by Naomi Novik
We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet. We’re always looking to one another for signals and information. Do you think that’s the best table to sit at? Do you think that’s a good class to take? Everyone wants to jump on any advantage. Me saying I was going meant that at least one presumed-to-be-rational person thought she had a sliver of a chance of making it out, and then the enclave kids had sweetened the pot. That’s why there were now more volunteers than places, because I’d put my finger on the scales.
If I took it off again now, who knew how many seniors would start to have second thoughts? They might decide that actually I was playing a double game of my own: maybe I was just trying to wipe out a dozen of the top seniors, and delay the rest of them long enough to stop them from either smashing open the school or dragging my class along with them to graduation. That would’ve been clever, now I thought of it, and surely the geniuses coming along had thought of it, too, and were keeping a wary eye on me to see if I bailed out at the last minute.
Clarita was going; so was David Pires, the still-resentful salutorian, saluditorian, whatever you call the number two besides “not the valedictorian,” which was in fact exactly what I was inclined to call him. He was an incanter also, and he hadn’t spent his academic career hiding his light under a bushel; he’d spent it informing everyone who talked to him for so much as thirty seconds that he was going to be valedictorian, and brandishing his every mark like a trophy. He’d told me back in my freshman year, when I’d accidentally knocked over one of his precariously balanced stacks of books in the reading room. He’d yelled at me and demanded to know if I knew who he was, which I hadn’t until then, and didn’t much care to afterwards. And he was going, as far as I could tell, because he wasn’t satisfied with the guaranteed enclave spot he already had coming in Sydney; he wanted to be able to pick and choose. Getting close to valedictorian does require a muscular ego, but his was on steroids.
After the first wave of volunteering, that boy from Berlin had rounded up a couple of other senior enclavers from the bigger places, the ones we all had in our heads as the most powerful kids, and we’d huddled up in the library—Orion included for obvious reasons, my own presence tolerated—to discuss the situation with Clarita and David and the third obvious candidate, Wu Wen. He was actually ranked only fifteenth overall in the senior class, and also made the discussion require more translation, because he was the only one there who didn’t know a word of English. He had copped out and claimed Mandarin was his native language so he could take Shanghainese—his actual native language—for his languages requirement. And he’d all but flunked the coursework for that. In fact, he’d barely squeaked through every course he’d taken that wasn’t shop or maths.
Since literally everyone else in the top twenty had almost perfect marks on everything and fought it out with extra-credit work, that gives you an idea of the kinds of marks he got on his artifice projects. He already had a guaranteed spot in Bangkok enclave, but he’d volunteered to come with Orion the instant that Shanghai enclave put one on the line.
I didn’t have any part in the planning, except to annoy the senior enclavers even more by insisting that we weren’t going until the morning of graduation day itself. “Don’t be ridiculous,” the boy from Jaipur enclave informed me coldly. “You can’t leave your rooms until morning bell, and graduation is two hours later. We need to allow more time than that. What if something goes wrong?”
“Then we’re all dead, and everyone left in the school has a worse-than-usual time of it for the next few years until things balance out. Shut it, Lake,” I added to Orion, who was opening his mouth to say that actually he was ready to go this evening, or something else similarly dim. “Sorry, but you don’t get to keep a tidy murder plan in reserve in case we don’t succeed.”
That could’ve turned into more of a fight, except Clarita and David and Wen weren’t on the enclavers’ side of it anymore—they weren’t going to be enjoying the benefits of any reserve plan if we didn’t make it back. Wen even suggested that the more time we had to build the parts and practice installation, the better.
Apart from that, though, the plan was fairly obvious anyway. We needed a group of artificers and maintenance-track kids who’d build the parts and do the repair, and we needed a group of incanters to shield them while they did it. And Orion would be our offense, dashing out from behind the shield at every opportunity, hopefully taking out enough mals to let us keep the shield up for long enough to get the work done. The alchemists were out of luck, if that’s what you want to call it. In this case, the machinery was going to need maybe one liter of the common school lubricant, which the maintenance kids brew for themselves in massive vats.
“I have a shielding spell we can use,” Clarita offered a bit sourly, which I understood after she got it out and grudgingly shared it with me and David: she’d written it herself, and I’d never seen anything like it. There are plenty of shielding spells that you can strengthen by casting them through a circle, but you still have to funnel the power through a primary caster, and if that one person goes down, so does the shield. Clarita’s shield spell was fundamentally designed to be cast by multiple people, to cover a group. It wove between English and Spanish, and read almost like a song, or a play with different roles for each caster: there were lines and verses that we could cast either solo or together, chaining them together one after another, so we could all take a breather now and then, and the lines weren’t even nailed down: you were allowed to improvise as long as you kept the same basic rhythm and meaning, which is a massive advantage when you’re in a combat situation and you can’t remember which adjective you’re supposed to use.
