We hit some kind of blockage maybe halfway down that made the whole level lock up and start shaking wildly, and the younger kids all shrieked when the gears finally forced us through the obstruction and we lurched several meters onwards in a single violent jerk. My entire desk fell off into the void; thankfully I already had the sutras in their case strapped safely onto my back, and Precious tucked inside her cage inside her cup, also strapped down.

Another roaring started to go, of monstrous fans somewhere, and a hurricane-violent air current began to tear away the outer edges of the room into jagged puzzle pieces, sending them flying upwards where they’d be reassembled into a new, hopefully never-to-be-used freshman dormitory. The floor was crumbling away at an alarming clip, actually, and we still hadn’t reached the bottom. “Get off the bed!” I yelled, but Sudarat and the others hadn’t waited for me to tell them the obvious and were already scrambling off; fortunately, since a moment later my bed tipped off, too. I had to yank the door open again and we all spilled out into the corridor even as it came to a thumping, jaw-rattling halt.

Kids were pouring out of rooms all over, running towards the landing as the rooms kept breaking up around us. The bathrooms were already gaping holes of void, and the tops of the corridor walls were starting to go as well. “Keep together!” I yelled at Sudarat and the other Bangkok kids, and then they were swept away by the current, and a moment later so was I. The corridor floors got in on it and began sliding us all along towards the landing like moving walkways gone mad, dumping us all efficiently into the still-steaming and freshly cleansed graduation hall, all of us in our thousands still dwarfed inside the cavernous space.

Actually this was a sedate graduation by Scholomance standards: normally we’d all have been fighting our way through the first wave of maleficaria to get to our allies by now. And I’d known, I’d literally seen it for myself, but I hadn’t quite believed my own memory until I got my feet under me and was standing there in the empty hall, not a single mal in sight.

The doors weren’t even open yet, so we really were early. It was just as well, since several hundred people would probably have instinctively made a run for it even if they hadn’t intended to. We were all milling round in confusion; people were vomiting—efficiently, we were practiced at that—and sobbing and yelling out names all over, trying to find their friends, and then Liesel was bellowing through the mindphone, “Back! Everyone back! Clear space in front of the doors!”

A gaggle of artificers emerged from the general mass, lugging several big square contraptions I hadn’t even seen before, which fired out a volley of thin colorful streamers that fell to the ground and then attached themselves there and lit up like runways. The artificers kept firing them off over and over, crisscrossing one another to create small sections covering the floor, all color-coded and marked with the numbers Liesel had assigned the teams; everyone started running to their places and lining up.

Alchemists were painting wider stripes on the outside of the queue area, imbued with spells of protection and warding that threw up hazy shimmery walls. Zixuan already had a team helping him check over the speaker cables that had been rigged from the ceiling, doing tests from the mouthpiece and making sure the sound was coming out again from the massive first speaker dangling down in front of the doors. Another large group were going over the massive barricades that they’d built around the second shaft, the one coming down, and Orion was there near them just tossing his whip-sword in his hand lightly.

He looked over and caught me watching him and smiled so blithely that I immediately wanted to run over just to punch him in the mouth, or just possibly kiss him one last time, but before I could put either plan into action, Precious knocked open the top of her protective egg and gave an urgent squeak. I jumped and looked round to see Aadhya and Liu beckoning to me wildly from the raised platform set up to one side of the doors, where the wide mouthpiece of the speaker system had been mounted onto a stand. Liu was saying something to her own familiar Xiao Xing in his cup on her chest, presumably Tell Precious to get her stupid mistress over here.

I ran over, dodging the other kids racing to their places in all directions, and as soon as I reached them, training took over, and we were just working, the same routine we’d practiced for weeks. Aadhya quickly tuned up the lute, and Liu and I ran through a few scales together. Chloe joined us with three prepared dropper vials nestled in a small velvet-lined case: I sang warm-ups while she mixed them carefully together into a small silver cup, stirring with a narrow stick of diamond glowing with mana, and gave the shimmering pink liquid to me. I gargled with it twice and then swallowed it, and all the raspy adrenaline tightness in my throat smoothed away, my lungs swelling with air as if someone had put a bellows into my mouth. I sang out a few more practice notes and they echoed around the room in an ominous ringing way, like the tolling of a bell, and everyone in their places shuffled back from the platform a bit. Probably just as well, in case anyone had thought of having a dash at the gates in the last minute.

“Ready?” I said to Liu. She nodded, and we stepped up to the mouthpiece together. Aadhya and Chloe had already run to their own places in the queue; everyone else was there, too. I took a deep breath, and Liu picked out the opening line, and then I started singing.

I was immediately glad for every last second we’d spent practicing, because I hadn’t quite realized until that very moment that we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves. The speaker system grabbed the sound and sucked it completely in, and then carried it off through the miles and miles of speaker cable wound through the school.

Which obviously was what we wanted, of course—if the song was audibly coming from me, the mals would just stay right here and come at me; we needed the sound to come out of that last speaker right in front of the gates, and from there lead the mals to chase it down that long, long line, so they’d fill the school up before they ended up back down at the gates Orion was guarding. But it was just as well that I had every word and phrase deeply embedded in my brain and my throat and lungs, as otherwise I would have bungled the incantation completely a minute later when the first notes I’d made finally boomed out of the speaker in front of the actual doors.

The younger kids all set up a chorus of yelps and small shrieks as larval mals started to drop from the ceiling and pop out of cracks in the floor and from under bits of rubble to chase the alluring call. Real screams started a moment later as a panel of the floor popped off and a really decrepit-looking voracitor crawled out. The thing was so antique it must have been at least two centuries old, all creaking wood and antique bloodstained cast-iron machinery held together with bundles of intestine-like flesh, with long spindly arms and fingers; it had probably been hiding down there snatching students and other mals almost since the school had opened.

It was near the front of the queue, amid a crowd of freshmen. The panicking and running didn’t have a chance to get under way properly, however, because it ignored them all, fixed its dozen eyes on the line of speakers hanging from the ceiling, and set off crawling along their direction at a good healthy clip. It would presumably have kept going on into the shaft and into the school, only it didn’t have the chance, as Orion dashed over from his station and pounced on it before it got halfway.