The main question was whether Liu’s idea would in fact work to protect the wise-gifted children of the world. The Scholomance wasn’t built out of some kind of passionate dedication to the concept of boarding-school education. It’s just a casino, meant to tilt the odds in our favor, because surviving puberty is a numbers game. Any wizard parent can save their kid from any one mal. But when mals come fifteen a day, sooner or later one of them is going to slip through your wards and shields and gates and get the tasty treat you’re hiding from them.

And that’s why we get crammed in here instead, past the guarded gates and only reachable through the narrow pipes covered with wards, and why we spend a healthy chunk of our formative years in a prison out of nightmares. If we could cut down the maleficaria population enough to give us odds of survival outside the school that were as good as, oh, one in seven, most people wouldn’t come to the school to get the one-in-four odds here. It’s too horrible. And after Liesel pounced on poor Liu and dragged her into a room to check the calculations a few million times, the two of them came back and announced that we had a decent chance of getting the odds outside down to one in two, and they thought the effect would last for at least a couple of generations. That made it one of the few ideas on the list that couldn’t just immediately be crossed off, unlike for instance that morning’s suggestion of creating a flock of flying snake-tailed piranha vultures that would absolutely have polished off the agglos in ten minutes and then come up to start on the rest of us.

The rest of the issues with Liu’s plan were logistical. After poring over the blueprints and maintenance documentation, we worked out that when you touch the gates, your portal home opens at that precise moment, stays open just long enough to return you to your induction point, and then slams shut again in seconds—a sensible design meant to keep mals out. If we wanted to lure in as many mals as we could, everyone would have to queue up and leave slowly: a steady stream of kids going out, a steady stream of mals coming in, so we could keep the honeypot spell working through the full half hour of graduation.

Sorry, so I could keep the honeypot spell working. No one even bothered discussing who exactly was going to be casting the spell intended to call up a vast tidal army of maleficaria. Well, it was a fair cop.

“How are we going to keep the mals from just killing everyone in line?” Aadhya said.

“As long as the honeypot spell is going, they’re just going to follow it, I think,” Liu said.

“So El has to be somewhere far from where they come in, to pull them deeper,” Magnus said. “Can she cast the spell up in the library and still have it work at the gates?”

“How am I getting out of the library afterwards in this scenario?” I said pointedly. I was very conscious that if the school didn’t mind being hacked off into the void itself—it hadn’t raised any objections so far—it would certainly consider me expendable, too. I couldn’t refuse to risk my life, but I wasn’t keen on accepting martyrdom before we even began.

“For that matter, how are you just not getting smothered in five minutes?” Aadhya said. “If this even works, a billion mals are going to be coming right at you.”

“Why don’t I just kill them all as they come in?” Orion said, without the slightest doubt in his ability to kill a billion mals.

“Shut up, Lake,” I said, having many doubts about his ability to kill a billion mals.

That left Liu’s idea as just one of the many very-long-shot possibilities on our list, but Yuyan talked it up to Zixuan, and three days later, he came up to the library with a solution for the problem of luring the mals throughout the school: a speaker system. The idea of it was we’d make hundreds of tiny speakers—magic ones, not the electronic sort—strung on a line, and then run this line in a gigantic loop throughout the entire school, starting and ending in the graduation hall, through all the corridors and stairways on every level, branches going off into every classroom; up to the library and winding through all the endless stacks, and then all the way back down into the hall. At one end of the loop would be me, standing near the gates: I would sing our alluring honeypot spell into a capturing mouthpiece, and it would get piped through the entire system and come back out at the very last and largest speaker, standing right in front of the gates, to broadcast the song out to any mals in listening range of the portals.

What would make the mals actually follow the line and go into the school was a single brilliant twist to the design: an enchantment so you only heard the sound coming out of the one speaker just ahead of you, and as soon as you got too close to that one, you’d start to hear it only from the next speaker along instead. The mals would come because they heard the song being blasted out, and then they’d chase it onward to the next speaker, and the next one, all the way through the school.

That certainly made Liu’s plan seem tidy, until you considered that there would be more than four thousand kids going out the gates, spanning the whole globe, and with hundreds of them headed to the huge city enclaves that were surrounded by hungry maleficaria. Broadcasting a honeypot spell out of the Scholomance—already the most tempting honeypot in the world—would be gilding the lily. If any of the mals didn’t come, it would likely be because they’d got stampeded or eaten by other mals rushing to get to the suddenly wide-open doors, or because they couldn’t make it to a portal in time.

“We’d be luring in all the mals in the world,” Chloe said nervously, and she wasn’t wrong. It was obviously insane.

However, it still didn’t get crossed off the list, because we only crossed ideas off the list when we were sure they wouldn’t work, not just because they were mad. The list wasn’t long even so. Most of them came off when Alfie said, “Yes, tried that,” often without even taking his head off his fist where he was slumped next to Liesel at the head of the table; others got crossed off because Yuyan or Gaurav from Jaipur admitted their own enclave laboratories had tried it. Surprisingly, no one in any enclave had ever explored the brilliant idea of destroying the entire school.

More seriously, it was an idea that they couldn’t have come up with, because it needed—me. You could have cast the honeypot spell with a circle of twelve wizards, or thirty if you wanted it to keep going for half an hour, and then you could have taken another thirty wizards and cast a spell to break the school off from the world, but you certainly couldn’t have got them all out again in time. As it was, I’d be yelling the last syllable of what was turning out to be my surprisingly handy supervolcano spell as I was jumping through the portal, or else I’d go toppling off into the void with the school. Oh well; if that happened, hopefully the accumulated mals would eat me before I had an opportunity to experience the full existential horror of being totally severed from reality.

And no, I wasn’t nearly that blasé about the prospect.

But we hadn’t found any better ideas, other than Chloe’s solution of just running out and throwing the problem into the laps of the adults. We all liked that solution quite a lot: the only problem with it was that it didn’t provide us with any work to do, and meanwhile the Scholomance was impatiently tapping a metaphorical foot. Over the next week, Zixuan started actually tinkering around and building the speakers, and other senior artificers started asking to help him, because anyone who wasn’t helping in some way started having their already dim room lamps go completely out, or having the water shut off to the bathrooms just when they got there, or being shut out of the cafeteria or the workshop.