A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(78)

You could really hear in the changing pitch of voices in the room that everyone was beginning to get excited about the idea. If we did get the cleansing fires running in the graduation hall, it wouldn’t just be the seniors this year who saw the benefits. There would be fewer mals in the school for years, and the cleansing might run again for our graduation, and the sophomores, too.

Unfortunately, you can’t, in fact, put aside the challenge of getting to the equipment. It broke for the first time back in 1886. The first repair crew—the original idea the enclaves had for school maintenance was that paid crews of grown wizards would pop in through the graduation gates every so often and come up, ha ha—anyway, the first crew sent in didn’t come back out again and also didn’t repair a thing. The second and much larger crew did manage to get the equipment repaired, but only two of them made it back out, with quite the alarming tale to tell. By then, the graduation hall was already home to our senior resident maw-mouths and several hundred exceptional horrors—the kind smart enough to realize that once they wriggled in through the gates, they could just lie around the hall and wait for an annual feast of tender young wizardlings. And the cleansing failed again in 1888. There were wards protecting the machinery, but somehow the mals kept getting through. They didn’t have anything to do all year but sit around down there bashing on things, I suppose.

    There were enough recriminations flying among the enclaves by then that Sir Alfred himself personally led in a large crew of heroic volunteers to install what he insisted would be a permanent repair. He was the Dominus of Manchester—he’d won the position for having built the school—and was generally agreed to be the most powerful wizard alive at the time. He was last seen going screaming into Patience or possibly Fortitude—witness accounts differ about which side of the gate the maw-mouth in question was on—along with about half of his crew. His “permanent” repair got dismantled again three years later.

There were a few more attempts by groups of desperate parents with graduating children, but they all just ended up with the parents dead and no repairs done. Manchester was in chaos with its Dominus and several of its council dead, enclavers all over the world were howling. People were talking about abandoning the school entirely, except then they’d be back to where they began, with more than half their children dying. In the midst of that, London enclave more or less organized a coup, took the Scholomance over, then doubled the number of seats—the dorm rooms became significantly smaller—and opened the place up to independent students. Rather in the same spirit as the seniors who wanted to bring our class along for graduation.

And it worked splendidly. The enclaver kids do make it out alive almost all of the time—their survival rate usually hovers around eighty percent, a substantial improvement over the forty percent chance they’ve got if they stay home. There are so many weaker and less protected wizards around them, and even in the graduation hall, the mals can’t catch all the salmon swimming upstream. And that’s the best solution that all the most powerful and brilliant wizards of the last century and more have been able to come up with. Not a one of them has tried to repair the scouring machinery since.

    But every excited and happy and pleased face in the room, everyone looking admiringly at Clarita, the genius who’d come up with this plan, wasn’t questioning for a single moment the idea that Orion was theirs to put on the hook to somehow make it happen. Not even Orion himself, who I could see was about to nod to her as his own surprise cleared out.

I shoved my chair back with a deliberate scrape and stood up before he could do it. “Were you planning to ask nicely at some point?” I said loudly. Clarita and Orion both jerked round to stare at me. “Sorry, just wondering whether a please might ever enter into this brilliant idea of yours that depends completely on Lake here serving himself up in all our places. He’s saved six hundred lives, so now he’s meant to save more to make up for it? Can anyone here tell me even one time that he’s ever had any reward for saving any of us?” I swept a look around the room that was furious enough that the handful of kids who made the mistake of looking me back in the face all flinched and dropped their eyes. “He’s never asked me for a thing, and I’m up to eleven by now. But right, he’s to go down to the graduation hall, all on his own, and fix the cleansing machinery. One hand for the work, and the other to fight off the mals, I suppose? It seems a little awkward. How exactly is he meant to do the repairs anyway? He’s not artificer track, he hasn’t so much as done a single maintenance shift.”

“We’ll build him a golem—” Clarita started.

    “Right, a golem,” I said with contempt. “Because the powers that be never thought of trying that, surely. Don’t even open your mouth in my direction, you overgrown lemming,” I snapped at Orion, who glared back, having in fact been just about to open his mouth. “No one is going to survive going in there alone, not even you, and a golem isn’t going to get it sorted before you’re overrun. That’s not heroism, it’s just suicide. And after you’re dead, we’ll all be back here—only once you’re gone, the seniors will be in a rather better position to decide for the rest of us what we’re doing about it,” which sent a low murmur going round.

Clarita had her thin mouth pressed even thinner. Yes, that particular angle had absolutely been in her head, and she hadn’t liked me dragging it out into the open. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “If he needs help, we could have a lottery of people whose lives he’s saved to go in with him. Maybe you should go, since you’re up to eleven.”