Almost everyone had made it to the other side of the split by then; it was only Yaakov and Nkoyo still behind the line. Yaakov was close enough that he just yelled and threw himself over before the vines got high enough; he fell down on the other side with them grabbing at his legs and trying to pull him back. Cora and Nadia were close enough to slash through the vines with their swords while Ibrahim and Jamaal grabbed his arms and hauled him away.

But Nkoyo had been one step further back, and that one step had put a solid wall of vines between her and the gates. I tried to cast a spell of putrefying rot at the vines, which ought to have wiped them out along with most of the rest of the landscape, but instead nothing happened, and I looked down and realized I hadn’t just made it clear, I was out: I was standing in the corridor, just outside the gym doors. I couldn’t help Nkoyo any more than I’d be able to help her in the graduation hall once I’d passed through the gates and was standing back in Wales.

But if I’d gone through the gates downstairs, I also wouldn’t have still been standing there to watch my friend get torn to shreds. Nkoyo was casting withering spells, whirling-quick touch spells, but she could only do them one vine at a time, and she was running out of both mana and breath. She couldn’t make an opening big enough to jump across the chasm without being pulled down, and the vines kept coming and coming. One of them made a darting lunge out of the mass and got round her throat and started to strangle her so she couldn’t cast anymore, blood running down her neck and her arms from the thorns as she grappled with it desperately.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wasn’t going to stand there. Even though I would have to do something real, something permanent—as bad as what I’d done to the gym in the first place. The mana was at my hands and the spell was on my breath, my tongue curling around the words: a spell of destruction and tearing-down, a spell to rip the obstacle-course machinery apart, bring the whole gym down if I had to—

And then that absolute wankstain Khamis went back for her. He poured a bottle of green liquid out over several writhing nests of vines, and they burst into flames and burnt up in a single roaring instant, opening up a wide gap in front of her. He jumped through, grabbed Nkoyo under her armpits and knees, and more or less threw her bodily through the opening—he was a big boy—before he jumped after her and shoved her along the rest of the way ahead of him through the doors, staggering as the last vines grabbed and clawed at his own legs, leaving a trail of fresh blood drips on the churned snow before the doors slammed shut on his heels.

And yeah, you never wanted to lose a member of your alliance this close to graduation, and it was Nkoyo’s team more than it was his; he’d just agreed to put up the resources and a shedload of mana, and she’d pulled everyone else together out of her big network, the loads of people who were happy to join up with her. But that work was done, and she wasn’t irreplaceable as an incanter by a long shot. In fact there were enough losers left floating around without an alliance that he could have subbed in two kids as replacements, who’d be desperate enough by now to agree to an even more exposed position further in the rear and a smaller share of team resources.

Instead he’d put himself as far out as anyone would go, just to save her. Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.

After the first moment of what just happened, the rest of our crew gathered round the two of them in the corridor, a yammering of noise and congratulations; even the next group of seniors just waiting their turn to go crowded in: they were helping gladly this time, offering bandages, handkerchiefs, good salves. We’re all fans of near escapes, of far escapes, of any escapes at all; we want so much to believe in them, even after all these years in here. Nkoyo just sank down on her knees on the ground in front of the doors, her eyes shut with two fat streaks of tears running shiny down her face; her other allies Janice and Fareeda were holding up her limp arms to bandage them. Khamis was sitting next to her staring at the bloodstained gashes in his trousers and shoes. He seemed roughly as shocked as anyone that he’d done it.

I’d got out of the way at some point, I don’t remember when; I’d backed up from the doors to make room for everyone helping, the crowd of them framed in the archway of the big metal gym doors. Only Ibrahim was off a little way down the corridor with Yaakov, their foreheads together and his hands cupping Yaakov’s face, tears streaming down his own; he jerked in to snatch a fast desperate kiss that made Yaakov lose it and shut his eyes and start crying, too.

I stood there with my back against the far side of the corridor, well away from them all, the working of destruction still alive in my mouth and the mana I’d pulled still churning inside me. We’d been running the obstacle courses for a month and we were already so much better, so much faster. We needed the gym, we needed the course. If I’d smashed the whole thing to save Nkoyo, I’d have been making another bargain with the lives of people I didn’t know, faces I wasn’t looking at, the way I’d traded those kids from Shanghai for the ones the quattria ate.

I didn’t have the right to do that. I didn’t have the right to do anything except the one thing I had the right to do—to get out of the gates—because we all agreed that we had that right. We all agreed we had the right to get out any way we could, within the one narrow limit of actually killing each other—and even that could be handwaved off as long as you did it unobtrusively enough. It was understood that you only promised to help other people because they’d help you back, and it was understood that your promises stopped counting when you got close enough to the gates, and nobody would ever blame you for going through as soon as you could, even if everyone else on your team died. Nobody would ever expect you to turn back and nobody would promise to do it.

If you even tried, nobody would believe you, because maybe you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but you could know that. If you turned back, you didn’t save anyone, you just died along with them. At best you died instead of them; you put yourself into a maw-mouth for eternity to get them out the doors instead of you. That’s all anyone could reasonably hope to do, so it wasn’t something you could ask anyone to do. You could ask people to be brave, you could ask them to be kind, you could ask them to care, you could ask them to help; you could ask them for a thousand hard and painful things. But not when it was so obviously useless. You couldn’t ask someone to deliberately trade themselves away completely, everything they had and might ever be, just to give you a chance, when in the end—and the gates were the end, the very end of things—you knew you weren’t any more special than they were. It wasn’t even heroism; it was just a bad equation that didn’t balance.

Except for me. I could turn back. With just an ordinary amount of nerve, not even as much as Khamis Mwinyi had dug up out of his own guts with no advance warning to anyone, I could turn around at the gates and wave everyone on my team through and wreak destruction on every mal that came in range, until all of my friends were safe. So I had to. Of course I had to. I couldn’t go running through the gates to safety, to the green woods of Wales and Mum hugging me tight, while anyone I loved was still behind me. I had to turn back and keep the gates clear for them until they all made it through. They hadn’t asked me, they wouldn’t ask me, because that went against the rules we all understood, but I’d do it anyway, because I could. I could save Aadhya and Liu and Chloe and Jowani, and I’d save Nkoyo and Ibrahim and Yaakov and Nadia.