by Naomi Novik
Thank goodness there were other sane people round; Angel on Clarita’s other side bent down and grabbed a small hunk of broken marble off the ground with his free hand, and threw it at Orion with, well, quite frankly all the skill of a four-year-old, managing to hit his shoe a little bit. That was enough to get Orion to whip around instantly and blast Angel—fortunately we still had the shield up—and then his eyes widened for an instant as he realized what he’d just done, but he had to keep going around again to take out the two mals that jumped him in the opening. “Lake, you absolute spanner!” I yelled furiously, but thankfully his head didn’t empty out again that quickly; he just killed the two mals and finished turning, ran over to us and grabbed Angel’s outstretched hand, and then Wen triggered the yanker on his belt.
I’d never actually ridden a yanker spell before. If you think bungee jumping off the world’s highest cliff sounds like the best time imaginable, you’d find it a cracking time. I personally did not. I screamed shrilly the whole way as the yanker dragged us at extremely high speed through the horde of monsters, the last remnant of our shield bowling them out of our way, and all the way back up the painfully narrow maintenance shaft, banging us back and forth. I screamed even louder for the really special part when we flew out through the landing and into Todd’s room and, thanks to our collective momentum, overshot the edge. Half of us hung suspended for a moment just out in the open void, the yawning impossibility of it beneath us, around us, and I would have started screaming in a whole new way, but then the yanker went taut again, snapped us back in through Todd’s room, and dumped us all into the middle of the senior dormitory corridor.
If my brain had in fact been rewritten so I couldn’t communicate with anyone, I couldn’t have told the difference at the moment. I was just sunk on my knees on the floor shaking, arms wrapped over my gut, and my whole face feeling like it was made of plastic that had melted partway off my bones. Doors were clanging all around us up and down the hall, seniors running past in groups, some of them throwing us startled looks but not slowing down at all, and at first I didn’t pull myself together enough to realize—
“Graduación!” Clarita said, and she and Angel and Maya all took off different ways, Maya stumbling and clammy blue but still going, melting into the crowd; the whole repair crew were running also: going to their allies.
Orion grabbed my shoulder, and I squawked in alarm: it was like having pins and needles shooting through my body. “We missed the bell!” he shouted over the pandemonium.
I nodded and staggered to my feet and followed him, dodging seniors; he plunged back into the stairwell ahead of me just as I heard someone shout, “El! Orion!” I paused: Clarita was standing in the door of a room just visible at the curve of the corridor, and she beckoned. “You’re not going to make it before the cleansing starts! Don’t be crazy!”
I hesitated, but Orion was already disappearing up the stairs two at a time, and I shook my head at her and ran after him. It wasn’t a very good decision. Orion had vanished out of sight, and I had to stop after only a little while to catch my breath, clinging to the vibrating railing; the stairs were moving back and forth like the pitching of a boat and my stomach was going with them. I forced myself back into motion, and Orion suddenly reappeared and grabbed me by the arm and started hauling me upwards with him. I didn’t even snap at him, just wrapped one arm tight around my gut to squash the pain in, and let him keep me from falling over as I staggered up alongside him.
But a scrabbling noise was building before we even reached the landing for the workshop level, and as we made it, a wave of tiny mals came squeaking and squirming and hopping towards us out of the corridor, in such complete flight that they didn’t even stop to try and munch on us; other waves came fleeing both up and down the staircase, all of them running in opposite directions, bowling each other over and turning into a scrabbling horde. I made a grunting effort and got myself the last few steps onto the workshop landing, panting, but the noises of the mals were being drowned out by the rising roar, like a campfire someone had rigged up to an amplifier, coming from both above and below, and the stairs were filling up with sharp-edged shadows in the brightening light. Orion stood still gripping my arm, frozen, then dragged me into the shop corridor instead. But there wasn’t anywhere to run to. Ahead of us, the wall of mortal flame, blue-white, was already filling the corridor from floor to ceiling like a whispering, crackling curtain, broken up by the shadows of mals being caught and incinerated in the waterfall of it, leaping dark shapes in final agonies and small construct mals coming apart in clatters as their power got sucked out of them. Bursts of static electricity came spider-crawling ahead of it over the panels and floor tiles as it swept towards us.
