mana for it.”
“Remember when the alchemy lab got damaged?” Ibrahim said to Orion earnestly, over my head. “We need to make an announcement, and recruit people to raise enough mana to fix the damage.”
I said, without moving or changing volume, “Ibrahim, I’m going to harvest your internal organs in your sleep.” I saw his hands on the table twitch.
“But we can’t,” Liu said. I did haul my head up for her input. “We can’t let the seniors find out at all.”
“Huh?” Orion said, but I propped my elbows on the table and put my hands over my face. She was right, of course. The seniors weren’t going to help us. If a hole opened up to the graduation hall before the senior dorms were closed off, the seniors went from being the whole buffet to the toughest and most stale entrées on the menu. If they knew it was a possibility, that the wards had weakened that much, they’d probably go down there and start hitting the stairwell themselves, so what if they were throwing the rest of us to the wolves? They’d all give themselves Todd’s excuse: it was understandable, they didn’t have a choice, it was Orion’s fault. It didn’t even need to be all of them who’d do it. Just enough.
We all knew it. Even completely knackered, Orion got it himself after a moment and stopped eating, hunched over the table. None of us said another word for the next ten minutes, until the senior bell rang. After they were all out of the room, I said, “How do we do it? How few people can we get away with telling, and still get it fixed?”
The best solution we came up with was trying to turn the iron wall of the stairwell into steel, in place. “So I recognize this is a crazy idea, but just as a starting point,” was the encouraging way Aadhya suggested it. “What if we go down to the bottom of the stairwell with a portable crucible and a whole bunch of carbon. We light it up, and then El uses the phase-control spell to melt in just a little bit of the iron from the damaged wall, the size of a quarter, not big enough to let something really dangerous get through. I have a spell process to infuse carbon into iron, to turn it into steel. I’ll do that to the melted iron, and then she can put it back solid again. We could do it in a running cycle, the way you were doing it with the silver during the demo,” she added to me. “And if anything squeezes through one of the holes we make in the wall while we’re working, Orion can take it out.”
That was a wildly ambitious plan, only as far as any of us could see, the only other option was to make new walls in the shop in pieces, tote them down to the stairwell, and ask the mals nicely to stay back while we swapped them in. After first asking all the seniors nicely to stay out of the shop for the next three days, while we recruited about ten artificer-track students to make these new walls in the first place.
“How much mana would this take?” Ibrahim said.
“Shedloads,” I said. “The phase-control spell is unbelievably cheap for what it does, but it’s not free. Melting down an entire wall of solid iron isn’t going to be like doing a tiny bit of silver or picking a single chemical out of a piece of wood. Fortunately, we’ve got a solution.” I turned and looked at Orion pointedly.
He blinked back at me. “I don’t know if there will be enough mals coming through for me to keep feeding you mana the whole time?”
“Just take it from your enclave power-sharer,” I said. “You put enough in, they can’t complain, surely.”
“Well—I could ask Magnus—”
“Wait, what?” I said. “Why would you have to ask anyone?”
He paused for a weird moment, and then he swallowed and said, “I don’t…I have a hard time paying attention to…if I have open access to the power bank, I’ll just use it. So my sharer’s got a block.” He tried to sound casual about it, but he was looking away.
None of us said anything. Ibrahim looked utterly horrified. It was a shocking feet-of-clay moment for him, I suppose: Orion Lake, blocked from his own enclave share because he didn’t have basic mana control. That’s like admitting you wear nappies because you wet yourself now and again.
Only in this case, it was more like he was being forced to wear a nappy and wet himself now and again so all of his enclave mates could go on happily enjoying the mana he was pouring into their share, the streams of mana those greedy selfish bastards were milking out of him every time he took out another mal. I wanted to rip the power-sharer right off his wrist and go and chuck it at Chloe’s head and tell her that Orion was right not to care about a single one of them, and we were going it alone, I was taking him to live in a yurt in Wales when we got out of here, and every last wizard in New York could set themselves on fire and cry about it.
