There were any number of charming additional proposals for maleficaria-breeding, some of which got so far as to include detailed specs. One alchemy-track kid actually had the gall to suggest to Liu that he could do it with our mice: enchant them and leave them all living forever in the pipes of the Scholomance to breed and eat agglo larvae. Liu didn’t get angry very easily, but she did get angry then, to the point that Precious woke me up out of a nap and sent me racing to her room just in time to collide with Mr. Animal Cruelty, who beat an even more enthusiastic retreat when he saw me outside the door with Precious poking a quivering-whiskered nose out of the bandolier cup on my chest.

People also generated some less obviously bad ideas, like plans for installing some kind of major weaponry in the dead space under the workshop floor, which would be used to blast the graduation hall mals more directly. The problem was that anything you installed outside the graduation hall would require openings in the extremely powerful wards that keep the mals in the graduation hall and out of the classroom levels.

We were a fairly glum group as we gathered in the reading room the next Saturday. The obstacle course had reversed itself full-bore: instead of being impossible to survive, it had suddenly got so easy that even freshmen could manage it, so now they were doing runs instead of us. The school had in fact started randomly locking seniors out of the cafeteria, and the only way to get in was to give something useful to one of the younger kids. Small things like individual spare socks or pencils were working this week, but you could see the writing on the wall perfectly well. And grotesquely, of course most seniors were giving the things to enclave kids, in exchange for nothing more than the promise of putting a good word in with the enclave council when they graduated.

“All of the proposals are still trying to repair the cleansing,” Yuyan said, spreading the papers out over the tables. She’d taken over gathering them, because she could read so many languages so fluently, and because unlike Liesel she didn’t traumatize people with her comments, so we’d got a lot more submitted after she put out the word that people should bring them to her. “I think we have to accept that the cleansing approach to graduation is just a failure. We need something different.”

“Yeah, well, we’re trying,” Aadhya said grimly. I knew she’d been in the shop almost all week with Zixuan and a bunch of the other top artificers of our year, trying to come up with things. “We’ve experimented with making a corridor to the gates—like a tunnel of safety. But…” She shook her head. She didn’t really need to say what the problems with that strategy were: you’d be offering a single irresistible target to every last one of the mals, and how did you decide who went first? “Anyway, it still feels too obvious. The grown-ups would have tried something like that before.”

“Hey—here’s a thought. What if we did all graduate?” Chloe said. “What if we bring all the younger kids out with us. When we graduate back to the New York induction point, Orion’s mom will be there—she can get the board of governors to cancel induction. If we did that, the school really would stay clear, because no mals would try to come in if there weren’t any of us inside. And then instead of just us trying to come up with something, we could have every wizard in the world thinking about a better solution.”

Yuyan sighed. “We have been thinking about it, for years,” she said, which made sense: if Shanghai had been able to develop a better solution, it would have been worth their building a new school, and everyone would have moved. She gestured to the nearest copy of the newspaper article, mounted against the end of one of the stacks. “London has been thinking about it for a century, and New York nearly that long. Nothing we’ve found gets us better odds than the Scholomance.”

“Well, okay, but if we can’t think of anything better, at least nobody is any worse off,” Chloe said.

“The younger children would be,” Liu said. “They’d be out there undefended.”

“Just for a little while—it could be like summer vacation. We could all help look out for them. And if it turns out there isn’t a fix, or it takes too long, they could come back in,” Chloe said.

“Would you?” Nkoyo said, with an edge I felt in my own gut. “Come back in? After you’d got out of here?”

Chloe paused. “Well,” she said, with a wobble. “They’d get to choose…” but it was only a faint protest, fading off.

Liu was sitting on the couch next to her; she leaned over and bumped shoulders with Chloe, comfortingly. “We should send the mals to school instead,” she said.

Ten minutes before curfew that night, she came and banged furiously on my door. I didn’t know it was Liu, so I jumped out of bed and threw up a major shield, got a killing spell ready, and yanked the door open ready to fight. I had to fling my arms to both sides as she lunged in and grabbed me by the shoulders, with a few pieces of scribbled-on paper crumpled in her grip. First she said something in Chinese too fast for me to follow, because she was so excited, and then she said, “We should send the mals to school instead!”

“What?” I said, and the final curfew bell rang, and she jumped and said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow!” and ran back to her room, leaving me to lie awake for an hour trying to figure out what she was thinking. The crumpled papers she’d left with me didn’t help: I could tell it was maths, but it was all in Chinese numbers, in two sets of handwriting, hers and I thought Yuyan’s, and even after I laboriously translated them, I could only guess what the numbers were referring to.

“The honeypot spell,” she said, the next morning, meeting me halfway down the corridor between our rooms.

“Right, I got that far,” I said: mals come swarming into the school through the graduation portals anyway; if we used our honeypot spell, we could lure a proper horde of them in. Theoretically tens of thousands over the half an hour of graduation, if Liu’s calculations were right and I’d understood them properly. “But what’s the idea? Are you thinking if we pack the whole hall completely full of mals, they’ll—eat the agglos?” That was the best guess I’d come up with in a night of thinking, although if mals were going to eat enough of the agglos, they’d have eaten them already, but Liu was shaking her head vigorously.

“Not the hall,” she said. “The school. The whole school. We leave, and we fill the school with mals.”

I stared at her. “And then what? Boot it off into the void or something?”

“Yes!” Liu said.

“Er, what?” I said.

* * *

I could tell you all the details of the next two weeks, during which we came up with five or six alternative plans and discarded all of them, and also had about ten different false starts working out the rough details of this one, but it was agony enough going through it once, so I won’t.