A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(83)
By Friday, when the five of us put the shield wall up, it felt roughly as strong as the major school ward we’d repaired down in the stairwell. And even as we were all congratulating ourselves, the repair team all screamed out loud and started jumping up and down hugging each other. After about five minutes of us yelling furiously for them to tell us what was going on, Yang and the other English-speaker—Ellen Cheng, from Texas—explained that Wen had just figured out a way to separate the parts into three collapsible pieces. They’d be able to build them up here and install them in under five minutes.
All the seniors on the team suddenly realized that we had decent odds to get through this alive, and if we did, they would emerge from the Scholomance as shining heroes, with guaranteed spots to any enclave they wanted. By the time graduation day was upon us, the maintenance kids were actually savagely competing to see who could do it the quickest: to keep the shield as tight as possible, only the four fastest of them were going—two to do the work and two spares, in case the rest of us couldn’t keep all the mals off them—along with Wen and Ellen and Kaito Nakamura, who were coming in case it turned out we needed some unexpected part.
It was just as well we had some cause for optimism, because otherwise, I’m fairly certain that at least half of our group would have balked when we got to the sticking point—namely, the way down.
The whole point of the school’s design is to keep the bit we’re in completely separated from the bit with the gates. If it were easy to get down, it would be easy to get up. The maintenance shaft we’d seen on the other side of the stairwell wall, packed full of argonet, wasn’t even on the blueprints. Not even the maintenance-track seniors had any idea where it would come out, or for that matter if it would be safe for us to go through whatever wards were on there to keep the mals out. They thought it would be all right, because presumably it had been built for those professional maintenance crews who’d been meant to be coming in here to fix things, but they couldn’t find a word about it in a single one of their manuals, even the old ones.
That was even sensible: if everyone forgot about it and didn’t think it was there, it would stop being there, more often than not, and that would be one unnecessary point of vulnerability closed up. The mals in the graduation hall had probably dragged it back into existence through their collective starving desperation to find a way to get up at us. And now it was our only way of getting down to them: climbing into the dark, with who knew what down there waiting.
When the morning bell rang on graduation day, Orion came and got me, and we went down to the senior res hall and met the rest of the group in the landing. Wen gave us each a belt hook for the yanker spell that would hopefully get us out alive; the anchor end was already secured to the drain in Todd’s old room, the one right across from the landing. The thirteen of us all marched the rest of the way down to the bottom of the stairwell, and the head of the maintenance team, Vinh Tran, carefully unrolled a maintenance hatch over my beautiful new steel wall, using a squeegee to make it come out smooth. It just looked like a big flat poster of a metal trap door at first, but as he smoothed it back and forth, murmuring some kind of incantation under his breath, it began to look like part of the wall. He took a thick brass handle out of his pocket, inserted it into the small, round black circle at one end, and pulled the hatch open in one quick motion, jumping back with one hand ready for a shield.
He didn’t need it: nothing came out. Orion went over and stuck his head in with a light on his hand—literally all the rest of us cringed—and then he said, “Looks clear,” pulled back in, and climbed on through, feet first.
Even with our fearless hero leading the way, no one was in a hurry to be the second person into the hole. There were a bunch of glances traded round, which after a moment predictably started to coalesce on me. I didn’t wait to be prodded; I just said, “Well? Let’s get on with it before Lake gets too far ahead,” and pretended to be perfectly sanguine about dropping myself down a very long, nasty oubliette.
We all know that the school is enormous, we have to slog around the place morning until night. But knowing it as you trudge up to the cafeteria isn’t the same as knowing it when you’re climbing down an endless ladder through a shaft so narrow your back is pressed against the other side and your elbows keep hitting the walls. A person isn’t near as big around as an argonet, but the shaft had apparently shrunk down since then, hopefully on the way to disappearing again. It was stiflingly hot, and the walls were vibrating around us with the shifting of the gears. The gurgle of liquid running through pipes on the other side rose and fell, never steady enough to turn into white noise. The only light was the dim glow filtering up from Orion’s hand.
The loud chomping noise we’d heard after the wall repair hadn’t started again. After I’d climbed down the first thousand miles of ladder, I paused and leaned back against the wall to catch my breath and give my arms a break, and after I was there panting for a bit, not more than a few seconds, I heard the first part of the sound start up, not very loud. Exactly at the height of my neck, a panel in the wall, only about a centimeter high, started to slide open.
I’m not an idiot; I didn’t just sit there. I hurriedly started climbing down once more, and the wall closed up again, so I never actually saw what would have come out, but I’m confident that it was the artifice responsible for keeping the shaft clear. It wouldn’t have been anything as simple as a swinging blade, either: it was smart enough to aim for the point of highest vulnerability on whatever was climbing through, which is quite the trick, and it could tell human beings from mals, at least well enough to let us through. I tried not to take it to heart that it seemed to have entertained doubts about me.