Orion’s breath was coming in short wavery gasps. I hadn’t seen him afraid down in the hall even once that I’d noticed, but mortal flame isn’t a mal: it consumes mals, it consumes anything in its path that has mana or malia to burn up. Combat magic isn’t any use against them; you can’t fight it. But to do him credit, he didn’t panic, even if he was staring down the one and only thing that he was actually afraid of; he just stood there staring at it sort of blankly, like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening to him.
I straightened up and shut my eyes, getting ready to start casting, and then had to push him off; he was trying to grab hold of my hand, which I needed rather urgently right then. “What are you doing?” I said, trying to get loose: he was being stupidly persistent about it. Yes, I really sincerely hadn’t any idea: whatever was Orion doing, trying to hold hands with me in the moment of what he thought was his imminent demise, and then as soon as I spared it that much of a thought, the answer became so obvious that I felt like a complete idiot. “You are dating me?” I yelled at him, in a fury, and he turned around with his face screwed up in pinched determination and grabbed my face and kissed me.
I kneed him with as much energy as the situation called for, since I also needed my voice, and then pushed him down to the floor so I could turn back to the onrushing fires and conjure up my own wall of mortal flame, just in time to put it around us as a firebreak.
IT GOT VERY HOT inside our dubious shelter, but the protection didn’t need to last long. The cleansing wall rolled past us in less than a minute and went on its merry devouring way along the corridor. I dismissed my own wall—it was a bit resistant about being unconjured without getting to actually consume anything, but I managed to shove it away—and we were left there alone in the newly scorched corridor, with the faint charred-mushroom smell of burnt maleficaria coming out of every vent.
I kept standing resolutely upright and staring after the wall of flame that had passed as if I thought any moment now it might come back. It wasn’t going to: the end-of-year cleansing is quick and thorough. The walls of mortal flame start in pairs and sweep away from each other towards the next one down the corridor, all of which are placed and timed so they don’t leave any places to hide. The same time the wall had been going past us, the two walls in the stairwell had met on the landing. They’d both winked out, and the wall that had swept over us was probably finishing up a little further down the corridor. However, I was much more inclined to watch for a wall of mortal flame coming back than I was to look down at Orion, since I’d have to see his expression and might have to actually say words to him at that point.
Then I nearly went over as the whole place began to heave and surge beneath my feet. The walls and floor outside the ring where my protective wall had been were all still scorching-hot, so I had to crouch inside the tiny space with him, both of us clinging to each other with one arm and holding out the other like a clumsy two-headed surfer trying desperately not to topple over and sear ourselves on the heated walls. At least I couldn’t have heard anything he tried to say to me. The gears were going, a hundred times louder than when I’d been safely tucked inside my room for graduation, and the stairway outside began to really move, squea
ling horribly. The familiar landing of our own res hall ground slowly into view and then continued on to vanish further below; it was all the way out of sight before the stairs locked into place again with a heavy clanging thump, and the grinding noise stopped.
A moment later all the sprayers turned on at once, and the corridor instantly filled with clouds of steam. We were left sopping-wet in a humid cloud of fog so thick we could barely see or breathe for a moment, but the walls were already baking off the moisture, and the hollow roar of the drain vacuums began to suck up the excess, leaving just the drowned-rat pair of us gasping in the middle of a sparkling-clean corridor. The end-of-term bell clanged away, and faintly echoing in the stairwell I heard doors clanging open in the dormitories above and below.
