A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,103
people—to either side to clear a path. A smart, well-designed graduation alliance team, one that had probably been practicing together for months. When we’re all mixed up in the cafeteria just busy stuffing in food, there isn’t always a big visible difference between the seniors and the rest of us, but here with us opposite them, it was painfully clear just how much difference a year made.
Except Orion moved instantly to stand in front of us all: it looked a little silly, just skinny him confronting them, but he said, “Something you were looking for?” with his hands clenched, and they all hesitated. He nodded when they didn’t say anything. “Maybe you guys should go back upstairs. Now.”
“That’s new steel,” the girl in the front row said abruptly: she was looking past Orion at the wall. “They’re replacing the panels.”
“You’re Victoria, from Seattle, right? I’m Chloe from New York,” Chloe said suddenly to the girl in the middle, trying for a chatty tone that was spoiled by a substantial nervous wobble. “There’s damage to the stairwell, it’s letting in mals from the graduation hall. That’s what Todd Quayle had that complete breakdown over. We’re just fixing it. Orion didn’t want any more of them getting in to hurt anyone.”
Victoria from Seattle wasn’t buying. “Sure, he wants to keep them waiting down there to hurt us,” she said. “So hey, Orion, are you planning to attend graduation this year and help us out with this horde you’ve whipped into a frenzy? People were saying you took out a grogler the size of a truck yesterday. Who knows if we’ll even be able to move down there.”
“You’ll still have better odds than a newly inducted freshman, since your own plan seems to be break the wards wide open and let them all come pouring in,” I said. “And that will be the end of the whole place. The mals will go nesting in the res halls and probably break the scouring equipment up here like they did down there. The death rates will double or more. Don’t any of you mean to have kids of your own?”
“I’m going to worry about living that long first, thanks,” Victoria said. “All of you can go back upstairs now and figure out where you want to be. We’re opening up this wall.”
“No, you’re not,” Orion said.
“Think you’re going to stop us?” she said, and even as she was saying it, she flicked the fire whip. The whole thing flamed up instantly and the end whacked Orion into the wall hard, then went coiling up around him fast from ankles to neck. “I’ve got him. Hit the walls, just bash them with anything,” she said, a little tightly: Orion was thrashing in the coil like crazy, and she needed both hands to hold him, but he was definitely not getting out of there anytime soon. “Lev, make sure you have that yanker ready,” she added, and I realized they were all wearing belts with a small hook symbol on them: they’d set up a spell hooked to some other place in the school along a straight line, a few flights up, so the second they did manage to break through, they’d trigger it and be yanked straight back to their safe point before the mals started pouring in.
“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Lev said, the boy in the front row, and Chloe screamed and ducked as the boys in the back row started lobbing good old-fashioned fire blasts at the still-damaged panels, flames splashing over the surface and raining sparks down on us.
“Orion!” Ibrahim yelled, and dashed for him: he cast a shield spell on his hands and started fumbling at the coil to try and pull it loose, but the fire whip was too strong; it kept burning through his shield quicker than he could have any effect.
Liu called out in Mandarin and put up a shield over us, a good one: it flexed with the impacts, letting the fire run down in little streams. It wasn’t big enough to cover the whole wall, though, just the three of us. “The wall!” she said. “Can you fix the parts they’re hitting before they break through?”
Aadhya looked at me. There were a thousand spells in my mouth ready to go: I could have killed all five of them with a word, or for variety’s sake I could have imprisoned their minds and made them my helpless slaves. I wouldn’t even have to pull malia