We didn’t know what we were going to find when we got down to the graduation hall, and in some ways that was worse than knowing it was going to be the same terrible horde of mals that seniors had faced every year for a hundred years and more. We couldn’t even guess based on the early accounts of the days when the cleansings had been running, because the school had been brand-new then, and the only mals had been the first squirming pioneers to find their way through the wards. Now there were century-old infestations and colonies buried deep in dark corners, ancient maleficaria rooted into the foundations, generations who’d never lived outside the machinery. Maybe there had been enough survivors of the cleansings to start a sudden population explosion in the available space, like the oncoming wave of amphisbaena, and we’d be dumped into a ravening horde of recently hatched and starving mals, so many of them and so small that most of our strategies wouldn’t apply, just like that horrible mass we’d accidentally lured with Liu’s honeypot spell only ten thousand times worse.
Or maybe they’d all be dead. Maybe they’d eaten each other all the way down the food chain, and there would be no maleficaria left except Patience and Fortitude themselves, guardians on either side of the gates, and they’d have nothing left on the menu except us.
If that’s what we found down there—I had no idea what I’d do. There was an obvious and sensible thing to do, which was to pass the word to our entire graduating class in advance that if it was us against the maw-mouths, they’d all make one enormous circle and feed me mana, and I’d try to take them out. But just because that was obvious and sensible didn’t mean I was going to do it. I had killed a maw-mouth the only way you could, from the inside out, and if I tried to think even in a very vague distant way about doing it again, a faint incoherent screaming started up inside me that took up all the room there was in my brain, like standing next to a fire truck with siren wailing while someone tried to talk to you, their mouth moving with no sound at all coming through because the whole world was full of noise.
Maybe I’d get over it if I saw the maw-mouths coming and there wasn’t any other choice. Maybe. I wasn’t at all confident, for all I was about to have six months of honing my reflexes to razor sharpness. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t remotely the same. Having to choose to go inside again—I don’t know if it’s a choice anyone could make more than once. There certainly haven’t been many people who’ve had the chance to consider it. If I do make it out of here, I should look up the Dominus of Shanghai. He’s the only other living person who’s ever done it. We could compare notes. Or we could look each other in the face and just start screaming together, which feels more appropriate to me.
Of course, it was extremely likely that it wouldn’t work anyway. The maw-mouth I’d killed had been a small one, maybe budded off one of the big ones or however they spawn—no one’s spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths as far as I know. It had managed to squeeze through the wards and make it upstairs. I don’t know how many people had been inside it, how many lives; I’d been far beyond keeping count of the deaths I’d dealt out. But I did know that it hadn’t been anywhere near as big as Fortitude, much less Patience, who’s been lording it over the killing grounds almost since the hall first opened. I don’t think even I can do that much killing. The only way they’re going is if the whole school goes.
The point being that we still needed a better strategy for graduation than Wait and see if El can keep her big-girl pants on, and here I was whinging on about how nice it would be for me to do something unbelievably stupid instead, like Orion. Aadhya had every right to cram my face in it.
“Sorry,” I muttered. She just nodded, which was kinder than I deserved, really, and then said, businesslike, “So I think I’ve figured out a good gym schedule,” and rolled out a timetable for me to look at.
After New Year’s, half of the gym gets cordoned off exclusively for the seniors, and every week, it lays out a fresh new obstacle course for us, so we can get as much practice as possible running flat-out through forests of sharp things trying to kill us. It’s excellently realistic, full of artificial constructs pretending to be mals, and also the many real mals who show up helpfully to populate it. It’s a testament to our top-quality educational experience how few of us die. Please envision me saying this with my hand held piously over my heart. But really, we were all hitting our stride by now. There isn’t anything much more dangerous in the world than a fully grown wizard. That’s why the mals have to hunt us when we’re young. We’re the real apex predators, not the maw-mouths that after all just sit by the doors mumbling to themselves and occasionally groping around for some supper. Once through the gates, we’ll be carving our dreams into the world like gleeful vandals scratching graffiti on the pyramids, and we won’t look behind us. But only once we’re out.