But they were close. So after the mortal flame had actually worked last year—and after Patience and Fortitude had eaten their way through everything else—and after Orion had done for every mal that had dared to poke its nose into the classroom levels—the whole room had been cleared. For one shining moment, our one unbelievably lucky year, we’d be able to come down here and walk straight to safety, the first class in the history of the Scholomance to make it through graduation without a single death.
And then—the mals would all come back. Every single portal that opened up to send one of us home would make an opening in the wards; two or three mals would squirm through for every one of us that left. More of them would tag along later that day with the newly inducted freshmen. Psychic mals would follow a parent’s worried dream of their child; the eldritch and gaseous mals would float up through the ventilation shafts, and the amorphous ones would pour themselves through the plumbing.
And sooner or later, if Patience or Fortitude didn’t come back, a new maw-mouth would ooze in through one of those openings and settle into pride of place by the gates. The cleansing would break again. The death rate would likely be back to normal by the time the current freshmen were graduating, or at best a year or two later. Sudarat and Zheng and my other freshmen wouldn’t get a free ride. That boy from Manchester, Aaron, who’d brought me my tiny scrap of a note from Mum, for nothing. All the kids I barely knew or didn’t know or had never met or who hadn’t been born yet.
That’s what the school had been working me up towards, all this time. Luring me onwards with one crumb of power after another to teach me that it wasn’t useless for me to care, that I could let myself care about my friends, and about their allies, and then even about everyone in my year, and once it had got me over that hump, now it was showing me that I didn’t need to worry about any of them after all, so surely now I had the spare capacity to care about—everyone else.
“But what do you want me to do?” I said, staring up at the doors. Surely the Scholomance didn’t want to save one year’s worth of kids, or even four years’。 The school had already chewed up a hundred thousand children during its relentless triage operation. No human who cared enough to try could have stood it. But the school wasn’t human, wasn’t soft. It didn’t love us. It just wanted to do its job properly, and here we were, dying all the time on its watch, inexorably, three-quarters of every class lost. It wanted us to take this wide-open shining window of opportunity and—“Fix you?” It was the only thing I could think of, but it didn’t actually provide any direction. I looked round the empty killing field: even the bones had been cleared away. “How?”
No answer came. I didn’t get any more helpful guidance, except from Precious, who gave a chirp and prodded me with her nose, wanting to go back. “I don’t understand!” I yelled at the doors. They went on placidly ticking away: the work of an army of geniuses with all the time and mana in the world at their fingertips, trying to build the safest and most clever school in the world for their children, and that hadn’t been good enough, so what did the Scholomance expect me to do?
Precious gave another squeak, vaguely exasperated, and poked me again. I thumped the left door resentfully with my fist, and then wished I hadn’t: it moved a little. Not really, not actually enough to go ajar or anything, it just trembled, barely, under my fist, enough that I could tell that if I braced myself on something and put my back and legs into it, I could have opened it. It wasn’t held shut from this side. The outer edges of the gates were stained with green and black mold, and the puffs of air coming in were coming in from outside. This was the one place where the school wasn’t just floating in the void. The real world was there, right there on the other side. If I pushed the doors open, I could walk out, into whatever secret hidden place the enclaves had chosen as the anchor point, and that would be a real place, somewhere on the Earth, with a GPS location and everything, and surely I could find someone in a day’s walk with a mobile who’d let me ring the main line of the commune and talk to Mum.
It would be an absolutely stupid thing to do, because I wouldn’t have graduated—we don’t march through the doors to get in, since if you turned the physical doors into a single point of entry, all the mals in the world would eventually be massed round it, and not a single freshman would survive the gauntlet long enough to get inside. My vague understanding of the induction spell is that we’re borrowed into here with the same kind of spells that enclaves use to borrow space from the real world, and when we go through the gates, what actually happens is we’re being paid back with interest, through a portal that sends us right back where we were taken from in the first place. If I hopped out the doors into the real world instead of going back out through the proper portal, I’d more or less be making off without paying the debt. I have no idea what the consequences would be, but they were bound to be unpleasant.