I wasn’t paying attention, as I really didn’t need to: I knew when my turn was. After everyone else had gone, and I’d pitched Orion through, and I’d ripped up the school’s foundations and it was teetering away into the void like a sequoia getting ready to come down. Then I’d—hopefully—have just enough time to jump before the tidal wave of mals reached me. On paper I would, assuming Orion hadn’t been overwhelmed some time before then—not a remotely safe assumption—and also assuming that Liesel hadn’t fudged the numbers or, less likely, made a mistake.

So I didn’t notice Myrthe Christopher getting up on her own table until she cast her own more straightforward amplification spell and said, “Excuse me!” so loudly she managed to drown out the mindphone even inside my head. “I’m so sorry, excuse me!” I knew her only by osmosis: she’d always ranked as one of the more important enclavers, since her parents were something high up in one of the American enclaves, but it was Santa Barbara, one of the California enclaves that aren’t quite satisfied having New York rule the roost. My uncomfortably acquired circle of enclavers didn’t overlap much with hers, and she’d never stopped by the planning sessions, either.

She waited smilingly until Liesel had lowered her clipboard, then said, “I’m so sorry, I don’t want to be rude,” in a syrupy way that suggested she’d been studying to be rude for weeks. “But, like—we’re not actually doing this?”

“Excuse me?” Liesel said, with a razor-sharp edge that translated into a prickling sensation along the bottom of my skull. It landed into total silence; even the freshmen with any breakfast left on their trays had stopped eating. My own had turned into a strange cold lump in my stomach.

Myrthe cast a wincing smile around, showing how pained she was to have this awkward yet necessary conversation. “I know it’s been really weird this whole year, and we’ve all been freaking out, but, reality check—this plan is literally insane?” She pointed down at the floor. “The graduation hall is empty right now. Empty. And you want us to go wait in line behind all the other kids, the freshmen, everybody,” hilarious, nonsense, “and hand over all our mana, so Queen Galadriel here can summon a billion mals to fill it back up and eat us?” She gave a gurgle of laughter out loud at the absurdity. “No? Just—no? I get it, we had to work on something and make it look good, or else the school was going to screw us, but it’s half an hour to graduation, so I think we’re good at this point. Please don’t get me wrong, I wish we could keep it this good for everybody. We should totally give the other kids all the stuff we can spare, extra mana,” the depths of her generosity, really, “but come on.”

She wasn’t using a mindphone, but she didn’t really need to. If there was anyone who hadn’t followed, they were getting a translation right now, and after all, surely most of them had thought of it. Surely most of them hadn’t been stupid enough to take the idea seriously, had at some point thought to themselves, We’re just killing time until we can leave, aren’t we? I was surprised Liesel hadn’t announced it herself, really; she wasn’t stupid. Seduced by her own spreadsheets, probably.

And I couldn’t even blame them, because the first thing that came into my head was, I couldn’t do it alone. Without all the seniors helping, actively channeling me their mana, I wouldn’t be able to keep the summoning spell running the whole time and break the school away at the end. That was why the seniors had to wait until last to go. So if they quit, if only all the seniors quit, if they refused to help and headed downstairs and out—there wouldn’t be anything for me to do, after all. I’d just have to walk out of the empty hall, and Orion would, too. In half an hour, I’d be hugging Mum, and this time tomorrow he’d be on a plane coming to Wales, and I’d have the whole rest of my life ahead of me, full of good work, and I wouldn’t even have to feel guilty.

I couldn’t help that greedy selfish desperate thought, and it stoppered up all the furious words I wanted to stand up and yell at her. I could feel Orion gone rigid next to me, but I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see him outraged, and I didn’t want to see him looking hopefully at me, and I didn’t want to see my own choked feelings in his face. The silence was stretching out into eternities as if Chloe had just sprayed me with the quickening spell again, except some of the younger kids had started to cry, muffled into their hands or buried facedown onto the tables. Everyone was starting to turn their heads, to look at me and Orion, at Aadhya and Liu and Chloe; others were looking at Liesel still up on her own table, all of us bloody fools who had taken the insane absurd plan seriously, much too seriously. The kids in the mezzanine were crowding the railings, peering down anxiously. They were waiting for one of us to say something, and I had to say something, I had to try, but I didn’t have any words, and I knew anyway that it wasn’t going to do any good. Myrthe would just keep smiling, and what was I going to do, threaten to kill her if she wouldn’t risk her life to help me save people from being killed? Was I going to kill everyone who said no? I certainly wouldn’t have enough mana then.

Then the next table over, Cora put her chair back, legs scraping over the floor, and stood up and just said flatly, “I’m still in.”

It was loud in the room, hanging there. For a moment, nobody else said anything, and then abruptly a boy also from Santa Barbara at the other end of Myrthe’s table stood up and said, “Yeah. Fuck off, Myrthe. I’m in, too. Come on, guys,” and as soon as he’d prodded them, the other kids at the table were all moving, shoving back their chairs and getting up, too, until Myrthe was standing red-faced with a growing ring around her, and people all round the room were yelling that they were in, they were still in, and I could have cried—for either reason or both.

People kept piling on until Liesel put the mindphone back up and yelled painfully, “Quiet!” and everyone winced and shut up. “Enough interruptions. There is no more time to review. Everyone find your partners and go down to the senior dormitories right away.”

The whole incident had probably taken less time than Liesel had been about to spend on reading her announcements, but she’d clearly decided to get us into motion before anyone else could throw out a clever idea. It was just as well, because the Scholomance evidently agreed with her. The grinding of the gears that rotate the dormitories down—and send the senior level to the graduation hall—was picking up even as we left the cafeteria, and kids were still pouring down the stairwells when the warning bell for the cleansing started to go, at least half an hour early. The last few came flying in panicked from the landing on the hissing crackle of the mortal flames going, with their shadows huge in front of them in the brilliant blue-white light.

I ran to my room and reached it with the floor beneath me thrumming. Sudarat and three of the Bangkok sophomores were already waiting inside for me, piled onto the bed clinging to one another: we’d divvied the younger kids up among all the seniors for the trip downstairs. I slammed the door shut just in time as a xylophone chorus of pinging started up outside, metal shards and bits scraped off the walls flying through the corridor as we started our violent rattling progress downwards.