A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(10)
I didn’t have to. Orion caught up to me on the stairs, panting, carrying two more pieces of scrap, and the pliers, and the drill. “Thanks a lot!” he said, indignantly. He had a thin bloody slice across one forearm and no other damage.
“I knew you had them,” I said, bitterly.
The climb up the stairs to our res hall took fifteen solid minutes of trudging. We didn’t talk, and nothing pestered us. I knocked on Aadhya’s door on the way back to my room, swapped for wire and also let her know I had a drill now—a lot of people who wouldn’t trade with me would trade with her, and if I had something she didn’t, she would usually broker for a cut—and then had Orion keep watch while I fixed my door. It wasn’t fun. I laboriously drilled holes in one piece of scrap and wired it in place over the hole he had left in the door, securing it thoroughly. I then sat there and wove some of the thinner wire around four thick strands to make a wider band, and I used it to wire the dented remains of my doorknob and lock roughly back in place. Then I pulled the door shut and did the same on the inside with a second piece of scrap.
“Why don’t you just use the mending charm?” Orion ventured tentatively, about halfway through the agonizingly boring process, after he looked round to see what was taking me so long.
“I am using the mending charm,” I said through my teeth. Even with the pliers and the drilled holes, my hands were throbbing. Orion kept watching with increasing confusion until I finally twisted down the last ragged end of wire. Then I put my hands flat on either side of the double-layered hole and shut my eyes. A basic version of mend-and-make is one of the spells we all learn, in shop class. The classes are the only way to get the most critical general spells. Mending is pretty obviously on that list, as you can’t get anything into the school but what little you’re allowed to bring in at induction. And mending is one of the most difficult spells, too, with dozens of variations depending on the materials you’re working with and the complexity of what you’re trying to fix. Only artificers really master it completely, and even then only within a specialized range of materials.
But at least you can usually do it in your own bloody vernacular. “Make and mend, to my will bend, iron thrust and steel extend,” I said—we all knew a lot of rhymes for mend and make—and mapped in seventeen knocks around the words, somewhere between the twenty-three you use for sheet metal and the nine for wire. Then I tapped into the mana I’d built up by doing all that excessively nitpicky hand work. The charm grudgingly went churning through the materials. The pieces of scrap slagged into something like a thick metallic putty, which I pushed into place to fill the gaping hole in the door, and as the surface went smooth and hardened under my hands, the doorknobs on either side made a rude noise like a belch and finally hooked themselves back together, the dead bolt shooting back into place with a solid thunk. I dropped my hands, panting, and turned round.
Orion was standing in the middle of my bedroom staring like I was an exotic zoological specimen. “You’re strict mana?”
He made it sound like I was a member of a cult or something. I glared at him. “Not all of us can pull from maleficaria.”
“But—why don’t you pull from—the air, or the furniture—everyone’s got holes in their bedposts—”
He wasn’t wrong. Cheating is a lot harder in here because there’re no small living things to pull from, no ants or cockroaches or mice unless you bring them in with you, which is awkward since the only stuff you can bring is what’s physically on you at the moment of induction. But most people can pull small amounts of mana from the inanimate stuff around instead: leach heat from the air or disintegrate a bit of wood. It’s a lot easier to do that than to pull mana from a living human being, much less another sorcerer. For most people.
“If I pull, it won’t come from there,” I said.
Orion was eyeing me with a growing frown. “Er, Galadriel,” he said, a bit gently, as if he was starting to think I was a lunatic, one of the ones who’d just gone crazy inside. I’d had a wildly horrible day anyway, thanks to him, and that was the final straw. I reached out and grabbed at him. Not with my hands—I grabbed at his mana, at his life force, and gave it a hard deliberate yank.
Most wizards have to work at it to steal power from a living thing. There are rituals, exercises of will, voodoo dolls, blood sacrifices. Lots of blood sacrifices. I barely have to try. Orion’s life force came away from his spirit as easily as a fish on a line, being tugged out of the water. All I needed to do was keep pulling and it would end up in my hands, all that juicy power he’d built up. In fact, I could probably have followed his power-sharing lines to pull mana from all his enclave friends. I could have drained them all.
Even as Orion’s face went wide with appalled shock, I let go again, so the mana went snapping back into him like a rubber band. He staggered back a full pace, his hands coming up defensively like he was ready for a fight. But I ignored him and sat down with a hard thump on my bed, trying not to cry. Whenever I let my temper get away from me like that, I always feel rotten afterwards. It’s rubbing my own face in how easy everything would be if I just gave in.
He went on standing there, hands raised, looking a bit silly when I didn’t do anything. “You’re a maleficer!” he said after a moment, like he thought he was prodding me into doing something.