A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(81)
If I took it off again now, who knew how many seniors would start to have second thoughts? They might decide that actually I was playing a double game of my own: maybe I was just trying to wipe out a dozen of the top seniors, and delay the rest of them long enough to stop them from either smashing open the school or dragging my class along with them to graduation. That would’ve been clever, now I thought of it, and surely the geniuses coming along had thought of it, too, and were keeping a wary eye on me to see if I bailed out at the last minute.
Clarita was going; so was David Pires, the still-resentful salutorian, saluditorian, whatever you call the number two besides “not the valedictorian,” which was in fact exactly what I was inclined to call him. He was an incanter also, and he hadn’t spent his academic career hiding his light under a bushel; he’d spent it informing everyone who talked to him for so much as thirty seconds that he was going to be valedictorian, and brandishing his every mark like a trophy. He’d told me back in my freshman year, when I’d accidentally knocked over one of his precariously balanced stacks of books in the reading room. He’d yelled at me and demanded to know if I knew who he was, which I hadn’t until then, and didn’t much care to afterwards. And he was going, as far as I could tell, because he wasn’t satisfied with the guaranteed enclave spot he already had coming in Sydney; he wanted to be able to pick and choose. Getting close to valedictorian does require a muscular ego, but his was on steroids.
After the first wave of volunteering, that boy from Berlin had rounded up a couple of other senior enclavers from the bigger places, the ones we all had in our heads as the most powerful kids, and we’d huddled up in the library—Orion included for obvious reasons, my own presence tolerated—to discuss the situation with Clarita and David and the third obvious candidate, Wu Wen. He was actually ranked only fifteenth overall in the senior class, and also made the discussion require more translation, because he was the only one there who didn’t know a word of English. He had copped out and claimed Mandarin was his native language so he could take Shanghainese—his actual native language—for his languages requirement. And he’d all but flunked the coursework for that. In fact, he’d barely squeaked through every course he’d taken that wasn’t shop or maths.
Since literally everyone else in the top twenty had almost perfect marks on everything and fought it out with extra-credit work, that gives you an idea of the kinds of marks he got on his artifice projects. He already had a guaranteed spot in Bangkok enclave, but he’d volunteered to come with Orion the instant that Shanghai enclave put one on the line.
I didn’t have any part in the planning, except to annoy the senior enclavers even more by insisting that we weren’t going until the morning of graduation day itself. “Don’t be ridiculous,” the boy from Jaipur enclave informed me coldly. “You can’t leave your rooms until morning bell, and graduation is two hours later. We need to allow more time than that. What if something goes wrong?”
“Then we’re all dead, and everyone left in the school has a worse-than-usual time of it for the next few years until things balance out. Shut it, Lake,” I added to Orion, who was opening his mouth to say that actually he was ready to go this evening, or something else similarly dim. “Sorry, but you don’t get to keep a tidy murder plan in reserve in case we don’t succeed.”
That could’ve turned into more of a fight, except Clarita and David and Wen weren’t on the enclavers’ side of it anymore—they weren’t going to be enjoying the benefits of any reserve plan if we didn’t make it back. Wen even suggested that the more time we had to build the parts and practice installation, the better.
Apart from that, though, the plan was fairly obvious anyway. We needed a group of artificers and maintenance-track kids who’d build the parts and do the repair, and we needed a group of incanters to shield them while they did it. And Orion would be our offense, dashing out from behind the shield at every opportunity, hopefully taking out enough mals to let us keep the shield up for long enough to get the work done. The alchemists were out of luck, if that’s what you want to call it. In this case, the machinery was going to need maybe one liter of the common school lubricant, which the maintenance kids brew for themselves in massive vats.
“I have a shielding spell we can use,” Clarita offered a bit sourly, which I understood after she got it out and grudgingly shared it with me and David: she’d written it herself, and I’d never seen anything like it. There are plenty of shielding spells that you can strengthen by casting them through a circle, but you still have to funnel the power through a primary caster, and if that one person goes down, so does the shield. Clarita’s shield spell was fundamentally designed to be cast by multiple people, to cover a group. It wove between English and Spanish, and read almost like a song, or a play with different roles for each caster: there were lines and verses that we could cast either solo or together, chaining them together one after another, so we could all take a breather now and then, and the lines weren’t even nailed down: you were allowed to improvise as long as you kept the same basic rhythm and meaning, which is a massive advantage when you’re in a combat situation and you can’t remember which adjective you’re supposed to use.
It was undoubtedly a wrench to hand over a spell that valuable to other people for nothing. She’d probably have got into an alliance on the strength of it even if she hadn’t had anything else to offer. My own best shielding spell is top-notch, but it’s a purely personal shield. And everyone else already has it, as Mum invented it, and she gives her spells out freely to anyone who asks. There’s a wizard who comes to the commune once a year and collects up her new ones and sends out copies to quite a lot of subscribers. He charges. I’ve yelled at Mum for just giving him the spells, but she says he’s providing a service, and if he wants to charge for it that’s his concern.