A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(80)

I spent the rest of the day making arrangements instead. “I will get the book chest done for you, I promise, soon as we’re done with this nonsense, which isn’t nearly as important as you are,” I told the sutras, stroking the cover in apology, before handing them over to Aadhya: she was going to be booksitting for me. “I just have to help save everyone’s lives, that’s all.” Possibly a bit over the top, but better safe than sorry. The book had kept itself out of circulation for more than a thousand years, with probably dozens of enclave librarians and hundreds of independent wizards fishing for at least some of the spells in it. It was still almost unbelievable that I’d got it at all, and now that I’d actually used the phase-control spell, I was even more desperate to get on with translating the rest of it. “Aadhya’s going to look after you so well. I promise.”

    “I will,” Aadhya said, accepting it carefully with both hands. “Absolutely nothing’s going to happen to the book while you’re gone. I’ll do some work on the spine of the case, make sure it’s sanded down just right to fit.” She went through a big show of putting a folded strip of silk against the back of the sutras, tucking the engraved purpleheart against that, and wrapping the whole thing back up in the satchel that I’d just taken it out of, before putting it under her pillow. She rested a hand on it and said without looking at me, “El, you know there are a lot of seniors who are willing to take a shot now that the enclaves are putting up guaranteed spots.”

It was something between an offer and a request. I wasn’t just me anymore. I was El, in alliance with Aadhya and Liu, our names in a line on the wall next to the nearest bathroom, underneath the lamp. That wasn’t a little thing. It was everything, and everything to me. And if I went down to the graduation hall and didn’t come back out, I was binning our alliance along with myself. So Aadhya had a right to push, to say that maybe I shouldn’t be taking the chance, not just with myself but them.

But I wasn’t just taking a jaunt down there for my own amusement. I’d got myself into this making a play for all our lives, and in some sense, being in alliance with me meant that they were supposed to back me, arguably to the point of coming along themselves. On graduation day, at best you have fifteen minutes between the first step into the hall and last step out the gates. You don’t sign on with someone if you aren’t willing to swerve when they yell, “Go left!” By saying anything, Aadhya was practically inviting me to ask her and Liu to come.

    I hugged my knees to myself on the bed. I wanted to take the excuse, badly, and bail myself out. There was even some tiny whimpering selfish part of me that would desperately have liked to take Aadhya up on the other side of her offer. Of course I wanted her and Liu at my back, not a bunch of seniors I didn’t know, who had an excellent strategic reason to ditch me if things went badly. But I wasn’t going to put them on this line with me. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t coming back, and neither was anyone else. Ten, maybe fifteen kids, jumping into the graduation hall alone to fix the machinery? One in a hundred odds, at best. Better to have stayed in Wales, after all.

So I told Aadhya, “I can’t let Orion go it alone with all the worst piranhas of the senior class. Someone’s got to watch his back for him. They’ll let him save their skins, and then they’ll cut him off the yanker and leave him down there so he does have to graduate with them. He won’t be paying attention to anything but the mals.”

I suppose the seniors really might have tried something like that. But I wasn’t really worrying about that possibility. If we actually got the machinery fixed, the seniors would probably garland Orion with laurel: they’d all be graduating through a cleansed hall, with guaranteed enclave spots. But it was plausible enough to serve as an excuse, an excuse for me to go, and her and Liu to stay behind.

And I had to go. Because Orion was going, and I couldn’t do anything about that. He’d have gone down without even a golem, the git. The only thing I could do for him, which Clarita had helpfully spelled out, was go along and give him a fighting chance. He had one now because we were going with a dozen seniors, and top seniors at that, who actually could do the repair work. And I’d only got that for him by throwing myself on the line.

    I wasn’t the shining hero of the school. And yeah, everyone thought I was dating Orion, but they didn’t think I was in love with him. They thought I was using him, and clever me for doing it. People expected the worst of me, not the best; when I’d volunteered to go along, I’d made it seem like something that wasn’t completely effing insane. In their heads, if I was going, it was because I’d made the cold hard decision it was a good bet, at least for a loser girl with no prospect of getting into an enclave if she lost Orion.

We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet. We’re always looking to one another for signals and information. Do you think that’s the best table to sit at? Do you think that’s a good class to take? Everyone wants to jump on any advantage. Me saying I was going meant that at least one presumed-to-berational person thought she had a sliver of a chance of making it out, and then the enclave kids had sweetened the pot. That’s why there were now more volunteers than places, because I’d put my finger on the scales.