The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

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?

Lmaooo bitch it starts as one exception, then another, and another, until she’s suddenly Orion Lake herself and saving everyone!

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.

“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. “Oh, I hate you,” I said, childishly stupid; I was about to burst, into tears,

💀💀💀 wow Magnus??? Has a heart??

maybe it was just the same kind of calm as going through a crying jag and coming out the other side, where you know nothing’s changed and it’s all still horrible but you can’t cry forever, so there’s nothing to do but go on.

I hadn’t any better plan to offer, in fact, than “run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.” I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going through. I wasn’t going through until everyone was out.

El oh my god 😭😭😭 and then her heart grew three sizes bigger that day LMAO

I emerged trailing clouds of dark-green smoke flickering phosphorescent with crackles of lightning, the dwindling remnants of the hurricane I’d whipped up to dissolve the shambling army of frozen-mud-things. There was also the large ring of glowing orange-purple balefire spheres orbiting round my waist. The workings all fizzled out as I came through the doors, but they hung in the air just long enough to make a fashion statement of the behold your dark goddess variety,

I need someone to draw this. How fucking badass LOL

I – 💀💀💀😫😫 i literally CANNOT with them hahahahahah

I’d already known that I could get out if I didn’t bother worrying about anyone else. I didn’t need to shove my own face in how lovely and easy it would be, and especially I didn’t need to contemplate how much fun I could have with Orion in the process.

Two most powerful wizards ever to exist in a gymnasium obstacle course…. They might kiss…

I ignored him and said to Liesel, “Right, let’s go.” She nodded back coldly and we went. A woman after my own heart.

We knew that Jermaine from New York had spent the last year in a competitive love triangle with a boy from Atlanta over one of the top alchemists, and we all knew when in a perfect storm of gossipy delight it turned into a trio and an alliance, halfway through the first month of term.

Okaaaayyy here for the throuple!!! Love that for them

my heart was banging around inside like it’d had an argument with my lungs and now it was in the kitchen putting pots and pans away angrily while they tried to find a way out through my breastbone.

What a great simile hahaha

I put my hands on the table and half came up, leaning forward, and I didn’t do it on purpose, but I don’t have to do this kind of thing on purpose: the lights in the room started to dim and stutter, except right around me, and the air got cold, and the words came out on a thin stream of fog when I hissed, “I helped Magnus because he needed it.

I was just a loser girl like you and a desi girl like you, and I wasn’t a complete jerk to you, so you let me get close enough to figure out that you were a rocket and I could grab on.”

And I’m telling you about Udaya because, in my head, at some point, I think I decided, okay, it was like a trade. I didn’t get to have my sister, so I got you.”

WHY AM I TEARING UP OH GOD I SWEAR TO GOD IF SHE DIES AFTER SAYING ALL THIS I’M GONNA BE PISSEDDDDDD

So all these months, I’ve been letting that sit in my head, and that was stupid of me, because if you’re who I get instead of my sister—I can’t just leave you behind and still be a person.” She looked up then, and it turned out she was also crying, tears trickling down her face and just starting to drip off her chin, even though her voice didn’t sound any different. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

I know I can come up with something better than Book it out the gates without giving you a second thought or Die tragically and pointlessly at your side, neither of which sound genius to me. Since that’s all you’ve got so far, pull your head out of wherever you’ve shoved it and consider the crazy idea that maybe us pathetic little people could help you solve this problem. I know it’s against your most sacred principles to ask anyone for anything, and obviously we don’t have any reason to care about figuring out how you could save everybody’s lives, but maybe some of us are really bored and don’t have anything better to do.”

As soon as I was plausibly but not actually out of hearing range, everyone else started whispering about it and I overheard Cora say, “Orion never found it, and she was so sick that day,” and I told Aadhya, very calmly in my opinion, “Sorry,” and ran ahead to the stairs and down to the nearest loo, outside the cafeteria, where I threw up what felt like most of my stomach lining, and then just sat crouched there over the toilet crying with my hands over my mouth.

Where the heck is Orion throughout all of this LOL does he not sit with El at lunch anymore??

Orion wasn’t panting at all, just sullen and bored as he trailed out after me. “You really want to do this twice a day, every day?” he said, with a whinge to it.

That’s hot

“Maybe you do need a bit more practice, Lake,” I said sweetly to him out in the hall as he irritably brushed off the snow and scowled at me. I beamed back and flicked a blob of snow off his nose, and then he visibly stopped being annoyed and started wanting to kiss me, but there were people there, so I glared him off.

