“When I told Nkoyo I was coming, she asked me to look out for you,” he said. “You’re her friend, not that you deserve her. I told her if I saw you, I would.” The implication was very clearly that, much to his regret, his girlfriend had an unfortunate lunatic pal who badly needed someone holding her leash, and he, being the very best of all boyfriends, had been saddled with the job.
I could gladly have spent the next hour explaining to Khamis in small words how little he deserved to have Nkoyo so much as speak to him, and how totally useless he’d be to me in every possible way, and if we hadn’t literally been in the middle of a massive firefight, I almost certainly would have had a go at it, at least a little. As it was, I just snapped at him, “Tell Nkoyo thanks ever so. If you want to tag along after me, you’ll have to keep up on your own,” and stormed away back into the garden.
By then, apparently some of the other enclavers had worked out what was going on and who I was. They’d presumably all heard about me before now: their Scholomance students had come pouring back out all at once, to tell them that induction was canceled and so was school, forever, and half the mals in the world were gone. The details would have been of intense and urgent interest, and my name would have come up.
Of course, just because someone’s notable in school doesn’t always mean they’re notable on the outside; my name had gone on a list of people to keep an eye on, rather than the very short list of people who can have an effect on an enclave war. I’d have been bumped up in priority as word started to go round about London and Beijing and Dubai, but everything had happened too quick; the news couldn’t be more than sketchy gossip yet for most enclavers, and they all had what they thought were different and more pressing concerns.
But Khamis wasn’t the only one of my classmates in the field. You might not think an eighteen-year-old would be the best choice for serious combat, but an eighteen-year-old wizard fresh from the gauntlet of the Scholomance graduation hall is often in the best fighting trim of their lives. Some of them had seen me, and told the older enclavers on their crews, and aside from that, by now I’d circled past all their fortified positions four times, with increasing disregard for whether anyone noticed me.
It’s also possible that I literally shook the earth a little as I came stamping out of Zanzibar’s corner, and maybe I was giving off a bit of smoke and glowing with a visible greenish aura.
For whatever reason, as soon as I emerged, eleven attacks came flying, and these were very much meant for me personally—a wave of deliberate malice and destruction that would have set me on fire, crushed my bones into powder, tangled my mind into gibbering knots, opened the earth beneath my feet. And every last one was only the shadow and pale imitation of what I could have done to them in return. I felt them launch; I was ready to catch all of them and shred them apart into raw mana, but only nine of them reached me. I looked round for the rest and saw a girl I didn’t know casting a psychic shield at my back, and a little way down the path Antonio from Guadalajara holding up a stone disk carved with a face, its mouth a square open hole sucking in the fire blast: they’d both been in our year.
At nearly the same moment, three other people yelled, “El!” beckoning to me from different parts of the path, other kids I recognized. I took a bit of the mana that I had sucked out of the ambush spells and threw up a common lux spell; it’s the easiest light spell there is, so much that even people who’ve never studied Latin use it, but I always used more complicated and expensive ones, because otherwise I got this: a blaze and a roaring like Guy Fawkes between my clapped hands, and then wide ribbons of neon light exploding away from me in zigzagging streaks, leaving behind a haze smelling of ozone, and the light itself a painfully bright churning orb like a miniature sun floating over my head, erupting with sinister flares of violet and green.
I amplified my voice and called out, “I’m not here to fight any of you, but if you haven’t the sense to go home, you’ll have to wait until I’ve gone to go back to killing each other.” There was an ominous roll of thunder for punctuation.
No more attacks flew, at least not immediately. The girl with the psychic shield darted over—I recognized her belatedly after I got a closer look at her face: she was an enclaver named Miranda from Austin who’d been waiting for her transition spells until after leaving school—with an anxious look over her shoulder, as if she’d gone against her own enclave’s orders. A moment later all the other seniors who’d been calling came out to join us, converging on where we were standing with Khamis. “If you need help, El, we’ll help,” Antonio said in Spanish. “What are you doing?”
I looked at them, all round me, and in some part of me, I wanted to say, No, I don’t need help. I don’t need your help. Because they were enclavers, all of them, and not reluctant ones; they were here fighting to put their enclave on top. Because I didn’t want to need help. Because I did need help and if I took theirs, I’d be dragging them behind me into a fight I had no idea how to win. But I couldn’t say no. They had been here fighting, but they’d chosen to come out of the dark, offering to help me.
“There’s a tower dug down into the ground, somewhere round here,” I said, instead. “Help me find it.”
We were trying to find the way down for half an hour; during that time we fended off a handful of attacks without much trouble. That was all we accomplished. The problem was, all of my new allies were combat specialists, which is why they were here in the first place. We would have made a really top-notch graduation team—even apart from me personally—but none of us were the kind of experienced artificers who could carefully and slowly untangle a massively complex working of access and concealment.
We were also all the impatient type. As the half-hour mark drew near, we all agreed amongst ourselves that after all the brute-force method was the right idea, and moved on to discussing which part of the gardens I should rip up first. We had just started transmuting a couple of litter bins into a giant pry bar, to serve as a sort of metaphorical lever, when Precious jumped out of my pocket and ran off.
She came back perched on Liu’s shoulder, leading her and Aadhya in. I let go of the pry bar and ran to hug Liu as tight as I dared, which was roughly half as tight as she hugged me back. “Are you all right?” I whispered, and she gave me an even tighter squeeze and whispered back, “No,” and was wiping tears when she let go, even though she smiled at me. She looked all right: I would have liked to find something I could point at and say, No, you’ve got to sit this one out, but I couldn’t; she didn’t have so much as a bruise or a scar. If anything, she looked too good. She’d brought the sirenspider lute, slung over her shoulder, and she was wearing loose graceful clothes. Her short hair was brushing perfectly at chin height, and I had the vague sense that one of her shoulders and one of her cheekbones had been a little higher than the other, and now they were all perfectly symmetrical: like someone on a magazine cover who’d been polished up on a computer. And it did help to feel good in your body, to be free from pain, but this seemed more like she’d been papered over by someone who’d wanted to hide the pain from their eyes, something they didn’t like looking at that was still there underneath for her.
“Is this going to help?” I asked bluntly, instead.
“Staying away would hurt,” she said, simply, and fair enough; I’d come for the same reason, after all.
“Okay, so can we all recognize that this is a totally pointless idea that I’m guessing you all liked because it was fast?” Aadhya was saying meanwhile, examining our jury-rigged pry bar. “They didn’t literally cover the well with dirt. You could rip up the entire garden and you still wouldn’t find it. We have to go through the artifice to get in.”