Which it would certainly have done here if given half a chance. I was about to frantically wave Liu in for an instrumental section, which had been our plan if I needed to stop long enough to kill anything especially gruesome, but before I could, Orion took a flying leap from the floor and straight into the middle head’s mouth. It paused and then a moment later he shredded his way out of the base of the neck in a whirlwind, hailing unpleasantly fishy bits and bones and ichor in all directions. All three heads toppled into the still-flowing tide of other maleficaria, and sank beneath it, devoured in less than a minute.

Orion landed in the full churning current still whirling off the detritus, and the mals actually split to go around him as he just stood there, bright-eyed and not breathing particularly hard, and cracked his neck to one side like he’d just got warmed up properly. He even gave me a quick infuriating grin before he plunged back into the fray.

Five minutes later, the very last of the freshmen were gone, and we were well into the sophomores. The mals had squeezed Alfie’s tunnel of access until it was barely big enough to go one across, and we only had fifteen minutes left, so the pacing had been thrown to the winds and everyone was just running at the gates as soon as they came to the head of the queue. I didn’t know any of the kids going now: they were a river of faces that I’d never talked to, never shared a classroom with. Even if I’d sat with them at table in the years before this one, taking a desperation seat with younger kids, I would have kept my head down; I didn’t remember them.

Some of them looked at me as they came up close to the head of the queue, and I saw my reflection in their faces: the ocean-green light flickering round me, the mana shining out from beneath my skin, tinted golden-bronze except where it escaped around my eyes and fingernails and mouth, turning me into a glowing lamp upon my pedestal. They ducked their heads and hurried by, and I thought of Orion saying There are normal people and we’re not, and maybe he was right, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t know those normal kids and maybe I’d never know them, but each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn’t been written yet, and in its place I’d inscribed one line with my own hand: And then they graduated from the Scholomance.

They were out, so many kids were safely out, and so many mals were still pouring in—mals that wouldn’t be out there to kill anyone else. I wanted them ferociously, wanted them beneath my command, and my desire fueled the spell even more. The mana should have been running low by then: the juniors were more than half gone, and taking their mana with them. But even as I felt the flow waver a little, the first sense of the tide beginning to ebb away, a fresh wave overflowed the banks. I didn’t know what it was at first, and then through my muffled ears I heard people yelling in dismay, and I looked up: the tide of mals had made it through the school, and the first ones had come crashing into the barricade.

I had to keep singing, but I watched them hit, clenched with fear: it was too soon, ten minutes too soon. First there were two or three, and then there were ten, and then almost instantly there was a solid thrashing wall of malice backed up, roaring and hissing and clawing each other in their hunger to get to Orion, and through him to us. Everyone still in the room tensed, and if they hadn’t been packed into the queue by then, with a torrent of mals going by on the other side, people would have broken; I’m sure of it. We’d hoped, we’d planned, for Orion to hold the barricade for just a minute or two, no longer, but we still had more than a quarter of the queue waiting, and it wasn’t possible for anyone to hold off that mass. It wasn’t the graduation horde, it was orders of magnitude built upon it, unstoppable, and he’d simply be smothered and overrun.

Except he wasn’t.

The first wave of mals came at him and died so fast that I didn’t even see how he killed them, and I was watching with unblinking desperation, already tensing in agony, getting ready to do—something, anything, as wild as I’d been watching Nkoyo from the other side of the gymnasium doors. The next wave swept over him, and a handful of them made it past, but only a few steps past; he broke out of the mass of already collapsing corpses, still alight with stupid grinning satisfaction, and caught the last running sherve by its skinny rat tail and dragged it still flailing wildly along behind him as he plunged without a pause back into the fight.

Mana was surging into me; more than a wave, an ocean. “Oh my God,” I heard Chloe say, sounding choked, and when I darted a glance over, I saw she and Magnus and the other New York seniors were all staggering, all their allies too. The power-sharer on my wrist was glowing vividly, like all of theirs, and they were all clutching at any kids round them who would take a handout, literally flinging mana at them—the mana that Orion was suddenly pouring into the shared power supply. The mals were still dying so fast it didn’t seem real, as if they were coming apart even as they got to him.

I hadn’t quite believed, even after Chloe had told me, that literally all the kids from New York had just coasted along for three solid years on the mana Orion had supplied them; I hadn’t understood his whinging about how low he was. But now he was finally being filled up again, enough to share, and it was coming in what felt like a limitless flood. He hadn’t let on how bad it really was, I realized belatedly; he’d only taken the bare minimum. Everything he’d done this year, he’d done starved as low as ever I’d been, in the days before I’d put Chloe’s sharer on my wrist. He’d spent his senior year, the year when our powers really bloom, without enough mana to do what he could do.

And now that he finally had it, I thought I might understand better what he’d told me, because it was so effortless for him. He wasn’t locked in a grim, desperate struggle for his life, counting every drop of mana like a tumbling grain of sand in an hourglass. His every movement, each graceful killing sweep of his sword-whip, every spell he cast, every effort he put forth, they all fed him back, and you couldn’t help but feel, watching it, that he was doing what he was meant for—something so perfectly aligned with his nature that it was as easy as breathing. It made sense suddenly that you’d like it, that it would be everything you wanted to do, if there were something you were this good at, and it rewarded you with endless buckets of mana on top. Your own body would teach you to want it more than anything—want it so much you’d have to learn to want anything else.

Orion didn’t look over at me again, even when he surfaced in between the killing waves; he was too busy. It was just as well, because if he’d looked over at me, I’d have smiled stupidly back at him. I was glad, so glad, even pinned down in this room with all the monsters in the world trying to come at me, at Orion, because it wasn’t despair in his way after all; it was just the clumsiness of learning. He could want other things. I wasn’t the only thing he’d ever want; I was just the first other thing he’d wanted.

The mals were still pouring in, a sea of horrors, and as the seniors started to go, even bigger ones started to come as well: these were the mals who’d been further away from the portals, who’d caught the song calling them in when freshmen or sophomores had first gone through, and now had reached the same induction point and were making it through. Some of them were so monstrous you could barely stand to look at them: zjevarras and eidolons, pharmeths and kaidens, deep nightmare creatures that lurked beneath enclaves waiting for a chance to devour. But even when the worst twisted unreal things came in, there wasn’t any screaming or panic anymore. It was only seniors left now, and we were the survivors of a nightmare ourselves, the ones who’d endured the Scholomance—the last ones who would ever endure it. That wasn’t just a dream anymore; I could see that hope being made real in the sheer number of mals coming through, and Orion was making room for more almost as fast as I could bring them in.