A Deadly Education

The juniors make their way to the dining hall, where they claim tables and wait for dinner to be served. Magnus suggests they call a “tribunal” on the seniors who had attempted to destroy the wall, but Aadhya points out that the other seniors will side with the attackers because they were trying to improve the whole class’s graduation chances. When the attacking group trickles in, Magnus says the seniors will try the attacks on other areas of the school, and they have to do something and “make it hurt” to discourage the attack (251). Orion starts to stand to offer to graduate early with the senior class, but El stops him. El points out that there will be too many mals for Orion to make a difference. As they argue, the senior valedictorian, Clarita, comes to their table and says she has a better idea.

Clarita explains that Orion has saved 600 students in the three years he’s been there. The current senior class has 900 students, twice what there would be in a normal year. She says that this is why the mals are hungry but also why many of the students are hungry—the school is not accustomed to feeding so many students for so long. She points out that if the senior class has to “pay back” the lives Orion saved on top of the normal graduation losses, then probably fewer than 100 of them will survive. Clarita says the seniors have been discussing making the entire junior class graduate with them to even out the losses. She suggests that, instead, they stockpile mana and skills and send someone down to the graduation hall to repair the scouring machinery.

El thinks that it would be easy enough to fix the machinery, but the challenge is getting down there and surviving the repair. There were several attempts in the late 1800s to repair the machinery, but they were either unsuccessful or took the lives of all but a few wizards who attempted it. The London enclave ultimately “solved” the problem by opening the school to independent kids, which gave the enclave kids a better chance of surviving. El realizes everyone expects Orion to do this—and that Orion himself is preparing to volunteer—and angrily stands, asking if Clarita was “planning to ask nicely at some point” (259). She tells them Orion has already saved 600 lives without asking for or being given any reward and points out that he does not have the skills to repair the machinery. Clarita protests that they would make him a “golem” to help. El says it’s a suicide mission and that without Orion and in the wake of his failure the seniors would have less resistance to any plan they may come up with that endangers the rest of the school.

Clarita says they can have a lottery of people who he’s saved to go help him. She says to El, “maybe you should go,” since Orion has saved her 11 times (260). El says she is going, but the others on the team should be the most skilled seniors, as they’re the ones with the best shot at fixing the machinery. The Berlin enclave quickly says they will give a spot in their enclave to any student who goes on the mission. Almost every other enclave seconds the offer.

El gives her valuable new book to Aadhya for “booksitting.” Aadhya points out there are a lot of seniors now willing to go on the mission in exchange for enclave spots. El knows she’s suggesting maybe El shouldn’t go on the mission—she’s a member of an alliance now, so if she dies it also affects Aadhya and Liu. She knows Aadhya is also inviting El to ask for the two of them to join her, but El doesn’t want to put them in that position. El says she won’t send Orion down alone with the “worst piranhas of the senior class” (265). This isn’t entirely true, but El does worry that if she backs out, some of the other seniors will too.

During planning, El insists they wait until the morning of graduation to fix the machinery. The seniors protest, but she tells them she’s not leaving them time to execute their original plan—to let the mals into the school—in case the group fails. Clarita has a strong collaborative group shielding spell she offers to share. The group consists of five incanters, five artificers, and ten maintenance track kids. The artificers create the repair parts while the incanters bring them supplies and meals and defend them against the mal attacks. The group has some success in creating parts and practicing the shield, so everyone is feeling better about their odds on the mission. On the morning of graduation, they use magic to install a maintenance hatch in the stairwell wall El and Orion and the others had repaired. They all climb down the maintenance shaft the argonet had been making its way up that day. Once they reach the bottom, one of the maintenance track kids turns a portion of the wall into one-way glass; they all peer in, taking note of the graduation hall’s layout and the density and quantity of mals. They all recognize the danger in the mass of hungry mals and are even more determined to go ahead with the repair.

As they approach the machinery inside the hall, El realizes that a group of chayenas gets close enough to claw at her shield. El prepares to turn and kill them, but the girl ahead of her, Ellen, trips—there’s no time to help her up, so El keeps running, hearing Ellen being killed behind her. El and the other incanters hold the shield around the machinery while the others work on the repairs and Orion kills mals. El is easily holding the shield, but another of the incanters, a boy named David, falls and is taken by mals; El thinks he may have been dead before he hit the ground. The mals attack with renewed vigor; another student, Maya, can’t hold up against the new surge and staggers backward. El uses her power and resentment about her treatment in the school to strengthen the shield, which Clarita notices with surprise. Immediately after this, the students working on the machinery cry out in triumph, and the whole group grabs ahold of each other and activates the yanker, which pulls them back out of the graduation hall quickly.

