I couldn’t help that greedy selfish desperate thought, and it stoppered up all the furious words I wanted to stand up and yell at her. I could feel Orion gone rigid next to me, but I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see him outraged, and I didn’t want to see him looking hopefully at me, and I didn’t want to see my own choked feelings in his face. The silence was stretching out into eternities as if Chloe had just sprayed me with the quickening spell again, except some of the younger kids had started to cry, muffled into their hands or buried facedown onto the tables. Everyone was starting to turn their heads, to look at me and Orion, at Aadhya and Liu and Chloe; others were looking at Liesel still up on her own table, all of us bloody fools who had taken the insane absurd plan seriously, much too seriously. The kids in the mezzanine were crowding the railings, peering down anxiously. They were waiting for one of us to say something, and I had to say something, I had to try, but I didn’t have any words, and I knew anyway that it wasn’t going to do any good. Myrthe would just keep smiling, and what was I going to do, threaten to kill her if she wouldn’t risk her life to help me save people from being killed? Was I going to kill everyone who said no? I certainly wouldn’t have enough mana then.
Then the next table over, Cora put her chair back, legs scraping over the floor, and stood up and just said flatly, “I’m still in.”
It was loud in the room, hanging there. For a moment, nobody else said anything, and then abruptly a boy also from Santa Barbara at the other end of Myrthe’s table stood up and said, “Yeah. Fuck off, Myrthe. I’m in, too. Come on, guys,” and as soon as he’d prodded them, the other kids at the table were all moving, shoving back their chairs and getting up, too, until Myrthe was standing red-faced with a growing ring around her, and people all round the room were yelling that they were in, they were still in, and I could have cried—for either reason or both.
People kept piling on until Liesel put the mindphone back up and yelled painfully, “Quiet!” and everyone winced and shut up. “Enough interruptions. There is no more time to review. Everyone find your partners and go down to the senior dormitories right away.”
The whole incident had probably taken less time than Liesel had been about to spend on reading her announcements, but she’d clearly decided to get us into motion before anyone else could throw out a clever idea. It was just as well, because the Scholomance evidently agreed with her. The grinding of the gears that rotate the dormitories down—and send the senior level to the graduation hall—was picking up even as we left the cafeteria, and kids were still pouring down the stairwells when the warning bell for the cleansing started to go, at least half an hour early. The last few came flying in panicked from the landing on the hissing crackle of the mortal flames going, with their shadows huge in front of them in the brilliant blue-white light.
I ran to my room and reached it with the floor beneath me thrumming. Sudarat and three of the Bangkok sophomores were already waiting inside for me, piled onto the bed clinging to one another: we’d divvied the younger kids up among all the seniors for the trip downstairs. I slammed the door shut just in time as a xylophone chorus of pinging started up outside, metal shards and bits scraped off the walls flying through the corridor as we started our violent rattling progress downwards.
We hit some kind of blockage maybe halfway down that made the whole level lock up and start shaking wildly, and the younger kids all shrieked when the gears finally forced us through the obstruction and we lurched several meters onwards in a single violent jerk. My entire desk fell off into the void; thankfully I already had the sutras in their case strapped safely onto my back, and Precious tucked inside her cage inside her cup, also strapped down.
Another roaring started to go, of monstrous fans somewhere, and a hurricane-violent air current began to tear away the outer edges of the room into jagged puzzle pieces, sending them flying upwards where they’d be reassembled into a new, hopefully never-to-be-used freshman dormitory. The floor was crumbling away at an alarming clip, actually, and we still hadn’t reached the bottom. “Get off the bed!” I yelled, but Sudarat and the others hadn’t waited for me to tell them the obvious and were already scrambling off; fortunately, since a moment later my bed tipped off, too. I had to yank the door open again and we all spilled out into the corridor even as it came to a thumping, jaw-rattling halt.
Kids were pouring out of rooms all over, running towards the landing as the rooms kept breaking up around us. The bathrooms were already gaping holes of void, and the tops of the corridor walls were starting to go as well. “Keep together!” I yelled at Sudarat and the other Bangkok kids, and then they were swept away by the current, and a moment later so was I. The corridor floors got in on it and began sliding us all along towards the landing like moving walkways gone mad, dumping us all efficiently into the still-steaming and freshly cleansed graduation hall, all of us in our thousands still dwarfed inside the cavernous space.