I saw her try to bite Orion once in the library when he was about to put his arm around your shoulders. That means she’s exercising judgment that’s independent of yours. That’s not really a thing that happens with mice.” I was about to claim that my judgment was perfectly aligned with Precious on the subject of Orion putting his arm around my shoulders or on any other part of me, but Liu gave me a pointed look and I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth.

geothaumaturgipolitical

The gym, which I’d completely overhauled this past Field Day, in a bizarre and utterly nonsensical use of power which would suddenly make fantastic sense if what I’d been doing was, for instance, arranging some kind of mysterious sabotage of the obstacle course that would force people to put themselves in my power. Ideally in some way that would allow me to maintain power over them even after they left school and went home to their enclaves. That’s the whole idea behind the obstacle course to begin with—giving your consent is necessary to make it work. If some maleficer—some maleficer—managed to wriggle their way into it, that would be an excellent mechanism to use to force people to become their mindless zombie servants et cetera.

I don’t understand why she didn’t warn him about getting too friendly with that blond Welsh girl in his senior year, although perhaps she did, and he listened as enthusiastically as teenagers ever do to that sort of warning. I would never ignore similar good advice myself if it were given me, of course.

El… 🥴

I’ve tried not to think about what it would be like—the idea of having to wade into the graduation hall all alone, the mass of the crowd breaking for the gates ahead of you, a sea of people with plans and friends and weapons, warding spells and healing potions, and the maleficaria all around already beginning to rip kids out of the mass, shredding them into bones and blood—running because your only hope was to run, knowing that actually you hadn’t any hope, and you’d die watching other people going out the gates. I spent three years trying not to think about it, because I thought that was going to be me.

He got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic, and then gave me a look of wounded disappointment when he discovered that Chloe was coming, which was exactly why I had asked him.

“Stop complaining,” I said. “Pretend you’re staking us out as bait. The two of us alone in this lab are as likely as anyone in the entire school to get jumped.” Judging by her sidelong look, I’m not sure Chloe really appreciated my argument.

LOL

If you’re wondering how Liesel came into our discussions, so were the rest of us, but she was both impervious to hints that she wasn’t wanted, and also hideously smart, so we hadn’t actually been able to chase her from the planning; in fact she had edged her way further up the table at every session.

Maaan i kinda like her and her pushup bra and lip gloss and spite. I hope she doesn’t die

I stomped down to the cafeteria on Monday the next week: in our library session after the English run that morning, she’d brought out a long checklist of the many, many things I’d done wrong or inefficiently that needed correcting, all of which she’d carefully observed while somehow managing to sail through the run completely undistressed herself.

A girl after my own heart tbh – major Courtney vibes LOL

She sniffed disparagingly. “It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAH OH MY GOD THIS IS *SUCH* A COURTNEY RESPONSE I’M DEAD

“Or maybe it wants to kill some of us now in practice, in case most of us do get out,” Liu put in, a perfectly reasonable concern which helpfully relieved me of having to make a bright and cheery point of explaining that it wasn’t that bad really, at least for me.

“Would—would you—have breakfast with me?” and then realized as the words left his mouth that he hadn’t made the situation horrible enough and added, “On a date?” in a squawky warble. I slammed my hand down on the door of Precious’s enclosure, where I’d tucked her in with some sunflower seeds, and latched it shut just in time. I ignored the furious chittering and squeaks from inside and blurted back, “Yes,” before anything resembling good sense could assert itself.

OMGGGGG AWWWWWWW HAHAHAHA ORION MY HEARTTT but also Precious I’m fucking dead

I almost couldn’t believe he’d done it. I went after him blankly, waiting for him to explain this was some sort of joke, which would itself be in poor taste. He just stopped under one particularly laden tree and earnestly began spreading out a ragged blanket for our picnic, while I stood staring down at him, trying to decide if he was literally insane, and whether I liked him enough to pretend he wasn’t.

I’d seen Alfie use it for the first time back during our run against the evil ice mountains. He’d brought it out several times since then to save random other kids’ lives. He wasn’t one of the enclavers who whinged about helping other kids; his grace went both ways, or maybe he’d secretly internalized the fantasy of noblesse oblige, because he’d dived wholeheartedly into the project of rescuing everyone in his path.

Awwww I’m a fan! Gives me Tom Holland energy

I imagine they were very sorry about that a moment later, and so was I, because that made him angry, and it turned out I’d never seen Orion angry before. Not really angry. And I realize I haven’t one metacarpal to stand on here, but I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t even the one he was angry at.

YESSSSSS ORION GO PROTECT YOUR GIRL!!!

But thankfully, he grated out, “They wanted to kill you,” and despite my visceral horror, I managed a spark of indignation over that, just enough to light up my ever-helpful reservoirs of irritation and anger.

