While I spent my days with Liu and Aadhya and Zixuan in the workshop, tuning the lute and singing my lungs out, Orion was still doing runs in the gym. He’d be spending most of graduation protecting the queue, unless the horde of mals managed to circulate through the entire school and come back down before we were all out, in which case—well, in which case he’d presumably make a hopeless but nevertheless determined stand at the barricades, trying to hold the mals off long enough for everyone else to make their escape. And I’d have to go on standing there next to the gates, singing the mals onwards, keeping them off everyone else, as he was inevitably overrun and torn apart before my eyes by the monsters I’d lured in to kill him.

I couldn’t stop myself going by the gym to watch him, just to poke the sore place. It didn’t make me feel any better to watch him thrashing scores of fake mals and gym constructs. I knew he was good at killing mals, I knew he was brilliant at it, but if this plan even worked, there wouldn’t be scores, there would be hundreds, maybe thousands, all piling on him at once. But I watched from the doors anyway, every day after I finished practicing, and when he finished his last run we went up to dinner together without talking, my teeth clenched round the words I wanted to say: You don’t have to do this alone; you can ask for people to help you, at least to shield you; we’ll hold a lottery, we’ll draw straws. I’d said them already and he’d just waved them away with a shrug and “They’ll just get in the way,” and he might very well be right, because no one would stick beside him with that horde coming. No one except me, and I was meant to be saving everyone else, everyone else but him.

But the last day before graduation, we decided it was best to rest my voice instead of more practice, and after lunch, I didn’t go back to the workshop; I marched down to the gym and told Orion I was going to do the last run with him. He was just outside the doors getting ready, whistling cheerily as he dusted his hands with casting powder—like gymnastics chalk, only with more glitter—and he had the gall to object. “I thought you were supposed to get some rest,” he said. “You don’t need to worry, I’m not going to let the mals get to you…” at which point he caught my expression and hastily said, “Uh, sure, let’s go.”

“Let’s,” I said.

The exercise did make me feel better, even if it shouldn’t have. As patently stupid as that was, five minutes into the onrushing horde that the Scholomance threw at us, I was as viscerally sure of invincibility as Orion: we could do it, we could, nothing would stop us—and of course nothing would until something did, at which point we’d be dead and past the bother of learning our lesson. But I let myself have the luxury of insane confidence while we mowed through maleficaria together, passing the work between us with the easy grace of partners dancing, my vast killing spells clearing great swaths around us and his shocking-quick attacks knocking down anything that dared to survive or poke its nose in any closer.

He lunged to one side of me to take out a swinging rack of crystalline blades and then instantly whirled to the other to vaporize the billowing violet-pink cloud of a glinder, finishing the sweep in close to me, and when he grinned down at me, breathing hard and sweaty and sparkling, I laughed back, helplessly, and threw a wall of flame spiraling out round us both, a swarm of treeks exploding like tiny fireworks as it caught them, half a dozen scuttling constructs melting into glistening puddles of liquid metal, and the course was done: we were alone in the hazy sunlit warmth beneath a stand of delicate purple-red maples. A moment later, an unnaturally perfect rumble of thunder sounded and a sudden torrent of warm summer rain came down to wash away the detritus—which wouldn’t have been unpleasant, except the pipes for the gym had evidently been infested, too, and quite a lot of amphisbaena came with the downpour, thrashing and hissing as they tumbled. Orion grabbed my hand and ran for the small pavilion, and he pulled me inside and kept pulling me into his arms and kissed me.

I kissed him back, I couldn’t help it. The soft pattering rain wasn’t real, except for the amphisbaena thumping down at intervals; the beautiful trees and the garden weren’t real, the pavilion wasn’t real, they were all just awful hollow lies, but he was real: his mouth and his arms round me and his body overheated against me, trickles of rain and sweat trapped against my cheek and his breath gasping out of the sides of his mouth even as he tried to keep kissing me, wanting me, his heart pounding so hard I could feel it through my chest, unless that was my own heart.

He’d buried his hands in my hair to kiss me more and I was clutching at his back, and then his t-shirt came apart under my grip, all at once the way clothes do when you’ve mended them with not enough raw material. He flinched back as the scraps fell off him, my hands slipping off him, and we were staring at each other across the opened space, both of us panting.

He jerked his head away first, his face wrenched and miserable, and he was about to say he was sorry; I could tell. I should have been sorry, too, because it was stupid and I knew better, even without Mum telling me keep far away from Orion Lake, except standing there with only hours left ticking down, it suddenly wasn’t stupid anymore. It was in fact the only sensible thing to do, because he might be dead tomorrow or I might, and I’d never know what it would be like to be with him; clumsy and awkward and terrible as it was likely to be, I’d never know, and I said, “Don’t even, Lake,” before he could open his mouth, and I stepped in close and grabbed him by the waist and said fiercely, “I want to. I want to,” and kissed him.

He groaned and put his arms round me again and kissed me back, and then he jerked away from me again, turning aside, and said cracking, “El, I do too, I want to, so much, I just—”

“I know you’re a mad optimist who thinks he can kill all the mals in the world, but I’m not,” I said. “And even if I were, if I knew for certain we’d make it, I still don’t want to wait until we’re out of here, on opposite sides of the ocean. I don’t want to wait!” I wanted his body back against me, the wave of heat back and rising higher, and it was so amazingly clear and obvious to me now that I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to, which wasn’t particularly fair of me, but I still couldn’t help taking a step towards him, reaching out.

He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m just—I’m so low.”

“What?” I said, confused, because it didn’t make any sense.

“I’m really low. There’s almost no mals, and they’re all coming at seniors, so everyone’s just taking them out for themselves. Magnus gave me some this morning, but…”

He trailed off: I think my eyebrows had packed bags and migrated three counties north. “If that’s dependent on mana, it’s news to me,” I said, with a pointed look in the appropriate direction, and immediately cursed Aadhya’s mum again in my head, because obviously I couldn’t help going straight to secret pet mal and I wanted to start howling with laughter in Orion’s face, which didn’t seem likely to advance my cause when he was squinched with mortification already.