“Right,” I said grimly. “Go ahead and blind the incanters. Is it permanent?”

“You really want me to explain how it works now?” Chloe said. “It’s a migraine inducer, and maybe they’ll keep having them for the rest of their lives, and they’re about to fry us!”

“Yes, all right!” I said hastily. I was in fact perfectly all right with giving someone migraines in exchange for attempted murder. “Go after the boy with the mustache: Yuyan’s just doing an amplification; if you get him, her casting won’t do anything.”

“But what about the reviser?” Chloe said.

“That I can handle,” I said, and I really hoped I wasn’t lying, but anyway we were out of time. Chloe threw me one last desperate look that also hoped I wasn’t lying as she got out the blinding spray, and then the blue haze was settling down and my throat was hurting as if I’d been shrieking at the top of my lungs. The people on either side of us in the line were cringing away, so probably that’s about what our conversation had sounded like. Chloe was already lunging with a last bit of unnatural quickness across the empty space towards mustache boy, whose eyes went wide in alarm but stayed resolute. He’d known he was going to pull the first attack, brave bastard, although he screamed and crumpled when the spray hit him in the face just the same.

I turned towards the other group just as they parted and Zixuan, owlish with his eyes magnified behind enormous farsighted lenses, brought the jade rod up to mouth level and sang a single clear line at it. I couldn’t understand his request, as he was casting in Shanghainese, but I could take a reasonable guess: it was probably something on the order of please alter the floor so it no longer encloses this girl.

I’d only seen a reviser in illustrations before. They’re used all the time, but only in major enclave projects. It’s a generic device that allows artificers to create vastly more complicated and difficult pieces of artifice—something that no one person could keep in their heads—by starting with a completed piece and then making it more complex, little by little. The first ones were used to help build the Scholomance, in fact.

It was quite a clever approach to take against me. Dropping me out into the void beneath the gym would certainly remove me as a problem, and I couldn’t stop it with any kind of shield or even throwing the spell back, because he wasn’t actually aiming a spell at me; he was aiming it at the school itself. It was a small enough edit that he could get away with it, too. And I couldn’t exactly destroy the piece of artifice he was using it on, at least not without dumping us all into the void.

Fortunately, I knew what to do in this situation, because I’d had to spend two months in my freshman year translating a charming cautionary tale in French all about a truly horrible maleficer who maintained herself in gory evil for about a decade at the expense of many wizard children in her vicinity. Her shielding was so good that she was effectively invincible in a fight, so she killed all the wizards who attempted to end her reign and mounted their heads on the parapet of her elaborate and well-warded tower. She finally got taken out by a young artificer she’d snatched: a boy with an affinity for stoneworking. He didn’t try to attack her; instead he cast a working on the stone of her tower, and walled her up with all her six layers of shielding, so closely that she couldn’t move, and left her entombed to suffocate.

The school then assigned me a long essay—in French—explaining what I would do in the same situation. It even flat-out failed my first half-arsed attempt in which I suggested running away and not killing any more children, so I had to spend a week in the library doing research for the makeup.

The answer I found was, when facing an artificer who’s about to turn the environment against you, kill them first. But if that’s not an option you like, your second best chance is to try and intercept the spell power, and then override their alteration with your own.

Chloe wasn’t wrong to be worried about my doing that, however, because if two wizards start wrestling over the same piece of artifice—which in this case was the school itself—almost always the better artificer is the one who ends up in charge.

If Zixuan could make a reviser of his own—you can’t bring one in with you through induction, because they’ve got to be fed with a tiny thread of mana constantly or they burn out—he had to be an absolutely brilliant artificer. And I’m not good at artifice myself. Artifice is fundamentally about giving the universe a long and complicated story complete with attractive props in order to coax it to accommodate your wishes. I’m really more about shouting the universe into compliance with mine.

But there was some tidy coaxing right at hand that had already been done for me, more than a hundred years ago, by a whole pack of artificers far more skilled than any senior kid could be. So when the green wave of power came towards me, ready to revise the floor beneath my feet out of existence, I stepped into it and spread my arms to greet it and said, “Set this right instead, why don’t you?” then just heaved it up at the gym ceiling, with a push of extra mana to help it along.

The power went boiling up from my arms into the mottled-grey ceiling. It ran cascading down over the domed surface with the wild frothing of a power washer, trickles of green dripping down and kids screaming and running everywhere around me trying to dodge the rain. I was only vaguely aware of them, deep in the breathless shock like standing under a waterfall, having to look straight up into the flow with my whole face desperately scrunched up, barely able to see or breathe or hear for the rushing fury of it. Zixuan and the other kids had put a lot of power behind his working: if I had stopped redirecting for a second, his original instructions would have been carried out, too.

I didn’t notice when the screaming and running stopped around me; I was still in the middle of the torrent, and I had to stay there until the last reluctant trickling flowed through and I sank out of it gasping, to find Chloe standing there in front of me with her hands over her mouth, crying in just a shocking way—outright blubbing with her mouth turned down like a clown. I couldn’t see Zixuan or any of the other Shanghai kids anymore, or anyone else I knew. Everyone had been scattered around the gym like giant hands had gathered them up in a sack and then shaken them out into the room again at random, except for the small area right around me.

Almost all of the kids were crying, the older kids especially, or huddled up on the floor like they wanted to be curled into a fetal position but they couldn’t bear to put their heads down. All of us under the crisp blue of an autumn sky, dry leaves on the air and crunchy under us, sunlight dappling in a slant through the leaves of dark maple trees in a mix of brilliant crimson and yellow and green around the edges of the room that was suddenly a forest clearing, the faint gurgle of water running over stones somewhere not far away like a promise, large grey stones emerging like islands from a carpet of moss and leaves, while in the far misty distance a hill climbed a little way above the tree line, with the wooden balcony and roof of a pavilion just peeking out from more cascading colors.