The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

they both kept a space open until I lurched in to join the hug, our arms around each other, and it was the miracle all over again, the miracle I still couldn’t quite believe in: I wasn’t alone anymore. They were saving me, and I was going to save them. It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

It is so nice to have the crisis management mindset undsrstood.

It didn’t weigh people up one after another and even the score. It would do its best to protect an enclaver kid as much as a loser, and it wouldn’t care that the enclavers had come in with a basketful of advantages. They still hadn’t been safe, after all. That was the only line it drew, the line between safe and not safe, before it doled out its help with an implacable unjust evenhandedness. And it expected me to do the same, and it made me angry even while I couldn’t see any way to do it better.

And this is where I realized the school might be a metaphor.

“Except whenever people tried to say thanks, or anything, I always felt like it was a giant lie. Because they thought I was being brave, and if they knew I liked it, they’d be weirded out, just like everyone from home.