“Will you stop? I don’t care about glory!” he said. “I just—it’s my fault! You told me it was. I screwed with the principle of balance, and—”

“Oh, now you’re ready to accept the basic laws of reality,” I said. “Shut up, Lake. We all know you don’t get anything for free. Nobody complained when you were saving their lives, did they?”

“Only you,” he said, dryly.

“I’ll remember to be really smug about that as I’m getting eaten by the graduation horde,” I said. “You’ve been white-knighting as hard as you can for three full years. You’re not going to fix the consequences by white-knighting a little bit harder over the course of a single week. That’s the principle of balance, too.”

“Well, you’ve convinced me. I guess I’ll just go take a nap, then. That’s going to help a lot,” he said, with a wealth of sarcasm.

I glared at him. “It would beat helping a grogler rip open the school.” He scowled back at me. And then yawned again.

LUNCH WAS almost over by the time we got back up. Everyone was in the cafeteria as usual despite the earlier panic in the shop: very few things are allowed to interfere with getting food, and the horrible grinding and vibrations had stopped, anyway. Aadhya and Liu had saved us seats, and even some food on their own trays, even though it meant they’d been sitting at an almost empty table by the time we got there. Keeping two seats open for kids who hadn’t even made it to the cafeteria before the line closed was a lot, especially when there was a potential disaster going below. I even had to be grudgingly glad for Ibrahim, who had actually stuck it out with them even after most of his friends had made excuses and ditched for other tables. But he took care of that sentiment fast.

“It couldn’t have just been an ordinary grogler,” he said positively, after we filled them in. “It must have been some new kind of variant.” Because otherwise his darling Orion might have made a stupid mistake, which was obviously inconceivable. If I’d had any food or any breath to spare, I’d have thrown some at him. As it was, I was too sore.

Thankfully, there were some people of sense at the table, who focused on the most important bits. “How exactly have you been patching the damage in the stairwell?” Aadhya asked Orion. “Just make-and-mend?”

“Yeah,” Orion said tiredly. “With my dad’s filler recipe.” He stopped shoveling in leftovers and took out the lump of putty and showed it to her.

Aadhya took a bit of it in her fingers and stretched it into a square, holding it up to the light and then pushing down onto the table, folding it a few ways and kneading it, rolling it out and coiling it up again before she gave it back to him. “Don’t get me wrong, this is amazing stuff, but it’s still generic. And you’ve done a lot of separate repairs?” She shook her head. “There’s no way that’s going to hold through the end-of-term rotation. Honestly, I’d worry it’ll come apart as soon as the first-tier gears engage this Sunday.”

“We’re not going to make it to Sunday if the mals down there keep pounding on it,” I muttered from where I was barely clearing the surface of my mash. I was giving serious thought to just licking it up like ice cream instead of sitting up again to get a utensil that I would have to use muscles in my body to move from the plate to my mouth. “We’re going to have to find a way to hold them back long enough to fix the damage properly. And we’ll need some ridiculous number of people helping to raise the mana for it.”

“Remember when the alchemy lab got damaged?” Ibrahim said to Orion earnestly, over my head. “We need to make an announcement, and recruit people to raise enough mana to fix the damage.”

I said, without moving or changing volume, “Ibrahim, I’m going to harvest your internal organs in your sleep.” I saw his hands on the table twitch.

“But we can’t,” Liu said. I did haul my head up for her input. “We can’t let the seniors find out at all.”

“Huh?” Orion said, but I propped my elbows on the table and put my hands over my face. She was right, of course. The seniors weren’t going to help us. If a hole opened up to the graduation hall before the senior dorms were closed off, the seniors went from being the whole buffet to the toughest and most stale entrées on the menu. If they knew it was a possibility, that the wards had weakened that much, they’d probably go down there and start hitting the stairwell themselves, so what if they were throwing the rest of us to the wolves? They’d all give themselves Todd’s excuse: it was understandable, they didn’t have a choice, it was Orion’s fault. It didn’t even need to be all of them who’d do it. Just enough.

We all knew it. Even completely knackered, Orion got it himself after a moment and stopped eating, hunched over the table. None of us said another word for the next ten minutes, until the senior bell rang. After they were all out of the room, I said, “How do we do it? How few people can we get away with telling, and still get it fixed?”

The best solution we came up with was trying to turn the iron wall of the stairwell into steel, in place. “So I recognize this is a crazy idea, but just as a starting point,” was the encouraging way Aadhya suggested it. “What if we go down to the bottom of the stairwell with a portable crucible and a whole bunch of carbon. We light it up, and then El uses the phase-control spell to melt in just a little bit of the iron from the damaged wall, the size of a quarter, not big enough to let something really dangerous get through. I have a spell process to infuse carbon into iron, to turn it into steel. I’ll do that to the melted iron, and then she can put it back solid again. We could do it in a running cycle, the way you were doing it with the silver during the demo,” she added to me. “And if anything squeezes through one of the holes we make in the wall while we’re working, Orion can take it out.”

That was a wildly ambitious plan, only as far as any of us could see, the only other option was to make new walls in the shop in pieces, tote them down to the stairwell, and ask the mals nicely to stay back while we swapped them in. After first asking all the seniors nicely to stay out of the shop for the next three days, while we recruited about ten artificer-track students to make these new walls in the first place.

“How much mana would this take?” Ibrahim said.

“Shedloads,” I said. “The phase-control spell is unbelievably cheap for what it does, but it’s not free. Melting down an entire wall of solid iron isn’t going to be like doing a tiny bit of silver or picking a single chemical out of a piece of wood. Fortunately, we’ve got a solution.” I turned and looked at Orion pointedly.

He blinked back at me. “I don’t know if there will be enough mals coming through for me to keep feeding you mana the whole time?”