Chloe sat up. “Wait, that’s right, I remember this! All the new cafeteria equipment—when they were ready to install it, New York built like a hundred golems to deliver it. The golems opened the gates from outside, blasted the whole hall with mortal flame from flamethrowers, and then charged in with the new equipment. They shoved it into a shaft and closed it again before they got ripped apart. And then the kids inside installed it.”

I didn’t ask how many of those kids had been slaughtered by the minor horde of mals that would surely have got upstairs in the time it took for a gang of golems to load equipment into a shaft. New York’s golems do have a reputation for being quicker than usual, but that means they could go thundering across the graduation hall in six minutes instead of twenty. I didn’t ask if all the kids in the school had been warned to expect the sudden influx. I’m sure Chloe wouldn’t have been told those parts of the story. You wouldn’t trouble a nice, warmhearted girl with that kind of information.

I didn’t ask, I just seethed about it while stomping all the way downstairs to the workshop level with a handful of volunteers—kids I didn’t know very well who’d only been hanging round the library looking for work because they hadn’t done very much that day and were anxious about getting into dinner—to confirm that yes, these helpful shafts were in fact there, one ending in the workshop and one in the gym, and both were wide open. They looked a lot more impressive in person than on the blueprints. It’s hard to remember just how bloody big this place is until you’re standing on the edge of a shaft, easily big enough for a jet plane, that just goes plummeting down for half a mile. An army of mals could sail up no bother.

“I don’t suppose it occurred to you to keep them shut until the enclavers bothered to give everyone a warning?” I demanded of the nearest framed blueprints—the shafts were showing on there now as well—while my company all nervously took their own peeks down to help make sure that the shafts were there. “Not very much for fairness, are you?”

The school didn’t answer me. But I already knew the answer. It didn’t weigh people up one after another and even the score. It would do its best to protect an enclaver kid as much as a loser, and it wouldn’t care that the enclavers had come in with a basketful of advantages. They still hadn’t been safe, after all. That was the only line it drew, the line between safe and not safe, before it doled out its help with an implacable unjust evenhandedness. And it expected me to do the same, and it made me angry even while I couldn’t see any way to do it better.

I seethed all the way back upstairs to the library—my mood wasn’t improved by having to climb back up all those stairs—and announced, “The shafts are open,” before I threw myself sullenly into a chair.

* * *

After that, Liu’s plan was the plan, the only one we were working on, which was just as well, since it took every last minute of the last weeks—of what might be the last term ever—to get it into shape. Almost everything we’d done already had to be done again. Half of the first round of hastily built speakers broke and had to be replaced; we had to redo a quarter of the cabling, and then we had to make nearly a hundred new coils just to go up and down the shafts. We weren’t sure where to safely get the materials until someone suggested the walls of the gigantic auditorium where we take Maleficaria Studies, which are plastered all over with a horrible educational mural of all the mals which are normally waiting below to eat us.

I hadn’t been inside since last year, and I hadn’t missed it, but I took a day off from singing practice to join in for the festival of destruction. I wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of kids showed up; the younger kids were actually still going to lessons, but a lot of them skived off to join in and help as much as they could. We tore the place completely apart. Alchemists were there pouring precious etching fluids onto the bolts; incanters heated and cooled the panels to warp them until they fell off. Kids were flying themselves to the ceiling and prying panels off there, yelling out warnings below as they dropped. Even the freshmen—dramatically more gangly than they’d been at the start of the year—were there just whacking away at the seats with ordinary hammers in a frenzy. By the time the lunch bell rang, the room was gutted down to the girders and pipes.

Liu’s plan had that one significant advantage over any other: we all wanted to destroy the Scholomance. I’m not even joking; the fact that we all loved the idea on a deeply visceral level would almost certainly help carry it off. And it wasn’t just resentment and spite working in us, although that would have been enough: I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here. And every last one of us, from the most blithe freshman to the most crumpled senior, was longing more violently with every passing day to get out, out, out.

Well, except for our one special loony. Orion got increasingly sullen as July 2 crept closer. If he’d been resentful over the task he’d been assigned in our delightful scheme—he was going to be guarding the shaft that came down, facing the entire horde of mals at once—I would have considered it entirely justified. Since he didn’t mind his assignment in the slightest and in fact seemed to be looking forward to it in some weird demented anticipation, I had no idea what was bothering him.

That wasn’t true, of course, but I wasn’t allowing myself to have an idea what might be bothering him. He hadn’t asked me on another date since the disastrous attempt in the gym, which might have been out of mortification or because we hadn’t had a single day to ourselves since.

Either way, it was just as well. I came in here and I’ve survived in here being sensible all the time, trying to always do the cleverest thing I could manage, to see all the clear and sharp-edged dangers from every angle, so I could just barely squeeze past them without losing too much blood. I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway. I’m too good at being hard, I’ve got so good at it, and I wasn’t going to go soft all of a sudden now. I wasn’t going to make Mum’s choice, wasn’t going to do something stupid because of a boy who’d come and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the library, the two of us alone in a pool of light in the reaching dark all around—a boy who improbably thought I was just grand and who made my stomach fold itself over into squares when he was near me.

Everyone else was doing stupid things all round me—that whole last week, I was constantly stumbling over people making out in the library stacks, and making mealtime trades for condoms or alchemical brews of dubious efficacy, and even otherwise sensible people were giggling to each other in the girls’ about their plans for dramatic last-night hurrahs, which was stupider than anything else; you weren’t going to catch me losing sleep the night before we tried to carry out this insane scheme, even if Orion Lake turned up at my door with tea and cake.