“All of the proposals are still trying to repair the cleansing,” Yuyan said, spreading the papers out over the tables. She’d taken over gathering them, because she could read so many languages so fluently, and because unlike Liesel she didn’t traumatize people with her comments, so we’d got a lot more submitted after she put out the word that people should bring them to her. “I think we have to accept that the cleansing approach to graduation is just a failure. We need something different.”
“Yeah, well, we’re trying,” Aadhya said grimly. I knew she’d been in the shop almost all week with Zixuan and a bunch of the other top artificers of our year, trying to come up with things. “We’ve experimented with making a corridor to the gates—like a tunnel of safety. But…” She shook her head. She didn’t really need to say what the problems with that strategy were: you’d be offering a single irresistible target to every last one of the mals, and how did you decide who went first? “Anyway, it still feels too obvious. The grown-ups would have tried something like that before.”
“Hey—here’s a thought. What if we did all graduate?” Chloe said. “What if we bring all the younger kids out with us. When we graduate back to the New York induction point, Orion’s mom will be there—she can get the board of governors to cancel induction. If we did that, the school really would stay clear, because no mals would try to come in if there weren’t any of us inside. And then instead of just us trying to come up with something, we could have every wizard in the world thinking about a better solution.”
Yuyan sighed. “We have been thinking about it, for years,” she said, which made sense: if Shanghai had been able to develop a better solution, it would have been worth their building a new school, and everyone would have moved. She gestured to the nearest copy of the newspaper article, mounted against the end of one of the stacks. “London has been thinking about it for a century, and New York nearly that long. Nothing we’ve found gets us better odds than the Scholomance.”
“Well, okay, but if we can’t think of anything better, at least nobody is any worse off,” Chloe said.
“The younger children would be,” Liu said. “They’d be out there undefended.”
“Just for a little while—it could be like summer vacation. We could all help look out for them. And if it turns out there isn’t a fix, or it takes too long, they could come back in,” Chloe said.
“Would you?” Nkoyo said, with an edge I felt in my own gut. “Come back in? After you’d got out of here?”
Chloe paused. “Well,” she said, with a wobble. “They’d get to choose…” but it was only a faint protest, fading off.
Liu was sitting on the couch next to her; she leaned over and bumped shoulders with Chloe, comfortingly. “We should send the mals to school instead,” she said.
Ten minutes before curfew that night, she came and banged furiously on my door. I didn’t know it was Liu, so I jumped out of bed and threw up a major shield, got a killing spell ready, and yanked the door open ready to fight. I had to fling my arms to both sides as she lunged in and grabbed me by the shoulders, with a few pieces of scribbled-on paper crumpled in her grip. First she said something in Chinese too fast for me to follow, because she was so excited, and then she said, “We should send the mals to school instead!”
“What?” I said, and the final curfew bell rang, and she jumped and said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow!” and ran back to her room, leaving me to lie awake for an hour trying to figure out what she was thinking. The crumpled papers she’d left with me didn’t help: I could tell it was maths, but it was all in Chinese numbers, in two sets of handwriting, hers and I thought Yuyan’s, and even after I laboriously translated them, I could only guess what the numbers were referring to.
“The honeypot spell,” she said, the next morning, meeting me halfway down the corridor between our rooms.
“Right, I got that far,” I said: mals come swarming into the school through the graduation portals anyway; if we used our honeypot spell, we could lure a proper horde of them in. Theoretically tens of thousands over the half an hour of graduation, if Liu’s calculations were right and I’d understood them properly. “But what’s the idea? Are you thinking if we pack the whole hall completely full of mals, they’ll—eat the agglos?” That was the best guess I’d come up with in a night of thinking, although if mals were going to eat enough of the agglos, they’d have eaten them already, but Liu was shaking her head vigorously.