Or maybe they’d all be dead. Maybe they’d eaten each other all the way down the food chain, and there would be no maleficaria left except Patience and Fortitude themselves, guardians on either side of the gates, and they’d have nothing left on the menu except us.

If that’s what we found down there—I had no idea what I’d do. There was an obvious and sensible thing to do, which was to pass the word to our entire graduating class in advance that if it was us against the maw-mouths, they’d all make one enormous circle and feed me mana, and I’d try to take them out. But just because that was obvious and sensible didn’t mean I was going to do it. I had killed a maw-mouth the only way you could, from the inside out, and if I tried to think even in a very vague distant way about doing it again, a faint incoherent screaming started up inside me that took up all the room there was in my brain, like standing next to a fire truck with siren wailing while someone tried to talk to you, their mouth moving with no sound at all coming through because the whole world was full of noise.

Maybe I’d get over it if I saw the maw-mouths coming and there wasn’t any other choice. Maybe. I wasn’t at all confident, for all I was about to have six months of honing my reflexes to razor sharpness. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t remotely the same. Having to choose to go inside again—I don’t know if it’s a choice anyone could make more than once. There certainly haven’t been many people who’ve had the chance to consider it. If I do make it out of here, I should look up the Dominus of Shanghai. He’s the only other living person who’s ever done it. We could compare notes. Or we could look each other in the face and just start screaming together, which feels more appropriate to me.

Of course, it was extremely likely that it wouldn’t work anyway. The maw-mouth I’d killed had been a small one, maybe budded off one of the big ones or however they spawn—no one’s spent much time studying the reproduction of maw-mouths as far as I know. It had managed to squeeze through the wards and make it upstairs. I don’t know how many people had been inside it, how many lives; I’d been far beyond keeping count of the deaths I’d dealt out. But I did know that it hadn’t been anywhere near as big as Fortitude, much less Patience, who’s been lording it over the killing grounds almost since the hall first opened. I don’t think even I can do that much killing. The only way they’re going is if the whole school goes.

The point being that we still needed a better strategy for graduation than Wait and see if El can keep her big-girl pants on, and here I was whinging on about how nice it would be for me to do something unbelievably stupid instead, like Orion. Aadhya had every right to cram my face in it.

“Sorry,” I muttered. She just nodded, which was kinder than I deserved, really, and then said, businesslike, “So I think I’ve figured out a good gym schedule,” and rolled out a timetable for me to look at.

After New Year’s, half of the gym gets cordoned off exclusively for the seniors, and every week, it lays out a fresh new obstacle course for us, so we can get as much practice as possible running flat-out through forests of sharp things trying to kill us. It’s excellently realistic, full of artificial constructs pretending to be mals, and also the many real mals who show up helpfully to populate it. It’s a testament to our top-quality educational experience how few of us die. Please envision me saying this with my hand held piously over my heart. But really, we were all hitting our stride by now. There isn’t anything much more dangerous in the world than a fully grown wizard. That’s why the mals have to hunt us when we’re young. We’re the real apex predators, not the maw-mouths that after all just sit by the doors mumbling to themselves and occasionally groping around for some supper. Once through the gates, we’ll be carving our dreams into the world like gleeful vandals scratching graffiti on the pyramids, and we won’t look behind us. But only once we’re out.

Ordinarily the reserved gym is a useful and highly valued privilege. No one was very enthusiastic about it this year, but there wasn’t any other option for practice. The fundamental goal of graduation is to get from the nearest stairwell to the gates as fast as possible without getting stopped along the way. It’s roughly a distance of 150 meters, about the same distance as from one end of the gym and back, and aside from throwing spells left and right, you also have to run.

“Mornings?” I said, in protest, because Aadhya had us meeting three times a week at eight, which meant hauling ourselves out of bed at the first quiet chiming to get breakfast and make it downstairs; we’d be first through all the corridors, not to mention—very important to mention—first into the obstacle course every week, without any warning how bad it was going to be.

“I talked to Ibrahim and Nkoyo today, during the cleansing,” Aadhya said. “We made a deal. They’ll go right behind us with their teams, on either side. We take the heat up front, and they keep us from getting flanked. We’ll practice together each morning.”

That kind of arrangement is normally a supremely terrible strategy for the lead group, to the point that you’re explicitly warned against it in the pre-graduation handbook we’ll all be getting in about three months—much too late to be of real use; we’re all using copies we bought in our sophomore years off that year’s seniors, who’d bought their own copies two years before, et cetera. The advice changes a little from year to year, but one of the most consistent points is that taking the lead is absolutely not worth whatever advantage you might get from the groups covering you. As soon as you’re in any danger of being overwhelmed, they’ll hop to one side and let whatever they’re holding off come at you, meaning that you won’t even have a chance to recover, while they take the opening created by the pile-on and go sailing onwards with a substantial improvement to their odds, taken out of yours.

It’s not great to be the one taking the lead even within an alliance, but at least in an alliance, you’ve been practicing together and integrating your skills tightly, so it’s not actually a good idea for your allies to cut and run. Unless you’re close enough to the doors, at which point loads of alliances do fall apart. And that, boys and girls, is why enclavers never take the lead.

Aadhya wasn’t making a mistake, though. There’s one situation where having someone covering you does in fact make excellent sense: if it’s never going to be a good idea for them to ditch you. For instance, if all they’ve got is knives and your team’s got a flamethrowing machine gun. So she was confirming that yes, our entire strategy was going to rest on my keeping my big-girl pants on. “Right,” I said, grimly, because what else was I going to say? No, don’t rely on me? No, I won’t do my best to get you to the gates, the way you’ve done for me? Of course she was going to build the strategy around me. And of course I had to let her.

“El,” Aadhya said, “you know we’d take Orion,” and you might think that was a hilariously absurd thing to say—yes, out of the generous goodness of our hearts we’d take the invincible hero along with us—but I knew what she really meant. She was saying Orion’s not on our team, and if I was, that meant I couldn’t ditch them to go help him, even if, for instance, I looked over and saw him being dragged into the guts of a maw-mouth, screaming the way that Dad’s been screaming in Mum’s head since the day she crawled out through the gates with me in her belly. If that was the monstrous fate Mum had been trying to warn me away from, she’d know, she’d know the way no one else in the world would know just how horrible it would be to live with someone you love screaming in your head forever.