It was undoubtedly a wrench to hand over a spell that valuable to other people for nothing. She’d probably have got into an alliance on the strength of it even if she hadn’t had anything else to offer. My own best shielding spell is top-notch, but it’s a purely personal shield. And everyone else already has it, as Mum invented it, and she gives her spells out freely to anyone who asks. There’s a wizard who comes to the commune once a year and collects up her new ones and sends out copies to quite a lot of subscribers. He charges. I’ve yelled at Mum for just giving him the spells, but she says he’s providing a service, and if he wants to charge for it that’s his concern.
“Four incanters, you think?” David said, looking up narrow-eyed from the bottom of the page before I’d even finished reading a quarter of the way down.
“Five,” Clarita said, with an unflattering look at me, even though another person meant diminishing returns: the bigger an area we had to shield, the more mana we’d need to use, and the harder it would be for Orion to keep mals from hitting the shield in the first place. But I kept my mouth shut; I wasn’t going to convince any of them to rely on me by telling them that I was brilliant.
The next incanter down the list, number five, already had a guaranteed spot from Sacramento and wasn’t as loony as Pires, so he wasn’t volunteering to go along. But number seven was Maya Wulandari, a languages-track girl from Canada, who had both English and Spanish, but not the guaranteed spot in Toronto that she badly wanted. That’s one of the few enclaves with the remarkably civilized practice of allowing any new recruit to bring their entire family in with them, which in her case meant that her little brother and sister would come here as enclavers.
Those enclaves are all unusually picky, though. If she’d been top three, the Toronto enclaver kids could have offered her a guarantee; top ten only got her an alliance and a promise of serious consideration. She could’ve taken a guaranteed spot for herself somewhere else; instead she’d taken the gamble that when she got out, she’d be able to persuade the enclave council that she and her family were a good choice to bring in. And now she’d taken a different gamble: she’d talked to the Toronto kids about the guarantee, and they’d agreed t
hat even if she didn’t make it back from what we were with excessive drama now calling the mission, they’d consider the spot hers—and her family would get to come in.
The next incanter down the rankings who’d volunteered and had both Spanish and English was Angel Torres, at lucky number thirteen: also not good enough to get a guaranteed spot anywhere, after three and a half years fighting tooth and nail for every mark; he was one of the nose-to-grindstone workhorses, the kind who sleep five hours a night, get ten extra spells a week down in their books, and do extra-credit projects in every lesson.
That made five of us. Wen ran over the list of volunteers and picked out five artificers and ten maintenance-track kids, ignoring the rankings entirely. The senior enclavers all peered over his shoulders while pretending to be casual, paying close attention to which names he passed over and which ones he immediately put down. Expert information about which artificers and maintenance-track kids coming out are the best is both hard to get and extremely valuable, not so much in here, but for any enclave recruiting new people. He went for Mandarin-speakers, obviously, so I didn’t recognize any of their names myself except for Zhen Yang, a maintenance-track kid who had come in already bilingual and done the same thing as Liu: took her maths and writing and history classes in English so she could avoid taking any language classes and get more time to do shifts.
Everyone else in school spent hell week in the usual mix of panic and frenzy, with a special side order of building shared mana for the mission, three times a day, after every meal. All the bigger enclaves have a large mana store in the place, built over generations, which the enclavers get to pull from: they keep them hidden somewhere in the upper classrooms or the library and only the seniors from each enclave know where they are. Ten of the biggest enclaves contributed power-sharers to our little team—Chloe gave me back the same one as before, from New York—and in return, everyone poured mana into their battery packs. There were rows of kids doing push-ups in the cafeteria like it was a military training exercise and they were all being punished.
Our group spent it in the workshop, also in panic and frenzy. The artificers had the worst of it, obviously; they had to do most of their work in advance, and the rest of us ferried in their meals and raw materials and also protected them from the five-daily mal attacks that came at our heads, which I suppose was good practice at that. Clarita did get a bit less hostile to me after the first time we all cast her spell together successfully, in a practice session on Wednesday. That might sound like the hour was late, given that graduation was on Sunday, and it was, but that was also probably as good as we could possibly have hoped for. Casting a single spell with a circle of people isn’t like going to a yoga class with an instructor who encourages you to all go at your own pace; it’s like learning a choreographed dance with four people you barely know for an aggravated director who yells at you if you put a toe out of line.
We were all looking round at the shield, pleased with ourselves, when the big air shaft overhead exploded open and a hissingale the size of a tree came writhing down at us: it literally wrapped us up completely in pulsing snaky limbs and started trying to rip us apart, without noticeable success. I confess I yelped, which mortified me because none of the seniors so much as paused for a second. They’d all spent the last six months doing obstacle-course runs in the gym; you could probably have crept up to one of them sleeping and exploded a balloon next to their heads, and they’d just have killed you before they opened their eyes.
David Pires just said, “Got it,” and stepped out of the spell, leaving the rest of us to hold the shield; he drew a deep breath for what I’m sure would’ve been a really impressive casting, except before he could start, Orion ripped apart the hissingale like he was pulling open a stage curtain, and dragged the limp mass of it off us.
