She stopped. I still couldn’t manage a word. After a moment I suppose she got tired of hanging about in the corridor with a mute statue, and she went politely past me and pushed the doors open. She went a decent way in: not so far that she didn’t have several good escape routes, but far enough that she was clear of the area round the doors. She settled herself at the base of a tree putting on an immense display, dark boughs sagging with bloom, and took a small box of strawberries out of her bag, which she must have wasted gobs of mana enchanting out of some dingy fruit from the cafeteria. She sat there eating them and reading a book, making a picture straight out of the freshman orientation handbook, with tiny petals drifting across the scene like pink snow. Living as much as she could, because she wasn’t going to get much more of a chance.
The doors swung shut over the scene, wafting a sweet fragrance into my face as they banged shut, and I said to them stupidly, “No,” which obviously helped loads, and then I just laughed out loud at myself, high-pitched and jeering. “God, I’m stupid, I’m so stupid, I can’t believe,” and I couldn’t go on. I put my hands over my face and sobbed a couple of times, and then I lifted my face and screamed at the doors, at the school, “Why did you even try to stop me? Why bother? There’s no use. There’s never been any use at all.”
Like an answer, there was an immense crash of glass and cracking wood behind me. I whipped round instantly. I’d been training for my Olympic-class event in uselessness so hard, so earnestly, that it wasn’t a voluntary reaction; I’d programmed my muscles so they could skip past my brain and just get on with it, with saving all those lives, all one thousand of those fantastically insignificant lives, so I whirled and my hands came up in casting position and the adrenaline was already flowing like a smooth-running river in my bloodstream before I even saw that the crash was just one of the heavy framed blueprints off the corridor wall that had come down behind me, a glitter of shards sprayed all round and the frame broken into kindling sticks, pale where the dusty gilt-slathered wood had splintered apart.
I dropped my hands as soon as conscious thought was involved in keeping them up, gulping for breath between the sobs and the instinctive alarm. “So why shouldn’t I just give up after all—is that what you’re trying to say?” I said, just a girl talking to myself in the hallway, a stupid girl pretending she was a hero because she was going to save a thousand kids before she then went skipping merrily through the gates, leaving behind—what were the numbers? Twelve hundred kids dead out of every year, and it’s been 140 years, which worked out to a number I couldn’t fix even if I stayed behind to guard the gates for my entire life. However many ticking minutes I had left, I’d still only ever be a girl with her finger stuck into a hole in the dike, and whenever I finally fell down, here the torrent would come.
“Is that what you wanted me to learn?” I said savagely to the pale blank square on the metal wall where the frame had been, a window through the grime of a century and more. “You should’ve done it quicker. At this point, I might as well save everyone as not,” and then I looked down, and the crashed frame wasn’t a blueprint. It was the front page from the May 10, 1880, issue of The London Whisper, dominated by a large photograph of a gaggle of men in Victorian suits, a grandly mustachioed blond one out in front with his arms cocked out from his hips and a self-congratulatory air. There were copies of that all over the building, too. For years I’d been reading it without paying attention, in droning history lectures and the cafeteria queue, the way you read the back of cereal boxes while you’re eating because you haven’t anything else to do with your eyes.
But now I picked it up and looked at it properly. The men were standing in a small and familiar wood-paneled room, lined with bookcases and full of small heavy cast-iron chairs with wooden desks, and at the very edge of the photograph a thick scroll covered with signatures was lying upon a massive roll-top wooden desk. It was my own special classroom, up at the very top of the school.
The article said, The final Scholomance binding spells were successfully laid today through what must be considered the most extraordinary circle working ever conceived by the mind of man, with fully twenty-one representatives of the foremost enclaves of the world, uniting their wills and the marshaled resources of all their several domains under the visionary leadership of Sir Alfred Cooper Browning of Manchester, for the singular goal of establishing an institution beyond all quarrels and disputes, whose fundamental purpose shall be to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world.