A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(79)

“I can do it on my own,” Orion put in, unhelpfully. “I can hold the mals off a golem.”

“It’d fall apart before you get halfway across the hall. And that’s right, I’ll go,” I added to Clarita, who frowned; she’d obviously been looking to make me back off. “But we’re not going down there alone just to get eaten for our trouble, and we’re not having any lottery, either. If this is meant to work, it’s got to be seniors going, and the best seniors at that. And then we really have got a chance to do the repair, if we have Orion keeping the mals off, and the whole school’s mana behind us.”

I don’t actually know whether Clarita had even meant her proposal as anything other than a clever hail-Mary attempt that would at worst get rid of Orion. But hope is good strong drink, especially when you can get someone else to buy it for you. A bunch of the seniors from the Berlin enclave were whispering urgently among themselves; when I finished, one of them stood up on the bench at their table and said loudly in English, “Berlin will guarantee a place to anyone who goes with Orion!” He looked over at the Edinburgh and Lisbon tables, near theirs. “Will any other enclaves make the same promise?”

    The question went racing around the room, being translated into a few dozen languages as it went, senior enclavers quickly huddling together to discuss, and one after another someone from almost every enclave stood up to sign on. Which changed the equation rather dramatically. The top students had all spent their Scholomance careers trying to make exactly that deal with the enclavers: their help fighting mals on the way out, in exchange for a home on the other side of the gates. And most of them hadn’t got guaranteed spots for their trouble. The top three, yes, but the rabble below that were having to content themselves with alliances and hope, unless they’d tried for guaranteed places at small enclaves, and even that would only have been available to the top ten students. That was why the competition for valedictorian was so savage.

And meanwhile the maintenance-track kids had all made a different kind of deal: the best of them would likely get homes, but they’d done loads of scut work already, and they’d be doing it for the rest of their lives. It was really their kids who’d get to be enclavers, not them. An offer like this meant a chance for them, a chance they’d given up on in freshman year.

Anyone could have told you which seniors were thinking about it and what enclave they wanted to live in, just by watching which table their heads turned to watch. There were a lot of them. Clarita herself was looking narrowly, not at the New York table, where one of the senior girls had stood up to announce that they were in, but at the table on the fringes where Todd was still sitting with his pathetic entourage of freshmen.



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ALL OF US GO into the last week of school—hell week has a whole new meaning in here—with fairly detailed plans, even if we’re not graduating. Aside from final exams and papers and projects, and the increasingly excited maleficaria, all of whom are reaching their peak, it’s also the most active trading time. The seniors are all selling off every last thing they own that they aren’t using to get out of the graduation hall; everyone else is selling off things they don’t need anymore, or that they can replace with something better from a departing graduate. Everyone who can afford to stockpile goods or mana for the end-of-year trading is running around in a frenzy making substantial deals; everyone who can’t is also running around in a frenzy trying desperately to find any opportunity they can to at least make small ones.

I’d been looking forward to a bit of success, for once. Aside from the auction Aadhya was going to run for me, I’d already traded some mercury to an alchemy-track sophomore in exchange for his half-burnt blanket, since he’d got a replacement from a senior in return for a tiny vial with three drops of a vitality potion. I’d be able to unravel it and crochet myself a desperately needed new shirt while I was building mana.

Which might sound like a ridiculous thing to be worrying about at this time of year even under more normal circumstances, when every hour brings a new maleficaria eruption, sometimes literally, like the shrieker blooms that came bursting out of all the sinks in the nearest girls’ bathroom on Friday morning. But any other time of year, a new shirt would cost me six snack bar tokens, assuming I could get one at all instead of having to sacrifice half my own blanket and sleep partly uncovered, which at best guarantees you the same lacerating ekkini bites the poor or rather lucky sophomore had in a wide band above the top of his fraying and stained tube socks, and at worst gets you stung by a numbing scorpion and eaten alive. If you don’t do well enough in the end-of-year trading, you’re getting yourself into a potentially fatal hole.

    Of course, now I was instead in the midst of planning to get myself into a much more potentially fatal hole, namely the graduation hall. The bright side—no, sorry, the side with a very faint hint of phosphorescence—was that I wasn’t going to have to sit a single exam. I’d already done with shop, and Liu had offered to wrap up my history paper for me; Chloe had organized a dozen alchemy-track kids to finish my and Orion’s final lab assignments, and that otherwise useless trombone Magnus had commanded people to take our maths and language exams for us. The school will come after you if the work doesn’t get done, but it doesn’t care in the slightest if you cheat. I didn’t even go to any of my last classes on Friday, except to stop by Maleficaria Studies, in possibly a morbid spirit, and stare at the giant mural of the graduation hall. The one relief it gave me was that at least I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the maw-mouths this time. The machinery was all the way at the opposite end of the hall from the gates.