By Friday, when the five of us put the shield wall up, it felt roughly as strong as the major school ward we’d repaired down in the stairwell. And even as we were all congratulating ourselves, the repair team all screamed out loud and started jumping up and down hugging each other. After about five minutes of us yelling furiously for them to tell us what was going on, Yang and the other English-speaker—Ellen Cheng, from Texas—explained that Wen had just figured out a way to separate the parts into three collapsible pieces. They’d be able to build them up here and install them in under five minutes.
All the seniors on the team suddenly realized that we had decent odds to get through this alive, and if we did, they would emerge from the Scholomance as shining heroes, with guaranteed spots to any enclave they wanted. By the time graduation day was upon us, the maintenance kids were actually savagely competing to see who could do it the quickest: to keep the shield as tight as possible, only the four fastest of them were going—two to do the work and two spares, in case the rest of us couldn’t keep all the mals off them—along with Wen and Ellen and Kaito Nakamura, who were coming in case it turned out we needed some unexpected part.
It was just as well we had some cause for optimism, because otherwise, I’m fairly certain that at least half of our group would have balked when we got to the sticking point—namely, the way down.
The whole point of the school’s design is to keep the bit we’re in completely separated from the bit with the gates. If it were easy to get down, it would be easy to get up. The maintenance shaft we’d seen on the other side of the stairwell wall, packed full of argonet, wasn’t even on the blueprints. Not even the maintenance-track seniors had any idea where it would come out, or for that matter if it would be safe for us to go through whatever wards were on there to keep the mals out. They thought it would be all right, because presumably it had been built for those professional maintenance crews who’d been meant to be coming in here to fix things, but they couldn’t find a word about it in a single one of their manuals, even the old ones.
That was even sensible: if everyone forgot about it and didn’t think it was there, it would stop being there, more often than not, and that would be one unnecessary point of vulnerability closed up. The mals in the graduation hall had probably dragged it back into existence through their collective starving desperation to find a way to get up at us. And now it was our only way of getting down to them: climbing into the dark, with who knew what down there waiting.
When the morning bell rang on graduation day, Orion came and got me, and we went down to the senior res hall and met the rest of the group in the landing. Wen gave us each a belt hook for the yanker spell that would hopefully get us out alive; the anchor end was already secured to the drain in Todd’s old room, the one right across from the landing. The thirteen of us all marched the rest of the way down to the bottom of the stairwell, and the head of the maintenance team, Vinh Tran, carefully unrolled a maintenance hatch over my beautiful new steel wall, using a squeegee to make it come out smooth. It just looked like a big flat poster of a metal trap door at first, but as he smoothed it back and forth, murmuring some kind of incantation under his breath, it began to look like part of the wall. He took a thick brass handle out of his pocket, inserted it into the small, round black circle at one end, and pulled the hatch open in one quick motion, jumping back with one hand ready for a shield.
He didn’t need it: nothing came out. Orion went over and stuck his head in with a light on his hand—literally all the rest of us cringed—and then he said, “Looks clear,” pulled back in, and climbed on through, feet first.
Even with our fearless hero leading the way, no one was in a hurry to be the second person into the hole. There were a bunch of glances traded round, which after a moment predictably started to coalesce on me. I didn’t wait to be prodded; I just said, “Well? Let’s get on with it before Lake gets too far ahead,” and pretended to be perfectly sanguine about dropping myself down a very long, nasty oubliette.
We all know that the school is enormous, we have to slog around the place morning until night. But knowing it as you trudge up
to the cafeteria isn’t the same as knowing it when you’re climbing down an endless ladder through a shaft so narrow your back is pressed against the other side and your elbows keep hitting the walls. A person isn’t near as big around as an argonet, but the shaft had apparently shrunk down since then, hopefully on the way to disappearing again. It was stiflingly hot, and the walls were vibrating around us with the shifting of the gears. The gurgle of liquid running through pipes on the other side rose and fell, never steady enough to turn into white noise. The only light was the dim glow filtering up from Orion’s hand.
The loud chomping noise we’d heard after the wall repair hadn’t started again. After I’d climbed down the first thousand miles of ladder, I paused and leaned back against the wall to catch my breath and give my arms a break, and after I was there panting for a bit, not more than a few seconds, I heard the first part of the sound start up, not very loud. Exactly at the height of my neck, a panel in the wall, only about a centimeter high, started to slide open.
I’m not an idiot; I didn’t just sit there. I hurriedly started climbing down once more, and the wall closed up again, so I never actually saw what would have come out, but I’m confident that it was the artifice responsible for keeping the shaft clear. It wouldn’t have been anything as simple as a swinging blade, either: it was smart enough to aim for the point of highest vulnerability on whatever was climbing through, which is quite the trick, and it could tell human beings from mals, at least well enough to let us through. I tried not to take it to heart that it seemed to have entertained doubts about me.
I didn’t pause again. After another century of climbing, a light abruptly bloomed below my feet, and I let out a very quiet but explosive sigh of relief: Orion had got out the other end, and the lack of instant howls and gnashing meant it was moderately sheltered. I heard a few similar sighs come out in the shaft above me, too.
