What would make the mals actually follow the line and go into the school was a single brilliant twist to the design: an enchantment so you only heard the sound coming out of the one speaker just ahead of you, and as soon as you got too close to that one, you’d start to hear it only from the next speaker along instead. The mals would come because they heard the song being blasted out, and then they’d chase it onward to the next speaker, and the next one, all the way through the school.
That certainly made Liu’s plan seem tidy, until you considered that there would be more than four thousand kids going out the gates, spanning the whole globe, and with hundreds of them headed to the huge city enclaves that were surrounded by hungry maleficaria. Broadcasting a honeypot spell out of the Scholomance—already the most tempting honeypot in the world—would be gilding the lily. If any of the mals didn’t come, it would likely be because they’d got stampeded or eaten by other mals rushing to get to the suddenly wide-open doors, or because they couldn’t make it to a portal in time.
“We’d be luring in all the mals in the world,” Chloe said nervously, and she wasn’t wrong. It was obviously insane.
However, it still didn’t get crossed off the list, because we only crossed ideas off the list when we were sure they wouldn’t work, not just because they were mad. The list wasn’t long even so. Most of them came off when Alfie said, “Yes, tried that,” often without even taking his head off his fist where he was slumped next to Liesel at the head of the table; others got crossed off because Yuyan or Gaurav from Jaipur admitted their own enclave laboratories had tried it. Surprisingly, no one in any enclave had ever explored the brilliant idea of destroying the entire school.
More seriously, it was an idea that they couldn’t have come up with, because it needed—me. You could have cast the honeypot spell with a circle of twelve wizards, or thirty if you wanted it to keep going for half an hour, and then you could have taken another thirty wizards and cast a spell to break the school off from the world, but you certainly couldn’t have got them all out again in time. As it was, I’d be yelling the last syllable of what was turning out to be my surprisingly handy supervolcano spell as I was jumping through the portal, or else I’d go toppling off into the void with the school. Oh well; if that happened, hopefully the accumulated mals would eat me before I had an opportunity to experience the full existential horror of being totally severed from reality.
And no, I wasn’t nearly that blasé about the prospect.
But we hadn’t found any better ideas, other than Chloe’s solution of just running out and throwing the problem into the laps of the adults. We all liked that solution quite a lot: the only problem with it was that it didn’t provide us with any work to do, and meanwhile the Scholomance was impatiently tapping a metaphorical foot. Over the next week, Zixuan started actually tinkering around and building the speakers, and other senior artificers started asking to help him, because anyone who wasn’t helping in some way started having their already dim room lamps go completely out, or having the water shut off to the bathrooms just when they got there, or being shut out of the cafeteria or the workshop.
The school only got meaner from there. There didn’t seem to be any big dangerous mals left—if there were, Orion was undoubtedly nabbing them before anyone else caught a glimpse—but we were all shaking ratworms and cribbas out of our bedclothes and having to cast purifications every night or wake up with mallows infesting our tear ducts, and one morning we got to the cafeteria and the food line was nothing but vats of the original thin nutrient slurry until after the last senior went through.
I have to say, I have no idea how anyone survived eating it long enough to graduate. We all ended up eating mad things: full English breakfasts, waffles slathered in berries and whipped cream, shakshuka with gorgeous heaps of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers; Aadhya had this amazing thing her nani had invented, thin pancakes stuffed with a puree of cholar dal and topped with toasted meringue. Once you’re spending the extremely expensive amount of mana it takes to transmute a meal in the first place, you might as well transmute it into something you actually like. But we’d all had to spend a week’s worth of mana to do it.
After breakfast every last senior was fairly clamoring for something to do, and since we didn’t have anything better on offer, they all started to grab bits of Liu’s plan, because it was the only one that was far enough along to start doing work, and it began to lurch down the runway like a half-built plane that people were literally holding up and carrying while other people were still putting on the wheels and wings and seats, trying to get the steering and the engine in order, and other people were running after it carrying the luggage.