The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

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.

But wanting can’t do harm without a pair of hands behind it.”

I thought of Orion saying There are normal people and we’re not, and maybe he was right, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t know those normal kids and maybe I’d never know them, but each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn’t been written yet, and in its place I’d inscribed one line with my own hand: And then they graduated from the Scholomance.

Or maybe if you only gave someone a reasonable chance of doing some good, even an enclave kid might take it.