It would be at least as effective at killing wizards off as a horde of maleficaria, especially once any survivors went home and told their parents that the war everyone was half expecting had started here on the inside.

the only people who weren’t there were Aadhya and Liu and Chloe, presumably because whoever had organized this protective scheme—three guesses, all Liesel—had known that they’d tell me about it in advance, thus denying her the satisfaction of getting to rescue me.

It felt like trying to surf a continental plate over the ocean with nothing more to steer by than a horse bridle.

Even Orion had got over being enraged and was just standing gawking at me—in an infuriatingly starry-eyed way, in his case, demonstrating his continuing total lack of judgment and sense.

“Gf so pretty when being bad 😍”

Liu did turn to me and ask, “El, are you coming?” “You go ahead,” I told her, and beamed at her as obnoxiously as I could. She turned red again and made a quick face at me, then smoothed herself down to calm dignity before she turned back to him. I was smiling the whole time as I watched them walk away; it was just—so normal, an ordinary fumbling towards a future outside this horrible place.

I suppose you could say the same of my own complicated dating situation, but it felt a lot more uncertain and dramatic and fraught when I was the one inside it, not to mention more impractical, seeing as me dragging Orion off to join a quixotic project of building tiny enclaves round the world was a lot less likely to be acceptable to his family. This was a happy ordinary human thing I could actually enjoy, and it felt like the perfect period to that magical run.

“So why shouldn’t I just give up after all—is that what you’re trying to say?” I said, just a girl talking to myself in the hallway, a stupid girl pretending she was a hero because she was going to save a thousand kids before she then went skipping merrily through the gates, leaving behind—what were the numbers? Twelve hundred kids dead out of every year, and it’s been 140 years, which worked out to a number I couldn’t fix even if I stayed behind to guard the gates for my entire life. However many ticking minutes I had left, I’d still only ever be a girl with her finger stuck into a hole in the dike, and whenever I finally fell down, here the torrent would come.

The message was extremely clear. My head wasn’t, which is why I didn’t think as hard as I probably ought to have before I went and got on the ladder and started climbing down, in the dark.

EL WHAT. WHAT. WHAT ARE YOU DOING

The school had been treating me gently, with kid gloves, bringing me along little by little, but time was running out now, and I had to face it, so I could be ready on graduation day. I’d promised, after all. I’d promised Khamis, and Aadhya, and Liu, and Chloe, and everyone in the entire school.

Oh god… the maw mouths…

I stayed down there for a very long time. I think it had been close to an hour when there was a small anxious chirp from the shaft, and Precious poked her tiny nose out, clinging to the last rung of the ladder.

Omg Precious???

Patience and Fortitude hadn’t been killed, but they’d been burnt and blinded, probably thrashing wildly, while the seniors ran out. They had missed their one annual meal. Afterwards, they’d recovered and tried to fill their hollow bellies by devouring all the rest of the surviving mals instead. But after they did that—when there was nothing at all left for them to eat, they’d—gone. I had no idea where.

THEY LEFT TO KILL THE BANGKOK ENCLAVE OMFG

That’s what the school had been working me up towards, all this time. Luring me onwards with one crumb of power after another to teach me that it wasn’t useless for me to care, that I could let myself care about my friends, and about their allies, and then even about everyone in my year, and once it had got me over that hump, now it was showing me that I didn’t need to worry about any of them after all, so surely now I had the spare capacity to care about—everyone else.

Orion and El have officially switched places. Does this mean Orion is going to become the villain now?

Keep away from Orion Lake. Was this what she’d seen? Had she caught some glimpse of what it would mean to stack me and Orion up together in a single year, and what I’d have to do in order to pay it off? Because of course I wouldn’t be able to do a thing if everyone took back their mana. But if I took their mana with a lie—it wouldn’t be freely given, after all.

Aadhya said tentatively, “So it’s just Patience and Fortitude…?” “No,” I said. “They’re gone, too. There’s nothing at all. The whole place is cleared out.” “What?” Orion had sat up and was staring at me. He sounded actually dismayed, which was a bit much, and got most people to look at him sidelong—and

LOL

and then Chloe said, “The school sent you? Why did it—but it’s been making the runs this hard, it’s been making us do all this—” A sudden roaring of wind blew through the room, the ordinarily murmuring ventilation fans suddenly starting up loud as jet engines, and the blueprints spread out on the table—the big central table, the largest one in the reading room—all went flying off in every direction along with the sketches and plans in a gigantic blizzard of paper, to expose the silver letters inlaid into the old scarred wood: To Offer Sanctuary and Protection to All the Wise-Gifted Children of the World, and at the same time all the lights in the reading room dropped to nothing except for four angled lamps that swiveled to hit the letters with broad beams that made them shine out as if they’d been lit up from inside.

Well. That’s one way to make a point