Liu’s plan had that one significant advantage over any other: we all wanted to destroy the Scholomance. I’m not even joking; the fact that we all loved the idea on a deeply visceral level would almost certainly help carry it off. And it wasn’t just resentment and spite working in us, although that would have been enough: I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here. And every last one of us, from the most blithe freshman to the most crumpled senior, was longing more violently with every passing day to get out, out, out.
Well, except for our one special loony. Orion got increasingly sullen as July 2 crept closer. If he’d been resentful over the task he’d been assigned in our delightful scheme—he was going to be guarding the shaft that came down, facing the entire horde of mals at once—I would have considered it entirely justified. Since he didn’t mind his assignment in the slightest and in fact seemed to be looking forward to it in some weird demented anticipation, I had no idea what was bothering him.
That wasn’t true, of course, but I wasn’t allowing myself to have an idea what might be bothering him. He hadn’t asked me on another date since the disastrous attempt in the gym, which might have been out of mortification or because we hadn’t had a single day to ourselves since.
Either way, it was just as well. I came in here and I’ve survived in here being sensible all the time, trying to always do the cleverest thing I could manage, to see all the clear and sharp-edged dangers from every angle, so I could just barely squeeze past them without losing too much blood. I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway. I’m too good at being hard, I’ve got so good at it, and I wasn’t going to go soft all of a sudden now. I wasn’t going to make Mum’s choice, wasn’t going to do something stupid because of a boy who’d come and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the library, the two of us alone in a pool of light in the reaching dark all around—a boy who improbably thought I was just grand and who made my stomach fold itself over into squares when he was near me.
Everyone else was doing stupid things all round me—that whole last week, I was constantly stumbling over people making out in the library stacks, and making mealtime trades for condoms or alchemical brews of dubious efficacy, and even otherwise sensible people were giggling to each other in the girls’ about their plans for dramatic last-night hurrahs, which was stupider than anything else; you weren’t going to catch me losing sleep the night before we tried to carry out this insane scheme, even if Orion Lake turned up at my door with tea and cake.
While I spent my days with Liu and Aadhya and Zixuan in the workshop, tuning the lute and singing my lungs out, Orion was still doing runs in the gym. He’d be spending most of graduation protecting the queue, unless the horde of mals managed to circulate through the entire school and come back down before we were all out, in which case—well, in which case he’d presumably make a hopeless but nevertheless determined stand at the barricades, trying to hold the mals off long enough for everyone else to make their escape. And I’d have to go on standing there next to the gates, singing the mals onwards, keeping them off everyone else, as he was inevitably overrun and torn apart before my eyes by the monsters I’d lured in to kill him.
I couldn’t stop myself going by the gym to watch him, just to poke the sore place. It didn’t make me feel any better to watch him thrashing scores of fake mals and gym constructs. I knew he was good at killing mals, I knew he was brilliant at it, but if this plan even worked, there wouldn’t be scores, there would be hundreds, maybe thousands, all piling on him at once. But I watched from the doors anyway, every day after I finished practicing, and when he finished his last run we went up to dinner together without talking, my teeth clenched round the words I wanted to say: You don’t have to do this alone; you can ask for people to help you, at least to shield you; we’ll hold a lottery, we’ll draw straws. I’d said them already and he’d just waved them away with a shrug and “They’ll just get in the way,” and he might very well be right, because no one would stick beside him with that horde coming. No one except me, and I was meant to be saving everyone else, everyone else but him.
But the last day before graduation, we decided it was best to rest my voice instead of more practice, and after lunch, I didn’t go back to the workshop; I marched down to the gym and told Orion I was going to do the last run with him. He was just outside the doors getting ready, whistling cheerily as he dusted his hands with casting powder—like gymnastics chalk, only with more glitter—and he had the gall to object. “I thought you were supposed to get some rest,” he said. “You don’t need to worry, I’m not going to let the mals get to you…” at which point he caught my expression and hastily said, “Uh, sure, let’s go.”