Beneath our feet, a more muffled grinding was still going: that was the senior dorm level winding the rest of its way to the bottom. If the cleansing machinery had run, down there Clarita and Wen and the others would come out into a nearly empty graduation hall, scorched from end to end by an even bigger wall of mortal flame. Some smaller mals would have hidden under larger ones, or under debris. Some of the sirenspiders could probably have made it, thanks to their shells. Patience and Fortitude would have survived, too; it would have taken a solid week of a direct bath in mortal flame to wear those away. But their thinner tendrils would all have burnt up, and the eyes on their surface. The seniors would be able to go straight for the gates, all of them.
Or maybe it hadn’t worked after all, and the seniors would instead be dumped into a starving horde that had been stirred up like a nest of wasps and was waiting for them with open jaws. We wouldn’t know one way or another, not until next year. When it would be our turn to go. We’d made it to our senior year, the one in two odds we’d beaten so far. Only our chances had been modified by Orion, changing the house rules under us, and when he took hold of my shoulders, I didn’t shove him off again.
“You saved my life,” he said, sounding baffled about it. I gritted my teeth and turned to look back at him, ready to inform him he wasn’t the only one who could be useful on occasion, except he was staring at me with an absolutely unmistakable expression, one I’d seen fairly often in my life: men occasionally aim it at my mum. Not the kind of expression you’re thinking of; men don’t lust after Mum in a leering kind of way. It was more like looking at a goddess, accompanied by thinking that maybe you might get the goddess to smile at you if you, I don’t know, proved yourself sufficiently worthy, and I’d never once imagined anyone pointing anything remotely like it at me.
I had absolutely no idea what to do with it, other than possibly knee Orion again even harder and flee. That was really appealing the more I thought about it, but I didn’t get the chance; instead he shoved me to the floor, straight into a half-frozen and half-scalding puddle, and fired off half a dozen targeted blasts over my head to destroy a small pack of gorgers who had evidently survived in the ceiling inside the pocket of safety I’d created, and were now jumping down to have us for a celebratory feast.
Which was exactly the moment when a dozen people came off the landing, just in time to see me on the floor at Orion’s feet, him standing heroically over me, his hands full of glowing smoke and the scorched and smoking corpses of the gorgers in a neat circle around me, just as the last one came thumping down.
* * *
READER, I RAN the fuck away.
It wasn’t difficult; everyone wanted to talk to Orion, to hear how he’d done it, how he’d slaughtered the mals and fixed the machinery and saved the seniors—I was fairly sure that by the end of the day, no one would remember that there had actually been any team involved at all, much less that I’d been on it. If I’d wanted to stay with him, I’d probably have had to wind both my arms around his waist and cling like a really determined ivy, but the crowd moved me away without any effort on my part at all.
All I had to do was make sure that I was getting pushed off in the right direction to do what any sensible person does at the end of term: I went straight for the workshop, where I had two shining minutes all to myself before anyone else got there. The supply containers are all purged completely and refilled from scratch at end of term, so I didn’t even have to worry about mals. There were five forging aprons hanging by the big furnace, made of some heavy flame-resistant fabric; I grabbed the one that looked closest to Aadhya’s size, spread it out on a workbench, and started loading it up.
I went for book chest materials first, because if you have a particular project firmly in mind, and you sacrifice an opportunity like being first into the shop after a resupply, you’re more likely to find what you need. Straight away I scored another four pieces of purpleheart, two bars of silver for the inlay, a set of heavy steel hinges, and a coil of titanium wire that I was pretty sure I could use to make a spelled wire that would hold the lid in place however open I wanted to leave it. I even found a little section of an LED lightstrip. Spellbooks are mad for electronics; if you make a book chest that lights up when you open it, you’re almost guaranteed never to lose a book unless you’re really careless.
Other people started turning up just as I finished piling that up on the apron, but even then I had another good couple of minutes to grab miscellaneous things before I had to start worrying about protecting my haul, since all of the new arrivals went straight for the materials that are really valuable for trade, like titanium rods and bags of diamond chips. I decided not to compete: instead I thought about what Aadhya might need for her lute, and I found a bag of fine metallic wire, a packet of sandpaper, and two enormous bottles of clear resin. I bundled it all up and carried it out with me just as the crowd really started to arrive.
