A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(76)
Orion didn’t weigh in himself; he was getting up from the table. The line had just opened, and we all headed in for the reward of virtue, namely being first into the buffet loaded with fresh hot food. Orion checked the line ahead of us all, taking out a couple of mals on the way, and we all came out with our trays crammed full. Nobody talked for the rest of dinner: it was probably the best meal any of us had eaten in a year, even the enclavers, if not in the last three years.
The rest of the school came in round us. Perhaps halfway through the meal, our ambitious group of seniors even warily came back down from the library: they’d got tired of waiting for the general screaming and slaughter to begin, I suppose. They stared at us from the door and then slowly headed to the line themselves after a quick discussion. They were in for a lot of hostile looks along the way, as by then everyone knew what they’d tried to do. But Aadhya had been absolutely right: none of the hostile looks came from the other seniors. In fact, by the time they came out, room had been made for all of them at prime tables, and they ate with other seniors watching their backs, the sort of thing you do for someone who’s at least taken a shot at helping you.
“They are going to try and do something,” Magnus said, throwing a hard look at me. “If the new wall is going to hold, they’ll hit the other stairwells. And if we don’t make it hurt, all the seniors are going to help.”
“No, they won’t,” Orion said quietly. He put his hands on the table and started to stand up, but I was ready for it; I kicked him right in the back of the knee, and he gave a sharp, loud gasp and fell back into his chair clutching at it, panting. “El, that freaking hurt!” he squalled out.
“Yeah? But did it hurt like getting pasted into a wall with a steam tray?” I said through my teeth. “Just put the theatrics to rest for once, Lake. You’re not graduating early.”
The half of our table that had begun glaring at me turned to stare at Orion instead, and he was red and obvious by then. Anyone’s welcome to graduate early: you just make sure you’re in the senior dorms when the curtain comes down. It’s about as good an idea as skipping out on school entirely, but you’re welcome to do it.
Orion’s mouth had gone mulish. “I’m the one who’s set them up—”
“And you’ll also be the one who’s set us up, if you starve the mals of half this year’s graduating class,” I said. “How is that better? Even assuming you don’t just get yourself killed.”
“Look, even if the seniors don’t break the stairwells open, the mals are going to break them open. If not now, then next term, probably next quarter. If they’ve got hungry and desperate enough to start hitting the wards, they’ll keep at it. I’m not planning to just get the seniors out. I’m going to cull the graduation mals.”
“The gates are open for half an hour at most. Even if Patience and Fortitude don’t do you in, you can’t possibly kill enough mals in that time to do anything but open up some space for the little ones to grow,” I said. “Or were you planning to take up permanent residence? You’d get quite hungry living in the graduation hall, unless you want to start eating mals instead of just sucking out their power. I know you’re just waiting for us to put your statue up, but that’s no reason to carry on like a slab of solid rock.”
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m listening,” he shot back.
“I don’t need a better idea to know yours is completely rubbish!” I said.
“I’ve got a better idea.” It wasn’t anyone at our table talking: Clarita Acevedo-Cruz had crossed over to us and was standing at the end of our table. I’d never spoken to her before, but we all recognized her anyway: she was the senior valedictorian.
In the early years, the school used to post academic rankings frequently. There are four enormous gilt-edged placards on the wall of the cafeteria, one for each class with our graduation year on top in shining letters, and at the end of each quarter, the names would march elaborately onto each one in order. However, the practice encouraged bad behavior, such as murdering the kids doing better than you. So now it’s only the very final senior ranking that’s put up, at New Year’s, and the rest of the placards stay blank. And all the kids who are going for valedictorian—and no one gets it without deliberately going for it—do their best to hide their marks. You can guess who’s trying by how much intensity they put into their schoolwork, but it’s hard to know for sure how well they’re doing. The kids who get anywhere in sniffing distance of valedictorian almost have to have massive egos as well as the drive of champion thoroughbreds, and if they aren’t also mad geniuses, they’re such brutally hard workers that they’ve made up for it.
Clarita hadn’t just made valedictorian, she’d played it so close to the vest that nobody had even suspected she was in the running. She had even picked up the occasional spare shift from maintenance-track kids who needed some free time, so most people assumed she was in maintenance track herself. Including the twenty kids who’d ended up directly below her in the rankings, having spent their own academic careers in savage and occasionally violent rivalry, snooping on each other’s exams and sabotaging each other’s projects. After the list had finally gone up with her name at the top, the news had gone buzzing round the school for days. The thing everyone had said was some variation on, “That dull girl from—” and insert a random Spanish-speaking country. She was actually from Argentina, where her mum did occasional maintenance work for the enclave in Salta, but it took about two weeks before the accurate information finally worked its way around, because hardly anyone knew anything at all about her. Until then, she’d been easy to overlook: short and thin and hard-faced, and she’d always worn—deliberately, in retrospect—dull beige and grey clothing.