to do it: Chloe had hunkered down behind a shield of her own, but the power-sharer was still wide open, mana flowing like a river. I could have made them fix the wall for us, and even wash the floor after. If only I could have scrubbed my mind clean as easily when it was through.
“We’ll have to do the whole rest of the wall at once,” I told Aadhya, grimly. “Can you open that crucible bigger?”
Her eyes popped. “If you take down the whole wall, something’s going to come in!”
“If it does, our senior friends are going to yank away, and then Orion can get it for us,” I said. “Will the carbon-mixing part work in a single go?”
Aadhya swallowed, but she nodded. “Yeah, the process has a diminishing—yeah,” she said, cutting off her own instinctive explanation. She grabbed her crucible and gave the end a quick hard flip, snapping it open to full size. “Ready.” I stood up and pointed at the wall, and pulled down all four of the remaining panels into a sloshing pool of iron.
So far while we’d been working, nothing had tried to come at us at all. When I took down the rest of the panels, the reason for that became quite horrifyingly clear. One of the seniors’ fire blasts shot through the sudden opening and splashed beautiful shimmering reflections all over the smooth, armored plate atop the argonet head that was completely filling up the space of a maintenance shaft on the other side. It had its eyes closed, apparently taking a peaceful nap before it got back down to the business of breaking in. One little talon, roughly a foot across, was resting atop a ladder. It must have had a tight squeeze of it, getting up. The sides of its head were streaked with familiar iridescent goo: it had evidently used the grogler as lubrication.
“Oh my God,” Chloe said faintly. The argonet cracked open first one and then six and then all nine of its eyes as it realized that dinner had been served early, and it started to pull itself inside.
“Lev!” one of the other boys yelled, and there was a sudden hard popping of air as he triggered the yanker and they were all bungeed back up the stairs—all five of them, including Victoria with her fire whip. It stretched out for a moment, but she must have kept concentrating on it, because instead of breaking, it also yanked Orion, who was still coiled up, and Ibrahim, who was still trying to pull coils away, right along with them. A few moments later, I heard Ibrahim scream faintly from somewhere above: he’d probably let go and fallen out of the yank.
Chloe shrieked, “Put back the wall! Put back the wall!” and then turned and ran up the stairs. Aadhya had already emptied the whole bag of soot into the crucible and was stirring desperately, but the steel wasn’t quite ready yet. The argonet was squirming its huge taloned hand up and through the opening, reaching to grab her before its elbow even got clear.
Lucky for us all, Chloe hadn’t shut off the mana supply. I pointed my hand at the argonet and recited a forty-nine syllable curse that had been used a few thousand years ago to disintegrate the guardian dragon of a sacred temple in Kangra by a group of maleficers who wanted to claim the temple’s supply of a mysterious arcane dust. The dust turned out to be the powdered shed scales of the dragon, which was information that you’d think the priests might have shared more widely in order to prevent just that sort of misguided attempt.
The argonet looked puzzled as its talons started to crumble. I don’t think it understood that it was disintegrating, so it kept trying to get in. Fortunately, my spell picked up steam quicker than the crammed-in argonet could move, so by the time it got its head thrust into the opening in place of its vanished arm, the disintegration was coming up its neck. I was even able to reach up and pluck one fist-sized tooth, gone loose and wobbly, right out of its mouth just before the spell swept up over the rest of the jaw.
Aadhya and Liu came to the edge of the hole and stood staring down it with me, open-mouthed, Aadhya clutching the long handle of her stirrer. The line of disintegration kept going down and down the body crammed into the shaft,