I went the other way down the corridor from the shop, to the opposite landing all the way on the other side of the school. I didn’t want to have to fight my way through the adoring crowd that was probably still clogging up the one where Orion was, and anyway since our floor had rotated, it was entirely possible that the other landing would now be closer to my own room, and all sorts of other perfectly adequate excuses. The stairs are crowded at end of term with everyone running all over the school madly for supplies, but going down to the senior dorm room wasn’t as bad. There wasn’t anyone below us anymore.
Our res hall itself was positively civilized. Anyone still there had missed the best shot for supplies, so mostly it was just enclavers who didn’t need to go to the effort; they were enjoying hot and relatively carefree showers, or just hanging out in the freshly cleansed corridor chatting in groups. Some of them actually nodded to me as I went by, and one girl from Dublin said, “You got a forging apron, lucky girl! Would you swap for it?”
“It’s for Aadhya, ninth room down from the yellow lamp,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to hire it out.”
“That’s right, I saw you written up, best of luck,” she said, with a congratulatory nod, exactly as though I was a fellow human being or something.
I got my haul back to my room, which I entered pretty warily, since I hadn’t been there to barricade the door against mals trying to flee the mortal flames in the corridor. Mana was still flowing handily through the power-sharer on my wrist, and I didn’t have the least compunction using it to cast a Revelatory Light spell. I went over every last corner of my room with it, including under the bed, which I pushed onto its side. Just as well: I spotted a mysterious cocoon tucked very carefully inside one of the big rusty springs, waiting to become an unpleasant surprise. I tipped out the jar of nails and screws on my desk and put the cocoon inside it. Maybe Aadhya would be able to do something with it, or I could sell it to some alchemy-track student.
I found a few more handfuls of vermin-class maleficaria on the shelves among my textbooks, and while I was dealing with them, one small scuttler jumped off my desk where it had been hiding behind the papers. It had no ambition for a meal at the moment; it just ran straight for the drain in the middle of the floor. I tried to zap it
, but it was too fast and I missed. It dived between two bars of the grating, energetically wriggled its rear with the gleaming stinger, and squeezed through before I could think of anything else to throw that wouldn’t have melted down a large section of the floor or possibly killed anyone walking past in the hall. Oh well. That’s how the whole place would get thoroughly infested again by the end of the first quarter; there’s not much to be done about it.
I’d just tiredly tipped my bed back over with a big clang when someone knocked on the door. I killed the Revelatory Light instantly; my impulse was to pretend I was somewhere else, on the moon maybe, but the light had surely been visible on the other side of the door through the cracks, and anyway I’d literally just made an enormous thumping noise. I steeled myself and went to the door, and cracked it open with several possible remarks going through my head, none of which turned out to be relevant, since it was just Chloe. “Hey,” she said. “I saw the light. I heard you and Orion made it out, I figured I should see how you were doing. Are you okay?”
“I’d say I’m as well as could be expected, but I don’t think anyone had any right expecting me to come out alive, so I suppose I’m actually better,” I said. I took a deep breath, made the effort to let go of the freely flowing mana, and unclasped the power-sharer band and held it out to her.
She hesitated and said tentatively, “You know—if you change your mind about the spot—”
“Thanks,” I said, shortly, without pulling it back, and after a moment she reached out and took it.
I thought that would be it, and I’d have liked it to be. Chloe had clearly just taken a shower and had her damp dark-blond hair back from her face in two thin silver clips; it was in a neat bob that someone had surely cut for her lately, and she was wearing a blue sundress with a twirly skirt and a pair of strappy sandals, the kind of outfit not even an enclaver would risk wearing past the first month of term. It didn’t have a single stain, and it wasn’t even much above the knee; she couldn’t have worn it until this past year or it would’ve been hanging off her.
