The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

I suppose I should’ve felt sorry for her, but I’d rather be sorry for someone who never had luck at all than for someone whose extreme luck ran out unexpectedly. Mum would tell me I could be sorry for both of them, to which I’d say she could be sorry for both of them, but I had a more limited supply of sympathy and had to ration it.

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.

It was one thing for the school to be out to get me, which I think all of us secretly feel is the case from the moment we arrive, and another for the school to be out to get only me, to the exclusion of literally everyone else, including even Orion, even though the school’s hunger was really his fault in the first place.

That was the scale of things for which he could express desire: friendship, love, humanity.

it wasn’t on her if she couldn’t take them the whole way, if they weren’t good enough and she had to jettison them to make it herself, like boosters of rocket fuel falling away spent while the orbital module went flying on past gravity. There

who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself,

But I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of being found attractive because I seem like a terrifying creation of dark sorcery instead of despite it.

But I’d been overwhelmed by an instant éclat of idyllic vision: the two of us wandering the world together, welcomed everywhere by everyone, him clearing out infestations and then watching my back while I put up Golden Stone enclaves with the power from the mals he took out.

I know perfectly well the only sensible thing to do when self-doubt creeps into your own head is to repress it with great violence.

If I’d tried to put into words what I was feeling, it would have been something unpleasant and envious and whinging like Why should you get to make easy deals that suit you perfectly to get out of the things you don’t like with the strong implication of when I never do, which wasn’t even true anymore since I had a New York power-sharer on my wrist.

In fact, mortifyingly I kissed him first, and then it was all up, because I’m starving, and I do like cake, and after I’d taken the first bite I wanted another,

only this was real and I could really have it, inside and after we graduated and forever, and the rest of my dream along with it—a life of building and creation and good work, and every prophecy of evil and destruction could go fuck right off and I could start the rest of my life right now, and I wanted to, so much I couldn’t stop, couldn’t want to stop.

you brew yourself a cup of nice go-the-fuck-away tea—an easy alchemical recipe every wizard girl can brew in her sleep—and that’s the end of it.

“It was just so nice,” and maybe that sounds stupid but I couldn’t help my voice wobbling. Nice was what we didn’t have in here. You could manage desperate victories and even dazzling wonders sometimes, but not anything nice.

If that was the monstrous fate Mum had been trying to warn me away from, she’d know, she’d know the way no one else in the world would know just how horrible it would be to live with someone you love screaming in your head forever.

“It was the right thing to do because it gave us choices. Having a choice is the most important thing.”

Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.

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.

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.

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.

He didn’t say outright that I’d asked to be covered in goo, but his expression was perfectly explicit. At that point I realized the only thing I was going to kill was him, so I gave it up.

everybody else who wasn’t saying anything to me, in exactly the same way no one had ever said anything to him, all these years—while he took their mana and their help and did whatever he wanted, because there was no point saying anything when the answer was yes. It was just rubbing your own face in it, and the only reason he didn’t already know that was he’d never been a loser before, lucky enclave boy.

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.”

“We must approach the run differently. Stop thinking how you can help the people nearest to you. Think about what help you can give best, and look for the nearest person who needs that help.”

because the plan was working. Everyone was helping everyone else, saving everyone else, and all I had to do was jump in when anyone’s luck went a bit sour.

Mum had to tote me all the way back to the commune because my father’s family were ready to put baby Hitler me to death, in order to save the world that I’m slated to cover in darkness and murder et cetera.

I’d spent most of my childhood yelling at Mum for not taking me into an enclave. It hadn’t occurred to me what any enclave would do with someone like me, what they’d want of me, what they’d tell a kid too young to resist them, just to get what they wanted.

“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.”

And perhaps the school hasn’t been able to do that very successfully, but apparently it still wanted to be—something besides a lesser evil.

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.

I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway. I’m too good at being hard, I’ve got so good at it, and I wasn’t going to go soft all of a sudden now.

because no one would stick beside him with that horde coming. No one except me, and I was meant to be saving everyone else, everyone else but him.

I hate my name, I’ve hated my name my whole life; everyone who ever said it and looked at me and smiled, it’s packed full of their smiles. Mum was the only one who didn’t think it was a good joke. Even she wouldn’t have saddled me with it if she hadn’t been a shattered child herself at the time, clinging to a scrap of dreaming that had helped her make it out of the dark, without thinking about what it would mean to make me carry that name around. But Orion said it like he’d been holding it in his mouth for a year, an unreal vision he hardly believed he’d found, and I wanted to cry and also thump him at the same time, because I didn’t want to like it.

if that hadn’t been enough, the unbelievable bliss of not thinking, of not worrying, for at least one glorious stretch of mindlessness.

his voice was cracking on the edge of tears, not just leaky sentiment but like he was barely holding on to keep from bursting into sobs, so I couldn’t stop him, and because I didn’t, he said, “You’re the only right thing I’ve ever wanted.”

“There’s no such thing as normal people,” I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”

know it’s not fair, El. But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.

I hadn’t any business agreeing to be with someone who told me in all sincerity that I was his only hope of happiness in the world, at least not until he’d sorted his own head out and diversified.

I’d been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I’d been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn’t need this much more to lose.

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

I could feel the whole building in my hands, yielding to me— Yielding the same way the gym floor had yielded to me, that day with all the enclavers ready to fight each other. Yielding—to give me a chance to stop the killing. To save more children.

He turned to me and said, “El, I love you so much.” And then he shoved me through the gate.