And it had been blindingly obvious to me back there in the graduation hall that we couldn’t possibly kill that monstrous agglomerated horror, not even with the mana of four thousand living students fueling me. The only thing to do with Patience was the only thing to do with the Scholomance: we could only push them off into the void, and hope they vanished away forever. But apparently Orion had disagreed, since he’d turned back to fight even with the school teetering on the edge of the world behind him.
As if he’d thought Patience was going to get out, and in some part of his stupid brutalized brain imagined that he could stop it getting out, and therefore he had to stay behind and be a hero this one more time, one boy standing in front of a tidal wave. That was the only possible reason I could imagine, and it had been stupid enough without shoving me out the gates first, when I was the only one of us who’d ever actually fought a maw-mouth before. That made it so unutterably stupid that I needed him out, needed him here, so I could scream at him at length to impress upon him exactly how stupid he’d been.
I clung to that rage. Rage made it possible for me to keep holding on, despite the heaving putrescence of maw-mouth trying to envelop my fingers, sucking on my skin and my shielding like a child trying to get through a candy shell to the better sweetness inside, trying to get to me, trying to get to every last bit of me so it could devour me down to staring eyes and screaming mouth.
Rage, and horror, because it was going to do that to Orion, Orion who was still there in the hall with it. So I didn’t let go. Staring down into the scrying puddle, I hurled murder at it past his blurry, half-seen shoulder, casting my best, quickest, killing spell over and over, the feeling of a lake of rot sloughing away from around my hands each time, until I was gulping down nausea with each breath I took, and each casting of “à la mort!” went rolling off my tongue on the way out, blurring until the sound of my breathing was death. All the while I kept holding on, trying to pull Orion out. Even if it meant I’d heave Patience out into the world with him and spill that devouring horror into the cool green trees of Wales right at Mum’s feet, my place of peace I’d dreamt of in every minute I’d been in the Scholomance. All I’d have to do was kill it, after all.
That had seemed utterly impossible five minutes before, so impossible I’d just laughed at the idea, but now it was only a low and trivial hurdle when the alternative was letting it have Orion instead. I was really good at killing things. I’d find a way. I even had a plan laying itself out in my head, the clockwork machinery of strategy ticking coolly away in the background of my mind where it never stopped after four years in the Scholomance. We’d fight Patience together. I’d kill it a few dozen lives at a time, and he could pull the mana out and feed it back to me, and together we’d create an unending killing circle between us until the thing was finally gone. It would work, it would work. I had myself convinced. I didn’t let go.
I didn’t let go. I was pushed off. Again.
Orion did it himself. He must have, because maw-mouths don’t let go. The mana I was pouring into the summoning spell was coming out of the graduation supply that was still unending, as if everyone in the school was still putting mana into our shared ritual. But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone else was gone. They were out of the Scholomance, hugging their parents and telling them what we’d done, sobbing and treating the wounds they’d taken, ringing all their friends. They weren’t still feeding me power. They weren’t meant to be. The whole idea of our plan was to sever all connection to the school: we wanted to cram it full of mals and break it off the world and let it float away into the void like a putrid balloon full of writhing malice, vanishing off into the dark where it belonged. It had been going when Orion and I had made that last run towards the portal.
As far as I knew, the only thing keeping it anchored to reality now was me, still clinging to the line of mana coming out of the school. And the only person left in the Scholomance to feed me that mana was Orion. Orion, who could capture mana from mals when he killed them. So at least in that moment, he must still have been alive, still fighting; Patience hadn’t swallowed him up yet. And he must have felt me trying to drag him out, but instead of turning round and helping me to pull him through, he drew away from me instead, resisting the summoning. And the horrible sticky mouthing over my hand pulled away, too. Just as if he was trying to do the same thing my dad had done, all those years ago: as if he’d reached out and grabbed a maw-mouth and pulled it away, letting it have him instead of the girl he loved.