The graduation bell rings right after the yanker deposits them in Todd’s room. The seniors rush to make their way back down, but Orion and El charge up the stairs to return to their own halls. They don’t make it in time and are left exposed as the walls of mortal flame start to cleanse the school. As El assesses the problem—the wall of flame will kill all of the mals, but also them—Orion grabs her hands and then kisses her. She knees him and puts up her own circle of mortal flame as a firebreak to protect them.

El’s mortal flame protects them for the 1-2 minutes it takes for the rest of the hall to be cleansed. The school begins to heave and surge, nearly toppling them. The sprinklers overhead turn on, the drains activate, and El and Orion are left, soaking wet, in the clean but humid hallway. Orion says that El saved his life; he looks at her “with an absolutely unmistakable expression,” not lust but, “like looking at a goddess, accompanied by thinking that maybe you might get the goddess to smile at you if you, I don’t know, proved yourself sufficiently worthy” (293). Orion then shoves her to the ground and kills a pack of lingering mals, which is, of course, the moment when a dozen other students come down the hallway and find them.

El runs away as soon as possible while Orion is distracted by everyone asking him admiring questions. She goes to the workshop and starts taking what she needs from the freshly restocked supplies. She grabs an apron for Aadhya and supplies to make a book chest, including wood and a LED light strip, which she knows the book will love. Everyone is relaxed and happy in the hallways, and one girl even calls out to El in a friendly way. Back in her dorm, El searches the room for lingering mals and gets rid of a few. Chloe stops by and tells El the spot in the New York enclave is still open to her, but El doesn’t commit to taking it. Before she leaves, Chloe apologizes for her part in the enclave system; she also confesses that their fear of El being a maleficer had been a cover. They had been complaining about how El was “awful and rude,” but Chloe recognizes it had really been the other way around (299). She says she wants to be real friends with El, which El grudgingly agrees to try.

El takes a nap but wakes up when Liu and Aadhya bring her food from the cafeteria. They compare supply hauls, exchanging what they’d grabbed for each other. El tells them quickly about what happened in the graduation hall and that Orion had kissed her. They laugh about how convinced El had been that she and Orion were just friends. They talk about how they all avoid dating because of the fear of getting pregnant while at school; El tells them her mom was three months pregnant with her at graduation and that her dad died getting her out. Liu brings in a mouse and explains that she’s starting to train him as a familiar. She has 10 mice left and says she could train mice for El and Aadhya as well. As they go to look at the mice, they find Orion waiting outside of El’s room.

Orion is awkward and confesses he doesn’t want to get kicked out of El’s life now. El realizes that, while she now has Aadhya and Liu, she is still Orion’s only friend. They agree that they like each other, but they don’t want to start a relationship while they’re still in the school. Orion offers El a t-shirt since she is low on clothes. She agrees, and the one he brings her has “the Manhattan skyline on it in silver glitter, a single spot marked out roughly halfway along the island with a rising swirl of colored glitter, presumably the enclave location: not at all meaningful or claim-staking in any way” (308). El showers, then she, Orion, Aadhya, and Liu head to the cafeteria for food and induction. They get there just moments before the incoming freshman class starts appearing. When new students are inducted, they are magically deposited into their dorm rooms and then run straight down to the cafeteria, nauseous and disoriented. The kids come with letters and small packages from the other side. El isn’t expecting anything because she and her mom don’t know many wizards and none well enough that they’d give up part of their child’s weight allowance to send a message. However, someone says, “I’ve got a note from Gwen Higgins” (310). Surprised, El doesn’t respond immediately. Aadhya and Liu speculate on whether Gwen Higgins (who is well-known in the magical world) has a kid in the school; Liu says that if she does, the kid is keeping it quiet. The boy with the letter then says, “For her daughter Galadriel?” and everyone looks at El, surprised.

They look at all of their mail. Liu has been sent a tiny pot of balm you put on your lips to detect poison. Aadhya receives a piece of enchanted gold leaf. El’s note is tiny, a strip of onion skin enchanted with her mother’s “spell for refreshment of the spirit” (312). There is small, faint writing on it; the writing says: “My darling girl, I love you, have courage […] and keep far away from Orion Lake” (312).