“I’m going to use the spell to liquefy the lignin in the wood, so we can bend it into a curve,” I told everyone, and passed around the wood so they could all make sure it was real and actually the perfectly straight and solid piece of half-inch-thick wood that it appeared to be. When it got back to me, I held it in my hands, visualized, and recited the incantation. Aadhya had told me lignin was just the bit in the walls of wood cells that makes them hard, and I’m guessing it wasn’t a huge amount of stuff that had to be changed, but even so, it was amazing how little mana the spell needed. It didn’t even consume half of what I’d raised, and the wood literally went pliable in my hands. I bent it over the wide steel pipe we were using to shape it, and Aadhya and I clamped it into place; then I used the spell to make the lignin solid again. We unclamped it and just like that, the plank was a tidy curve; the spine of the sutras nestled into it beautifully. The whole thing took only a few minutes.

Everyone was murmuring and excited as we passed the curved plank around. For the second demo, Aadhya used an engraving tool and carved a little design in the very top of the plank, then set up a tiny funnel with a strip of silver out of her supply stash. I turned the silver liquid, and she poured it into the design. I even experimented a bit: I tried turning it back solid in a continuous process, just as it landed in the carving, so that it wouldn’t overflow the edges. It worked brilliantly.

People started asking if I’d show them something more, and I didn’t see any reason not to: I still had some mana left. Aadhya and I were trying to decide what we should do, and then a senior girl in the alchemy track suddenly came up with the idea of trying to turn some nitrogen liquid, straight out of the air around us. That could obviously be amazingly useful, although we weren’t sure what would happen with the nitrogen after I did it: wouldn’t it just instantly evaporate away again? But everyone was so excited about the idea that a couple of senior boys volunteered to climb up on a bench to get one of the metal canisters from the high shelves along the wall, if we let them keep whatever was left inside after. I agreed; that was fair when they’d be the ones sticking their heads that close to the ceiling without knowing if there was going to be any real return.

The first one climbed up, and then the next round of grinding vibrations hit, except this time it didn’t stop; instead it got worse, a lot worse, almost graduation-day bad, and things started falling off the walls and shelves and then even the stools started falling over. The boy on the bench had crouched down for balance already, but he had to jump for it, grabbing for his friend’s hand just in time as three of the canisters came crashing down on the table. One popped open and a writhing mass of baby copper-gnawers came spilling out on the floor, like the unwanted prize in a shell game.

But we were all running for the door by then. Thankfully I had never taken the book-sling off. I grabbed the newly inlaid spine of my chest on the way, and Aadhya and I made it out into the corridor in the middle of the pack of fleeing kids. We all dashed for the stairs. Getting to higher ground is the sensible thing to do when there’s a disturbance from below, so of course I saw Orion go flying past the stairwell heading downward instead. The only place down from here was the senior dorms, and the stairs past that were the ones that would soon be opening up to the graduation hall.

“Lake, you utter wanker, go up!” I yelled, but he had already gone; he didn’t even break stride. I clenched my jaw and looked at Aadhya, who stared back at me, and then I said grimly, “Can you take this?” and ducked my head out from under the sling.

“He’s going to be fine!” Aadhya said, but she was grabbing the sling from me as she said it. She even took the purpleheart piece.

“No, he’s not, I’m going to bash his head in with a brick,” I said, and then we were in the stairwell and I fought my way out of the current running upstream and headed down after him. The grinding felt a lot worse as soon as I was out of the crowd; the stairwell walls were actually vibrating so much they were humming out loud. “Orion!” I yelled again, but there was no sight of him, and he probably couldn’t have heard me over the sound.

As I wasn’t myself a noble hero with a limitless store of mana and all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair, I went down slowly and cautiously. Nobody came up past me: it was the middle of the school day, and this close to end of term the seniors were only in their res hall after curfew anyway. The grinding was even louder after I passed their landing: it was clearly coming from the bottom of the stairs, and I was horribly sure that I was going to find Orion down there with it.

I was nearly down to the next turn in the stairs when he came flying back up towards me, literally: he’d been thrown bodily through the air. He smashed into the wall and fell almost exactly at my feet, gasping. He stared up at me puzzled, and then a gigantic jellyfish-translucent tentacle came groping up around the corner, feeling for him, and he sat up and slashed at it with the thin metal rod he was clutching in his hand. If you would like to envision the dramatic results, get a very large bowl, fill it with jelly, take a toothpick, and very gently press it into the surface and lift it away. If the indentation stays for longer than a second, you’ve had more of an effect than he did.

Orion looked at the rod with a confused and betrayed expression: it had to be some artifact that had switched off. The tentacle was going straight for his arm in return. I had to reach out and touch it—I used the very tip of my left little finger—and shock it with the electrical-charge spell I’d got from Nkoyo. It recoiled long enough for me to grab Orion by the arm and help him scramble to his feet, and also to drag him up a few steps. Then I met resistance. “No, I have to—” he said.

“Get your brains beaten out against the stairwell?” I snarled at him, and pulled his head down as the tentacle lashed back over our heads.

“Allumez!” he said, and the rod burst into blazing white-hot flames between us. It nearly took off my eyelashes. I fell back on my bum and skidded down the stairs all the way round the next turning myself, where I got an absolutely beautiful view down the staircase into a horrible mass of writhing jelly tentacles at the very bottom. They had got themselves wound around everything that could be gripped, every inch of the railing and into the vents. They were straining to the utmost to pull the rest of whatever the mal was through a tiny cockroach-sized gap in the lower bottom corner of the stairwell. Which meant it was effectively trying to rip the staircase open. I couldn’t remember ever noticing on the blueprints what was on the other side of the staircase wall over here, but at the moment, there was a graduation mal on the other side, which meant that somehow there was a path for mals to make it up here from the hall, despite all the wards and barriers along the way, and the staircase was our last line of defense. If this one made it through, all its friends would follow. It would effectively start graduation early. Except, since the senior hall hadn’t been separated from the rest of the school yet, the waiting mals would instantly come pouring up for all of us.