And then, once I’d done that, then I could go through the gates myself. I’d rescue the people I cared about, and then—I could turn my back on everyone else. I could go through, and leave them to find their own way out or die. I didn’t owe them. I didn’t love them. They’d done nothing for me. Except Khamis, who was sitting on the floor there shaky with blood trickling over his legs in rivulets and puddling beneath him, blood he’d spent to save Nkoyo when I couldn’t. I’d save Khamis. I’d keep standing by the gates long enough to save Khamis, who I didn’t love in the least, because how could I do anything else now?

I stepped back from the knot of people gathered round him and Nkoyo, the strangers helping someone I cared about, in the small ways they could afford. I took another step back, and another, and turned, and three breaths later I was halfway down the corridor and running, running like the gates were up ahead of me and I could make it out, I could escape. There were more seniors heading for the gym by then. Their heads turned, anxious to follow me as I passed, wondering what was I running from, only I was running from them, from any of them who might turn out to be a decent person, who might turn out to be just as special as the people I loved. Who might deserve to live just as much as they did.

I sped up even more, which I could do because for the last five weeks I’d been sprinting for my life on a near-daily basis, only that turned out to be a terrible idea because I ran straight into Magnus. He was coming off the stairs to go practice with his own team: a pack of five boys who took up nearly the full width of the archway so I couldn’t dodge round them and had to pull up hard instead, and he reached out instinctively to steady me and said, “El? What happened? Is Chloe okay?” as if even he had a thought to spare for another human being, as long as she was someone he’d grown up with. Or maybe as long as he could risk caring about her because he knew the odds were she wasn’t going to die before her eighteenth birthday.

“Oh, I hate you,” I said, childishly stupid; I was about to burst, into tears, into something else, I have no idea what, when Orion got literally bowled down the stairs and knocked all six of us off our feet like a perfect strike. A monstrous roaring slitherjaw, thrashing squid-sucker tentacles around a prehistoric-shark mouth, came humping down the stairs after him, gargling and grabbing, and all of the boys screamed and tried to get away, which was hard to do when we were tangled up on the floor in a heap.

At least Magnus didn’t do anything heroic; he scrabbled wildly for escape just like the rest of them. There wasn’t any, though; it was on us, arms already grabbing Orion and all of Magnus’s teammates and dragging them towards its gnashing mouth, more coming for him and me, but after it pulled Magnus off me, I sat up and screamed at it, “Shrivel up and die, you putrescent sack of larva!”

Those weren’t actually the right words of the rotting spell that I had been trying to cast on the vines, but apparently that didn’t matter, because the slitherjaw obeyed me without the slightest hesitation, its skin shrinking down until it popped along seams that unleashed a writhing mass of tiny horrible maggot-like grubs all over the floor, half burying the boys as it dropped them—still screaming, possibly even louder—in its disintegration. They all flung themselves out of it and went wildly careening into the corridor, frenziedly shaking off grubs in every direction and crushing them underfoot as they went grape-stomping around. Except for Orion, who just surfaced out of the sea of maggot-things, shook himself off without an iota of decent horror—they were in his hair—and looked around at the rapidly disappearing remains of the mal: the larvae were fleeing down the drains en masse, leaving behind nothing but the two enormous bony jaws full of serrated teeth, hanging still wide-open on the floor like something out of a natural history museum.

He didn’t have the nerve to reproach me, but he did heave a faintly disappointed sigh. “Don’t even start, Lake,” I said. I felt better; maybe because I’d blown away my gathered mana forcing a new spell into existence, or maybe it was just the same kind of calm as going through a crying jag and coming out the other side, where you know nothing’s changed and it’s all still horrible but you can’t cry forever, so there’s nothing to do but go on. “Tell me something, what’s the plan? Is there one, or were you just going to improvise the whole thing?”

“Uh, the plan?” Orion said.

“Graduation,” I said, making sure to enunciate every syllable in case he missed one. “Taking out the mals. Before they eat everyone.”

He glared at me. “I don’t need a plan!”

“In other words, you can’t be arsed to think of one besides ‘run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.’ Well, too bad for you, that’s not what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing?” he said after a moment, warily.

“Well, look at you,” I said, making a condescending wave to take in the still-writhing mess of the stairs. “If I let you clear the hall on your own, you’ll trip over your own feet and get yourself eaten by a grue in five minutes; it’ll just be embarrassing.”

He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be offended more than he wanted to be pleased, and he obviously also had a brief thought about making a chivalric protest of the no you mustn’t do something so dangerous variety, but he thought better of that and shut his mouth before it escaped him. Instead he folded his arms over his chest and said, coolly, “So what’s your plan? Turn all the mals into maggots? That would be fun for everyone.”

“They’d take it and say thanks if they knew what was good for them,” I said.

I hadn’t any better plan to offer, in fact, than “run in and start killing mals until one of them gets you.” I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going through. I wasn’t going through until everyone was out.

Of course, nobody else even noticed my grand noble decision to save all their lives, as I started with the only thing I could think of, which was in fact just not going through the gym doors until everyone else had made it out. But that wasn’t noticeable, because given this week’s ridiculous course, that was the only sensible thing to do. The course usually doesn’t change throughout the week, but we thought possibly this one time there would be additional attacks during our second and third runs, because it was so aggressively useless otherwise, but no. For that whole week, for everyone who ran it, that’s all the course was: a good sprint with one not-actually-surprise attack at the end.

Even if I had been full of ironclad determination to abandon everyone behind me and run through the graduation gates at the first chance, it would still have been stupid to let my teammates get picked off in the gym during practices.

So no one batted an eye when I stopped at the doors on Wednesday and Friday and turned round to disintegrate the entire forest of vines even as they came whipping out. We didn’t even discuss strategy or anything; there wasn’t any strategy to discuss, except to agree after the Wednesday run that Nkoyo and Khamis should just take Friday off and build mana while they healed up. That wasn’t even a nice break for them; it was making the best of a bad situation. None of us wanted a break. What we wanted was more of the practice that we desperately needed to get out alive. Personally, I wanted it even more than I had before.