“You could probably sell that second one to an enclaver?” I said.

“Not until we’re out,” Aadhya said, making the face it deserved: she was right, nobody inside the school was going to buy a modestly good artificer tool. It wasn’t like the phase-control spell from my sutras, where it was so useful and so expensive on the outside that it was worth someone trading a substantial advantage in here to get it for their family’s future use. Also, there was the question of how the Scholomance would have her test it. I’m sure it would have been generous enough to provide an entire hive of live miercels to practice on.

The last option was a combination sunlamp and self-watering planter that could be stacked to make a vertical garden while using very little mana, for setting up a greenhouse in a tiny space with no natural light. It would have been very nice to have in a Scholomance room, so of course the specifications required the planter to be fifteen feet long, which meant it wouldn’t fit in even a double-wide room. After I finished translating that bit, I realized to my dismay that the one place these planters would have worked perfectly was in those small Golden Stone enclaves I’d been so energetically dreaming of setting up. It was probably my fault Aadhya had got stuck with it: spend a lot of time with your allies, and sometimes their intent can start to influence your own work.

“Sorry,” I said grimly when I handed it over for her to look at.

“Ugh, and it’s going to take forever to meld these layers of chalcedony with the sand,” she said in dismay. “And I’m still not done with the lute.”

She’d been working on the lute in her every free minute since last term, but she badly needed more of them. Aadhya’s got an affinity for exotic materials, especially ones taken from mals. As you might imagine, they have loads of power, but most artificers can’t handle them; either they just don’t work, or more likely the artifice goes wrong in some excitingly malicious way. Aadhya can almost always coax them along into her projects, but the lute was ten times more complicated than anything else she’d done. The sirenspider leg I’d given her had gone to make the body of the lute, and the argonet tooth had made the bridges and the frets, and she’d strung it with the hair Liu had cut off at the start of the year. And then she’d etched sigils of power over the whole thing and lined them with the enchanted gold leaf her family had sent her on induction day. Pulling the whole thing together would’ve been a challenge for a professional artificer with a full workbench of favorite tools, and we’d pinned a large number of our graduation hopes on it.

Senior year, you spend half your time staying alive, half your time on your lessons, and half your time working out a graduation strategy to get you through the hall. If you can’t make that equation add up properly, you die. Most teams spend a lot of time identifying their best approach—are you going to rely on speed and deflection, dodging your way through the horde; are you going to build a massive forward shield and try to bowl yourselves straight to the doors; are you going to turn yourselves gnat-sized and try to hop from one team to another and let them carry you; et cetera.

Our alliance had a very obvious basic strategy: everyone else would keep the mals from interrupting my casting, and I would slaughter everything in a tidy path straight to the doors. Perfectly simple. Only it wasn’t, because most spells can’t slaughter everything. Even La Main de la Mort doesn’t work on everything; it’s useless on the entire category of psychic maleficaria, since those more or less don’t actually exist to begin with. They can still kill you, though.

And not even a share in the New York mana pool was going to be enough to power more than one of my major workings. There were six other New York seniors who’d be in the graduation hall at the same time as Chloe, all wanting hefty quantities of mana for themselves and their own teams, and even if they didn’t mean to cut me off beforehand, they were very definitely going to ration just how much mana I could take during the main event.

So all our planning took place at one remove: how could we get enough mana for me to keep slaughtering mals all the way to the gates. The two key pieces were Aadhya’s sirenspider lute and Liu’s family spell. Liu’s grandmother had sneaked her a really powerful song-spell for mana amplification to bring in, even though she couldn’t cast the spell alone—her affinity was for animals, and anyway it usually took two or three of her family’s most powerful wizards to make it work. After a lot of careful Chinese coaching, I’d got the words down. Our strategy was, just before we sailed into the hall, Liu would play the melody on the sirenspider lute while I sang out the lyrics, and then she’d carry on playing even after I finished. With a magical instrument, the spell would keep going, and our whole team would have the benefit of amplified mana. So Liu would be in the middle of our team, sustaining the spell; Chloe and Aadhya would be on either side of her, covering her and me, and I’d take the lead.

That was the theory, at any rate. Unfortunately, the lute wasn’t quite working according to plan. We’d made one experiment with it a few weeks back while still urgently trying to make a honeypot for Orion. Liu had written a Pied Piper spell for mals with the idea that we’d do a little parade through some section of the corridors one evening, me singing and her playing, and Orion whacking the mals one after another as they popped out at us.

I’ll leave you to imagine how appealing I found the prospect of wandering around loudly calling, Here, kitty, kitty. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to lure mals. But we needed to try out the lute, and Orion didn’t quite beg and plead for us to get him some mals to kill, but he clearly wanted to beg and plead, so after Aadhya finished the last bit of inlay, we agreed to give it a go.

We bolted our dinners and hurried to a spare seminar room down on the shop level, so everyone else would still be upstairs and not in range to see us doing anything this unbelievably stupid. Orion hovered around hopefully, and this time we tied all the mice securely into their bandolier cups as a precaution. That seemed to have been a good idea, because they all set up a frantic squeaking from inside as soon as Liu started tuning the lute and I hummed the line of melody.

In retrospect, the mice were just trying to warn us. Liu hit the first notes, I sang three words, and the mals came from everywhere. The baby mals. Agglo grubs came out of the drain and larval nightflyers started dropping from the ceiling and thin scraps that looked like flat handkerchiefs that were probably going to be digesters peeled off the walls and blobby mimics the size of a little toe and a thousand different unrecognizable flabby things all started coming out of every possible nook and cranny of the entire room and converging on us like a slow horrible creeping wave swelling out of every surface around us.

“It’s working!” Orion said delightedly.

The rest of us, not being absolute madmen, all ran for the door at once, with mals crunching and squishing under our feet and more of them still coming, crawling out of tiny gaps between the metal panels and oozing from the corners and falling from the ceiling and pouring in a torrent out of the air vent and the drain. Orion barely made it out before we had the door slammed and were barricading it fervently against the solid mass of mals. Chloe rushed to seal up all the edges with an entire syringe of mana-barrier gel while Liu and I reversed the invocation and Aadhya unstrung the lute. We locked in place there staring at the door, ready to flee, until we were sure it had stopped bulging out any further, and then we all jumped up and down and shook ourselves wildly and pawed and batted at one another to get the larvae out of our hair and clothes and off our skin and onto the floor where we stomped and crushed them in a frenzy. We’re used to flicking off larval mals—it’s always satisfying to take them out that small when you have the chance—but there’s a horrific difference between one tiny digester trying very hard to eat a single square millimeter of your skin and a thousand of them speckled all over your body and clothes and hair.