But Orion had flipped his sword-wand-thing open into a long, whiplike length, and he was keeping the whole dais clear; any mal that tried to set so much as a toe on the steps, he killed, and none of them wanted to come up. Little ones tried to dart out through the sides; he killed them with rapid flicks that my eyes couldn’t even follow. I was chanting the final verses of the incantation, and the floor was beginning to heave beneath us. I could feel walls parting, pipes bursting, all through the school, and the low groaning of the floor as it began to separate from the dais. The seam all round was opening up, and a thin black line of empty void was beginning to show through.

The mals were going into a frenzy: they stopped being reluctant, and Orion was fighting furiously, killing them in every direction: nightflyers and shrikes diving at us, ghauls howling in the air, eldritch horrors whispering frantically. There was a squealing of metal behind me, too: the doors were starting to swing shut again. The fiery letters in the air were counting down: forty-one seconds left, and time to go. If a few mals did escape now, after we were gone, it didn’t matter. The job was done; we’d done it. I deliberately stopped on the last syllable but one, and let the spell go. The air around me rippled with the shudder of the spell traveling out—not quite finished, but so close that it would tip over to completion on its own in another moment. I laughed in sheer triumph and cast the evocation of refusal round us and shoved it outward, tumbling the mals away from me and Orion down the steps.

Orion wobbled himself, on the lowest step, and looked round wildly at the mals that had just been pushed out of his reach. “Let’s go!” I shouted to him, and he turned and stared up at me, blankly.

And then the whole floor shook beneath us, and it wasn’t because of my spell. The ocean of mals surrounding us parted like the Red Sea, frantically frothing away to either side as a titanic shape bigger than the doors themselves erupted out of the shaft and came surging towards us, so enormous I couldn’t even recognize it as a maw-mouth at first: the endless eyes and mouths so tiny they were only speckles scattered like stars over its bulk. Any mal that couldn’t get out of its way was consumed without a pause; it just rolled over them and they were gone.

It wasn’t Patience; it wasn’t just Patience. It was Patience and Fortitude. Scorched and starved, their graduation hall picked completely clean, they’d finally turned on each other. They’d chased each other through the dark underbelly of the school—the school had surely opened spaces up for them deliberately, luring them away from the gates to clear the hall for our escape—until one of them had devoured the other and settled in to quietly digest its enormous meal in peace, a century of feeding in a single go, only to be stirred up into a panic when it had felt the school beginning to topple.

All my triumph fell away from me like a long tail of ashes crumbling off the end of a stick of incense. I’d been getting ready to be proud of myself, self-satisfied: I’d done it, I’d saved everyone, I’d purged the world of maleficaria, I’d faced my greatest fear and I’d come through it. I’d been ready to go through the door and boast to Mum of what I’d done, to wait with queenly grace for my knight in shining armor to come and receive my hand, his reward and mine, and set out on our crusade to save any tarnished bits of the world that still needed to be polished up.

I actually laughed out loud, I think, I’m not sure; I couldn’t hear myself, but it felt like a mad frightened giggle in my throat. It was just so utterly hilarious that I’d ever imagined I could face this. I couldn’t form any words, any coherent plan. Patience slammed into the evocation of refusal like a tidal wave hitting a seawall, sloshing fully over it like a dome encasing us; eyes smushed up against the surface and staring down at us blankly. It slid back down and came at us again: mana roared through me with the impact, blinding. I couldn’t have cast a killing spell even if I could have done anything whatsoever: it was taking everything I had to keep the evocation up, against a monstrosity that wouldn’t ever take no for an answer.

Then Precious put her head out and gave a shrill squeak, and I realized—I didn’t have to. “Orion!” I screamed. “Orion, come on!” He was standing there staring up at Patience through the shimmery dome evocation. I didn’t actually wait for him to respond; even while I was screaming I had already grabbed him by the arm. I pulled him back with me up the stairs, towards the doors. They were grinding a bit; they had just started to swing slowly shut. The crack around the base of the dais was widening.

Patience slammed into the evocation again, and I nearly fell over, prickling starbursts filling my eyes. I was hanging on Orion’s arm when my vision cleared; he hadn’t moved. I didn’t speak again, just yanked on him, dragging him one more step back.

But he wasn’t taking his eyes off Patience. There was a fierce terrible light in his face, that hunger I’d seen in him before, wanting a thing dead. And I couldn’t blame him: if anything in the universe wanted killing, it was that thing, that horrible monstrous thing; it needed to die. And the crack around the base of the dais was still widening, but it was going just a little bit more slowly than the doors were closing.

It wouldn’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things if ten or twenty other mals made it out, but it would matter if Patience made it out, if that sack of endless death escaped, to keep gnawing eternally on its victims’ bones and gobble up who knew how many countless others, unstoppable and forever.

But our time was running out: the hanging numbers of flame were counting down the last seconds. “We can’t!” I yelled at him, and turning braced my whole body and flung one hand out, at the end of a stiff arm, to hold Patience off again through one more thundering blow. I gulped air and turned back to haul Orion up one more step, to the very edge of the gateway, and then I let go of his arm and caught his face in both hands and pulled him round to look at me. “Orion! We’re going!”

He stared down at me. The seething colors of the gateway were shining in his eyes, mottling his skin, and he leaned in towards me, like he wanted to kiss me. “Do you want to get kneed again? Because I will!” I snarled at him, in outrage.

He jerked back from me, more ordinary color flushing into his cheeks. His eyes cleared for a moment; he looked back at Patience, and then he laughed once—he laughed, a short laugh, and it was awful. He turned to me and said, “El, I love you so much.”

And then he shoved me through the gate.