I stood there with my back against the far side of the corridor, well away from them all, the working of destruction still alive in my mouth and the mana I’d pulled still churning inside me. We’d been running the obstacle courses for a month and we were already so much better, so much faster. We needed the gym, we needed the course. If I’d smashed the whole thing to save Nkoyo, I’d have been making another bargain with the lives of people I didn’t know, faces I wasn’t looking at, the way I’d traded those kids from Shanghai for the ones the quattria ate.
I didn’t have the right to do that. I didn’t have the right to do anything except the one thing I had the right to do—to get out of the gates—because we all agreed that we had that right. We all agreed we had the right to get out any way we could, within the one narrow limit of actually killing each other—and even that could be handwaved off as long as you did it unobtrusively enough. It was understood that you only promised to help other people because they’d help you back, and it was understood that your promises stopped counting when you got close enough to the gates, and nobody would ever blame you for going through as soon as you could, even if everyone else on your team died. Nobody would ever expect you to turn back and nobody would promise to do it.
If you even tried, nobody would believe you, because maybe you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but you could know that. If you turned back, you didn’t save anyone, you just died along with them. At best you died instead of them; you put yourself into a maw-mouth for eternity to get them out the doors instead of you. That’s all anyone could reasonably hope to do, so it wasn’t something you could ask anyone to do. You could ask people to be brave, you could ask them to be kind, you could ask them to care, you could ask them to help; you could ask them for a thousand hard and painful things. But not when it was so obviously useless. You couldn’t ask someone to deliberately trade themselves away completely, everything they had and might ever be, just to give you a chance, when in the end—and the gates were the end, the very end of things—you knew you weren’t any more special than they were. It wasn’t even heroism; it was just a bad equation that didn’t balance.
Except for me. I could turn back. With just an ordinary amount of nerve, not even as much as Khamis Mwinyi had dug up out of his own guts with no advance warning to anyone, I could turn around at the gates and wave everyone on my team through and wreak destruction on every mal that came in range, until all of my friends were safe. So I had to. Of course I had to. I couldn’t go running through the gates to safety, to the green woods of Wales and Mum hugging me tight, while anyone I loved was still behind me. I had to turn back and keep the gates clear for them until they all made it through. They hadn’t asked me, they wouldn’t ask me, because that went against the rules we all understood, but I’d do it anyway, because I could. I could save Aadhya and Liu and Chloe and Jowani, and I’d save Nkoyo and Ibrahim and Yaakov and Nadia.
And then, once I’d done that, then I could go through the gates myself. I’d rescue the people I cared about, and then—I could turn my back on everyone else. I could go through, and leave them to find their own way out or die. I didn’t owe them. I didn’t love them. They’d done nothing for me. Except Khamis, who was sitting on the floor there shaky with blood trickling over his legs in rivulets and puddling beneath him, blood he’d spent to save Nkoyo when I couldn’t. I’d save Khamis. I’d keep standing by the gates long enough to save Khamis, who I didn’t love in the least, because how could I do anything else now?
I stepped back from the knot of people gathered round him and Nkoyo, the strangers helping someone I cared about, in the small ways they could afford. I took another step back, and another, and turned, and three breaths later I was halfway down the corridor and running, running like the gates were up ahead of me and I could make it out, I could escape. There were more seniors heading for the gym by then. Their heads turned, anxious to follow me as I passed, wondering what was I running from, only I was running from them, from any of them who might turn out to be a decent person, who might turn out to be just as special as the people I loved. Who might deserve to live just as much as they did.
I sped up even more, which I could do because for the last five weeks I’d been sprinting for my life on a near-daily basis, only that turned out to be a terrible idea because I ran straight into Magnus. He was coming off the stairs to go practice with his own team: a pack of five boys who took up nearly the full width of the archway so I couldn’t dodge round them and had to pull up hard instead, and he reached out instinctively to steady me and said, “El? What happened? Is Chloe okay?” as if even he had a thought to spare for another human being, as long as she was someone he’d grown up with. Or maybe as long as he could risk caring about her because he knew the odds were she wasn’t going to die before her eighteenth birthday.