He was absolutely right; some desperate kids would go for it, year after year, losing a few each time but keeping the machinery tidy, until finally one group went down only to discover that surprise! The machinery had finally broken again before they could fix it, and there was a hungry crowd of maleficaria waiting for them. I was about to put up a howl of protest, but Alfie was already shaking his head, in weary exasperation. “They’ve thought of that. Posting guards, sending in maintenance crews every month, all of it. And that would handle the agglos. But you can’t pay anyone enough to do it, because a new maw-mouth will come into the school, very soon. There’s a trace on the doors. Usually one or two manage it every year—they’re oozes, those are always the hardest to keep out of anywhere. And they’ll set up shop in the hall. Patience and Fortitude were protecting us, actually. They would eat the newer ones.”

Everyone’s faces had downturned into masks of appalled horror; I cringed inwardly and tried to tell myself that it wasn’t very long until graduation, and surely there wouldn’t be a new maw-mouth that soon.

“What if we breed some mals to eat agglos?” some bright lad blurted out, I didn’t see who; I think he ducked away behind someone else as soon as he realized what he’d suggested and everyone turned to stare in his direction. Breeding maleficaria is a very popular pastime for maleficers, because it always ends in roughly the same way, with variation only in the amounts of screaming and blood. Trying to do it with good intentions generally makes the results worse, not better.

“We could build a construct to do it,” someone else suggested, which also wasn’t going to work, since the other mals coming in would happily eat the agglo-eating constructs, but at least that was less likely to create some kind of hideous monstrosity shambling around the school devouring kids forever.

But more to the point, it was another suggestion, and the crowd in the reading room was breaking up into small groups along preferred language lines and starting to argue and discuss, to come up with ideas. Trying to help. I didn’t care that all the ideas were useless; we’d literally only just started thinking.

Aadhya came round to me and put her arm round my waist and said under her breath, “Hey, she can be taught,” with a tease in her voice that wobbled a little, and when I looked at her, her eyes were bright and wet, and I put my arm round her shoulders and hugged her.

* * *

I did begin to care that the ideas were useless after an entire week went by without any useful ones. We’d enlisted the whole school in the brainstorming project, but so many people came up to the reading room to suggest that someone go down to fix the machinery on some arbitrary day each year that by Tuesday we were all yelling, “Maw-mouth!” before they got halfway through their first sentence. All of these clever people were enclavers, I note.

A junior came up to propose our staying on an extra year to guard the other students. He called his idea paying it forward, and it had the novelty of making literally every senior in the room squirm with a violently stifled shove it up your arse even before Liesel said in exasperation, “And where will we be sleeping during this year? What will we eat?” He then revised it to suggest that we come back in just in time for next year’s graduation. That didn’t even merit a response beyond a flat stare: no one has ever volunteered to come back into the Scholomance, and no one ever will. Barring the one incredibly stupid glaring exception, who didn’t count.

For variation, one pale and bedraggled-looking freshman girl came up with the notion that all of the underclassmen should graduate with us, instead. I think she just couldn’t stand school any longer and wanted to go home to her mum, and fair enough, except that her plan wouldn’t have protected and sheltered her at all. She’d just be snapped up in a few months by some mal on the outside, like ninety-five percent of the wizard kids who aren’t lucky enough to get into the school. We more or less gave her a bracing pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way, and that was all the time we alloted to her suggestion.

But that afternoon as I was leaving lunch I saw her slumped in the freshman queue, standing alone, and on an impulse, I stopped by Sudarat, who was alone in the queue just a little further back. “Come on,” I said. “You’ve got someone holding a place for you.”

She trailed after me uncertainly, and I took her over to the other girl: she was an American, but just an indie, and I vaguely thought she was from Kansas, or one of those other states you never hear about on the BBC news, far from any enclaves. The point being, she didn’t have a smidge of a reason to care about what had or hadn’t happened to Bangkok. “Right, what’s your name?” I demanded, and the girl said warily, “Leigh?” as if she wasn’t quite willing to commit.

“Right, this is Sudarat, she was from Bangkok before it went pear-shaped; you’re Leigh, and you’re so miserable in this place that you’d rather trade for the odds outside; that’s introductions sorted,” I said, getting the worst bits out in front, for the both of them. “See if you can bear to sit together; it’s best to have company for meals.”

I sailed away and left them to it as quickly as I could, so none of us including me could think too hard about what the bloody hell I was doing. I don’t think I could have done it, even a week before. I wouldn’t have imagined doing it, I wouldn’t have imagined either one of them letting me do it: a senior putting two underclassmen together, why? I’d need to have an angle, and if I hadn’t an obvious one, they would have made one up for me, and more likely than not actively avoided each other afterwards.

Maybe they still would: Sudarat had more reason than most to be wary, and I didn’t know a thing about the Kansas girl beyond her being as miserable as I’d once been, which might mean anything. Maybe she, too, was secretly a proto-maleficer of unimaginable dark power, or maybe she was such a reflexively nasty person that everyone avoided her for good reason—I immediately thought of dear old Philippa Wax, back in the commune, who almost certainly hadn’t got any nicer just because I wasn’t there, although she’d often implied she would—or maybe Leigh from Kansas was just a loser kid who was shy and bad at making friends, and who had nothing going for her, so no one had bothered to make a friend of her. She wasn’t an actual maleficer, because a maleficer wouldn’t have been that desperate to get out.

Anyway, Sudarat could decide for herself if it was worth enduring her company. At least it was someone, someone who wasn’t going to be suspicious of her, or even just hesitant to make a friend of her because other people were suspicious of her. And I could imagine trying to help her, and help the other girl into the bargain, because that was now a thing that could happen in the Scholomance.

Assuming that they actually did sit together for at least that one meal, it was also the most successful example of help that entire week, at least that I knew of.