I couldn’t speak because I was so mad. And annoyingly, I’d underrated Ibrahim again; he was actually the one who broke the silence and said, “But—aren’t you the one who—I heard you get mana from the mals—”
Orion shrugged a little without meeting anyone’s eyes. “Everyone puts in mana. It’s not a big deal. I can get some whenever I need it.”
“But,” Ibrahim said.
“Later,” I told him, and he looked over at me and I assume gathered from my expression that yeah, it was an absolute mountain of rubbish that I wasn’t going to let stand five seconds longer than it needed to, once we weren’t all a few days away from even more sudden and unpleasant death than normal. He subsided, and I said to Orion, “Not Magnus. We’ll ask Chloe.”
* * *
CHLOE’S BRILLIANT INPUT on our plan was, “But wait, why don’t we just put in a maintenance request?”
She said it as if that was a completely reasonable and obvious suggestion, and Orion actually rubbed his face and looked over at me a bit sheepishly, like oh, he hadn’t considered that option, he really should have had more sleep. We went in for a round of staring around at each other with equal degrees of what sort of moron are you expressions, and then I said, “Does that ever actually work for you?”
“What do you mean?” Chloe said. “Of course it does. I put in requests all the time.”
It shouldn’t’ve been a surprise. The maintenance request form, which I haven’t bothered filling out since second half of freshman year, has a box for your name. I had assumed they were all just going straight into a bin, and we got assigned to repair work by random and malicious chance, but now I realized of course the forms went into a box instead, somewhere in the hidden janitorial rooms that only the maintenance-track kids know about, and they fished out requests made by, for instance, New York enclavers, and saw to it that those got handled. In fact, after a brief moment, it wasn’t a surprise, and I went right on past it. “Right, have you ever put in one at graduation time?”
“No!” Chloe said, like I’d insulted her. “I know we’re not supposed to put in unnecessary maintenance requests at midterms and finals. But I think this qualifies as life-threatening damage!”
“It certainly does qualify,” I said. “It’s especially life-threatening to anyone who goes down there to fix it, which is why you won’t get any maintenance-track kids to do it for you. They’ll give you half an hour of their time to patch your desk lamp, Rasmussen; they won’t face down the graduation horde on your behalf just because you ask nicely. Not to mention the seniors are probably the ones who dole out the s
hift assignments. So are you going to help us or not?”
Chloe did come round, especially after I made several very sharp and pointy remarks about Orion’s contributions to the New York mana supply, which I suppose conveyed the extent of my desire to take Orion’s power-sharer and throw it with great force at her head. She did have one useful suggestion, namely, “Shouldn’t we try this out first?” even if it came from the unflattering direction of doubting that we were competent enough to actually manage the process.
What she really wanted to do was to ask in a half-dozen other New York kids, including Magnus, all of whom had many close senior friends. She only agreed to hold off temporarily after we agreed to do a practice run. I think she expected it wasn’t going to work, and we’d have to give in to her afterwards. Whatever her reasons, I was just as glad for the practice, as long as she was putting up the mana.
We got together in the shop the next day, during work period, and Chloe gave me and Aadhya each a power-sharer. When I clasped it round my wrist, I tugged experimentally and got a line of mana that felt roughly like a hose being fed by the Atlantic. I’d already known that the enclavers had access to gobs of mana, loads more than the rest of us, but I hadn’t realized how much more. I could’ve razed a city or two without even making a dent. I had to work really hard not to just start pulling it down as wildly as if I didn’t have any basic mana control of my own. I couldn’t help but tell that I could’ve filled every crystal I had, twice over, with a few good gulps.
Orion trotted round the supply bins to collect up all the materials for us, with about as much hesitation as usual. He was less exhausted this morning; I’d made him go to bed early last night, on the grounds that whoever was going to get munched during the night was going to get munched just as much along with everyone else in the school on Sunday if he couldn’t keep the mals off us while we worked.
