We stood around dumbly for some time after he finished. The cleansing was so stuck in all our heads as the obvious thing to fix that even after Alfie’s explanation, at least half a dozen people opened their mouths to suggest some other way to do it, only none of them managed more than “What if…” before they realized that whatever their clever notion was, the brightest minds of London had already thought of and tried it at some point in the last hundred years.
“What if we just fix it every year from now?” one of Aadhya’s acquaintances from Atlanta said finally, the first one to make it past the sticking point. “A crew could go down right after New Year’s, when the hall is freshly cleaned, and,” picking up enthusiasm, “we could make it the same deal as last year. Anyone who signs on for the fix gets a spot, enclave of their choice. Right? People would go for it.”
He was absolutely right; some desperate kids would go for it, year after year, losing a few each time but keeping the machinery tidy, until finally one group went down only to discover that surprise! The machinery had finally broken again before they could fix it, and there was a hungry crowd of maleficaria waiting for them. I was about to put up a howl of protest, but Alfie was already shaking his head, in weary exasperation. “They’ve thought of that. Posting guards, sending in maintenance crews every month, all of it. And that would handle the agglos. But you can’t pay anyone enough to do it, because a new maw-mouth will come into the school, very soon. There’s a trace on the doors. Usually one or two manage it every year—they’re oozes, those are always the hardest to keep out of anywhere. And they’ll set up shop in the hall. Patience and Fortitude were protecting us, actually. They would eat the newer ones.”
Everyone’s faces had downturned into masks of appalled horror; I cringed inwardly and tried to tell myself that it wasn’t very long until graduation, and surely there wouldn’t be a new maw-mouth that soon.
“What if we breed some mals to eat agglos?” some bright lad blurted out, I didn’t see who; I think he ducked away behind someone else as soon as he realized what he’d suggested and everyone turned to stare in his direction. Breeding maleficaria is a very popular pastime for maleficers, because it always ends in roughly the same way, with variation only in the amounts of screaming and blood. Trying to do it with good intentions generally makes the results worse, not better.
“We could build a construct to do it,” someone else suggested, which also wasn’t going to work, since the other mals coming in would happily eat the agglo-eating constructs, but at least that was less likely to create some kind of hideous monstrosity shambling around the school devouring kids forever.
But more to the point, it was another suggestion, and the crowd in the reading room was breaking up into small groups along preferred language lines and starting to argue and discuss, to come up with ideas. Trying to help. I didn’t care that all the ideas were useless; we’d literally only just started thinking.
Aadhya came round to me and put her arm round my waist and said under her breath, “Hey, she can be taught,” with a tease in her voice that wobbled a little, and when I looked at her, her eyes were bright and wet, and I put my arm round her shoulders and hugged her.
* * *
I did begin to care that the ideas were useless after an entire week went by without any useful ones. We’d enlisted the whole school in the brainstorming project, but so many people came up to the reading room to suggest that someone go down to fix the machinery on some arbitrary day each year that by Tuesday we were all yelling, “Maw-mouth!” before they got halfway through their first sentence. All of these clever people were enclavers, I note.
A junior came up to propose our staying on an extra year to guard the other students. He called his idea paying it forward, and it had the novelty of making literally every senior in the room squirm with a violently stifled shove it up your arse even before Liesel said in exasperation, “And where will we be sleeping during this year? What will we eat?” He then revised it to suggest that we come back in just in time for next year’s graduation. That didn’t even merit a response beyond a flat stare: no one has ever volunteered to come back into the Scholomance, and no one ever will. Barring the one incredibly stupid glaring exception, who didn’t count.
For variation, one pale and bedraggled-looking freshman girl came up with the notion that all of the underclassmen should graduate with us, instead. I think she just couldn’t stand school any longer and wanted to go home to her mum, and fair enough, except that her plan wouldn’t have protected and sheltered her at all. She’d just be snapped up in a few months by some mal on the outside, like ninety-five percent of the wizard kids who aren’t lucky enough to get into the school. We more or less gave her a bracing pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way, and that was all the time we alloted to her suggestion.