So maybe this was what she’d seen. Me with a beautiful gold-paved road Orion had laid out in front of me, with all the best intentions in the world, while never doing a wrong thing himself. But if I took my first wrong step onto it, who knew how far I’d go? No one could stop me flying down it at top speed, once I got started.
I sat up slowly. Precious scrambled up onto my knees as I folded myself up and twitched her nose at me anxiously. “Well,” I said to her, “let’s go and see.”
I put her into her cup and slogged up to the library. Half the reading room had more or less been turned into a war room. Everyone else from our half-official planning committee was up there: lunch had finished and Liu and Zixuan were telling them all about the upgraded effects of the lute, with pleased and happy—and massively relieved—faces all round. Orion was snoozing on a couch with his mouth hanging open and one arm dangling off limp.
“El!” Aadhya said, when I walked in. “You missed lunch, are you okay?”
Liesel didn’t wait for me to answer, just gave a quick exasperated flick of her eyes as if to say You were skiving off, weren’t you, and said to me sternly, “We have more work to do now, not less. We still do not know how far the lute will reach. It may be able to amplify everyone’s mana, but to find out, we must make an attempt at a full run sooner rather than later.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t need to do any more runs.” Everyone stopped and stared at me—most of them with absolute terror on their faces; I suppose they thought aha, it was time for the curtain to pull back from the monster or something. One girl from Mumbai enclave who I suspected had joined the planning committee to keep an eye on me even started doing a shielding spell. “Not like that,” I said crossly to her, and let the irritation help me say it. “I’ve just been down to the graduation hall. There’s nothing there.”
She paused with her hands in midair. Everyone else just gawked at me in total confusion. They’d probably have felt more sure of themselves if I had given out a maniacal cackle and told them to run for their lives.
Aadhya said tentatively, “So it’s just Patience and Fortitude…？”
“No,” I said. “They’re gone, too. There’s nothing at all. The whole place is cleared out.”
“What?” Orion had sat up and was staring at me. He sounded actually dismayed, which was a bit much, and got most people to look at him sidelong—and then actually take the idea into their own heads, to think about what it would mean, if there literally wasn’t anything—
“Are you sure?” Liesel demanded peremptorily. “How did you go down? How close did you—”
“I kicked the bloody doors, Liesel; I’m sure. Anyone who doesn’t care to take my word for it can go down themselves for the price of a ladder climb,” I said. “The shaft’s in my seminar room, other side of the north wall of the workshop. The school just popped it wide open and sent me down there to see.”
That got variations on “What?” coming out of roughly thirty mouths, and then Chloe said, “The school sent you? Why did it—but it’s been making the runs this hard, it’s been making us do all this—”
A sudden roaring of wind blew through the room, the ordinarily murmuring ventilation fans suddenly starting up loud as jet engines, and the blueprints spread out on the table—the big central table, the largest one in the reading room—all went flying off in every direction along with the sketches and plans in a gigantic blizzard of paper, to expose the silver letters inlaid into the old scarred wood: To Offer Sanctuary and Protection to All the Wise-Gifted Children of the World, and at the same time all the lights in the reading room dropped to nothing except for four angled lamps that swiveled to hit the letters with broad beams that made them shine out as if they’d been lit up from inside.
Everyone was silent, staring down at the message the school had given me, given us all. “It wants to do a better job,” I said. “It wants us to help. And before you ask, I don’t know how. I don’t think it knows how. But I’m going to try.” I looked up at Aadhya, and she was staring back at me still stunned, but I said straight to her, “Please help me,” and she gave a snort-gasp kind of a laugh and said, “Holy shit, El,” and then she sank down in a chair like her knees had given out.
Idon’t think anyone really knew what to do with themselves. We’ve all spent the best part of four years training as hard as we could to be inhumanly selfish in a way we could only possibly live with because all of us were going round in fear for our lives—if not in the next five minutes then on graduation day at the latest—and you could tell yourself everyone else was doing the same and there wasn’t any other choice. The Scholomance had encouraged it if anything. Everyone-for-themselves worked well enough to get 25 percent of the students out through the unending horde: I suppose up until now that had been the school’s best option. And yes, it now very clearly meant for us to start collaborating instead, but a large building might not understand that human beings have a bit more difficulty shifting their mindset. I wouldn’t have been surprised if all the enclavers had pulled out instantly. I wouldn’t have been surprised if literally everyone had pulled out instantly. In fact I expected the library to empty out within two minutes of my announcement, theatrics or no.