But now I picked it up and looked at it properly. The men were standing in a small and familiar wood-paneled room, lined with bookcases and full of small heavy cast-iron chairs with wooden desks, and at the very edge of the photograph a thick scroll covered with signatures was lying upon a massive roll-top wooden desk. It was my own special classroom, up at the very top of the school.

The article said, The final Scholomance binding spells were successfully laid today through what must be considered the most extraordinary circle working ever conceived by the mind of man, with fully twenty-one representatives of the foremost enclaves of the world, uniting their wills and the marshaled resources of all their several domains under the visionary leadership of Sir Alfred Cooper Browning of Manchester, for the singular goal of establishing an institution beyond all quarrels and disputes, whose fundamental purpose shall be to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world.

I read it again and again, until I couldn’t possibly avoid understanding it anymore. I knew all the words already, of course; I could probably have recited it from memory. The same photo was literally in the freshman orientation handbook they sent us before we came in, the exact same self-aggrandizing article was on the wall in a dozen of my classrooms and in the history textbooks. The words are even engraved on the stairway railings and the upper molding of the library reading room, those precise words: to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world, only absolutely nobody ever took them seriously. Even Sir Alfred Cooper Browning and all his fellow smug waistcoats didn’t believe their own nonsense at the time. They didn’t let in any children from outside their enclaves until they had to, and when they did have to, they did everything they could think of to give their own every possible advantage, and certainly not a single student ever got through a single day in here believing them. No one thought it was true.

Except, apparently, the Scholomance itself. And fair enough: twenty-one of the most powerful wizards in the world had made a circle and forced the words into the very bones of the place—the words they’d wrangled among themselves into a warm mealymouthed lie they could all agree to tell together. They built the Scholomance and told it very firmly that its fundamental purpose was to offer sanctuary and protection to all the wise-gifted children of the world.

And perhaps the school hasn’t been able to do that very successfully, but apparently it still wanted to be—something besides a lesser evil.

I can’t pretend that I completely understood at first; quite the opposite. I got the first vague inkling of the idea and then dropped the article back onto the heap of broken frame and walked away down the corridor. I was moving aimlessly, a cloudy blob of static from ear to ear, and anything at all could have killed me. But nothing came at me, even though I kept wandering along. I couldn’t have told you where I was, until the door I was passing slammed open, loudly, and I saw it was the corridor going to my delightful private seminar room, the one where I’d been attacked relentlessly the first two months of the year.

Which suddenly took on a very different light. I stopped and stared down the passage. The school hadn’t been trying to kill me, and it hadn’t been trying to make me go maleficer. It didn’t want me to suck everyone dry and fly out to darken the earth. So what did it want from me?

I went down to the room. The door was waiting open. I paused at the threshold looking inside, and with a bang, one of the outer wall panels next to the sink literally fell in, exposing a narrow shaft with a ladder, tucked into the wall. I knew what it was: I’d been inside it at the end of last year, for another one of the delightfully unique school experiences I hoped never to relive. It was the maintenance shaft that went down to the graduation hall.

The message was extremely clear. My head wasn’t, which is why I didn’t think as hard as I probably ought to have before I went and got on the ladder and started climbing down, in the dark. But I didn’t even hear any sounds of maleficaria, no scuttling or rasping or hisses or breath; only the gurgles and bangs of the school itself, the vast conglomeration of artifice running on, steadily pumping air and water and cafeteria slop and wastes all round, the low burring hum of mana being channeled into the wards. The climb didn’t take very long: the school wanted me to get there quickly, and my brain was so empty that it didn’t insist on the climb taking a rational amount of time. It felt like only a few minutes, and then I was climbing down off the ladder into the skinny maintenance chamber at the bottom, the place from which we’d sallied forth on our grand mission to repair the cleansing machinery.

I made a light. It shone onto the blank, curved metal wall—dented a bit from the outside, as if the mals had beaten on it trying to get through after we’d made our yanked escape. The graduation hall was on the other side, along with whatever the school had been preparing us all—preparing me—to deal with. This whole term, all the endless outrageously horrible unsurvivable runs, pushing and pushing and pushing all of us to find completely new strategies, to learn to work as a single enormous alliance, to defeat—whatever was on the other side. That’s what we had to overcome.

And apparently, it was time for me to face it. I didn’t have a maintenance hatch with me, but one of the metal wall panels just popped itself open, rivets pinging out of the seam and onto the floor one after another. I just stood there and watched. The two panels of the wall fell open with an enormous clanging, one towards me and one away.

Nothing came through the opening.

It wasn’t especially shocking; I’d understood by then. I knew what was on the other side waiting, and they weren’t going to bother coming after one measly student. I’d known all along what it was going to be, really, no matter how hard I’d pretended I didn’t. It wasn’t going to be evil glaciers, or an anima-locust swarm, or a castigator demon. The school had been treating me gently, with kid gloves, bringing me along little by little, but time was running out now, and I had to face it, so I could be ready on graduation day. I’d promised, after all. I’d promised Khamis, and Aadhya, and Liu, and Chloe, and everyone in the entire school.

I couldn’t make myself step through. Even if it was safe right now, in some ridiculous sense of the word, I didn’t want to go look. I didn’t want to have to go back upstairs and tell everyone what we were up against. I didn’t want to spend the next three months thinking about them every single day, making plans, discussing strategies for me to relive the most horrible thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to huddle into a ball against the back of the chamber. I wanted to sob for Mum, for Orion, for anyone at all to save me, and there wasn’t anyone. There was only me. And them. Patience and Fortitude, waiting by the gates, so hungry that they’d licked the entire graduation hall clean.

I knew I had to go look at them, so I couldn’t go back up the ladder—if the school would even have let me run away—but I couldn’t move forward, either. I stayed down there for a very long time. I think it had been close to an hour when there was a small anxious chirp from the shaft, and Precious poked her tiny nose out, clinging to the last rung of the ladder.