A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(7)

My not-very-near-death experience did at least get me a good seat at dinner. Usually I have to sit alone at the far end of the half-filled table of whoever else is being most socially rejected at the time, or else people change tables away from me in groups until I’m sitting completely alone, which is worse. Today I ended up at one of the central tables right under the sunlamps—more vitamin D than I’d got, apart from a pill, in months—with Ibrahim and Aadhya and half a dozen other reasonably popular kids: there was even one girl from the smallish Maui enclave who sat with us. But I only got angrier, hearing them talking reverently about all the wonderful things Orion had done. A few of them even asked me to describe the fight. “Well, first he chased it into my room, and then he blasted open my door, and then he incandensed it before I could say boo and left a stinking mess on my floor,” I snapped, but you can guess how well that went. Everyone wants to believe he’s a magnificent hero who’s going to save them all. Ugh.





AFTER DINNER, I had to try and get someone to come with me to the workshop, so I could get some materials to patch up my door. It’s an extremely bad idea to leave your door unlocked at night, much less with a gaping hole in it. I tried to make it casual, “Does anyone need anything from the shop?” But no one was buying. After hearing my story, they could all guess that I needed to go down, and we’re all alive to the main chance in here. You don’t make it out unless you use every advantage you can get, and nobody likes me enough to do me favors without payment in advance.

“I could come,” Jack said, leaning forward and smiling at me with all his shiny white teeth.

I wouldn’t need anything to crawl out of a dark corner if he went with me. I looked him straight in the eye and said hard, “Oh really?”

He paused and had a moment of being wary, and then he shrugged. “Wait, sorry, just remembered I’ve got to finish my new divining rod,” he said cheerfully, but his eyes had narrowed. I hadn’t really wanted him to know that I knew about him. I’d have to make him pay me for my silence now, or else he’d think he had to come after me to shut me up, and he might bet on that anyway. Yet another thing Orion had now cocked up for me.

    “What’s it worth to you?” Aadhya said. She’s the sharp and pragmatic sort; she’s one of the few people in here willing to make deals with me. One of the few people in here willing to talk to me at all, really. But she was also brutally hard-nosed about this sort of thing. I normally appreciated that she didn’t beat about the bush, but knowing I was hard up, she wasn’t going to put herself on the line for anything less than twice the going value of a trip down, and she also would certainly make sure I took all the significant risk. I scowled.

“I’ll go with you,” Orion said from the table next to ours, where the New York kids were sitting. He’d kept his head down all dinner even while everyone at our table talked loudly about how massively wonderful he was. I’d seen him do the same after his other notable rescues, and had never quite decided if he was making a pretense of modesty, was actually modest to the point of pathology, or was just so horribly awkward he had nothing to say to people complimenting him. He didn’t even lift his head now, just spoke out from under his shaggy overhang of hair, staring down at his cleared plate.

So that was nice. Obviously I wasn’t going to turn down free company to the shop, but it was going to look like more of the same, Orion protecting me. “Let’s go, then,” I said tightly, and got up at once. Here at school, you’re always better off going as soon as you’ve got a plan, if your plan is to do something unusual.

The Scholomance isn’t precisely a real place. There are perfectly real walls and floors and ceilings and pipes, all of which were made in the real world out of real iron and steel and copper and glass and so forth, and assembled according to elaborate blueprints that are on display all over the school, but if you tried to duplicate the building in the middle of London, I’m reasonably sure it wouldn’t even go up for long enough to fall over. It only works because it was built into the void. I’d explain what the void is, but I haven’t any idea. If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to live in the days when our cave-dwelling ancestors stared up at this black thing full of twinkly bits of light with no idea whatsoever what was up there and what it all meant, well, I imagine that it was similar to sitting in a Scholomance dorm room staring out at the pitch-black surroundings. I’m happy to be able to report that it’s not pleasant or comfortable at all.

    But thanks to being almost completely inside the void, the school doesn’t have to fight boring old physics. That made it much easier for the artificers who built it to persuade it to work according to the way they wanted it to work. The blueprints are posted so that when we look at them, our belief reinforces the original construction, and so does all our trudging along the endless stairs and the endless corridors, expecting our classrooms to be where we last saw them and for water to come out of the faucets and for us all to continue breathing, even though if you asked an engineer to look at the plumbing and the ventilation, probably it’s not actually sufficient to handle the needs of several thousand kids.

Which is all very well and good and extremely clever of Sir Alfred et al., but the problem with living in a persuadable space is, it’s persuadable in all sorts of ways. When you end up on the stairs with six people rushing to the same classroom as you, it somehow takes you all half the time to cover the distance. But the creepy anxious feeling you get if you have to go down into a damp unlit basement full of cobwebs, where you become convinced there’s something horrible about to jump out at you, that works on it, too. The mals are more than happy to cooperate with that particular kind of belief. Anytime you do anything out of the routine, like for instance going to the shop alone after dinner when nobody else is down there if they can help it, the stairs or the corridor might end up taking you somewhere that doesn’t actually appear on the blueprints. And you really won’t want to meet whatever is waiting there for you.