A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,109
under a bushel, doing the odd maintenance shift on top of your classwork, without ever once bragging about a mark on a project or an exam—that was more discipline than most teenagers have when marks are the only thing in school you care about. Well, apart from surviving.
Her discipline had paid off with a guaranteed spot in New York. Nobody cared if you were dull if you could cast six major arcana workings in a row, which she’d done for the final project in her senior seminar. We all knew about that, too, because after the rankings finally went up, she’d mounted a binder on the wall next to her door with literally every mark she’d received in the past three and a half years, so anyone could come and look through it and see them in detail, possibly to make up for all the bragging she hadn’t done before then.
Too bad for her that she was now also stuck with Todd on her team. Orion hadn’t wanted to talk about it much, but I’d gathered that Todd’s dad was indeed high up on the enclave council, and despite what Chloe had promised me in the library, the other New York seniors on his team were apparently reluctant to ditch his darling boy. Very likely he had control of at least one or two of the better defensive artifacts they were planning to use. And Clarita didn’t get a vote, unless she wanted to ditch the entire alliance herself—along with her guaranteed spot, which she wasn’t going to be able to replace this close to graduation.
But being saddled with Todd wasn’t her fault, and none of us needed any incentive to take her seriously. Everyone at the tables nearby had stopped whispering and was straining over to listen to her. “I’ve worked out the numbers,” she said to Orion. “There’re records in the library of inducted students and graduated students. You’ve saved six hundred lives since you started school.” The quiet spread further out, followed by a ripple of whispers as people repeated the information. I’d known he was saving ridiculous numbers of us, but I hadn’t known it was that much. “More than three hundred just this one year. That’s why we’re all hungry, not just the maleficaria. The food trays aren’t supposed to be empty if you get here before the bell rings.”
Orion stood up and faced her, his jaw tight. “I’m not sorry.”
“I’m not sorry, either,” she said. “Only a bastard would be sorry. But that is the mana we have to pay back. There are nine hundred seniors left. An ordinary year, half of us can expect to get out. But if we alone have to pay back all the lives you’ve saved this year on top of that, we’re talking less than a hundred survivors. It’s not fair for our class to bear that burden.”
“So we should let the mals into the school?” Chloe said. “Then you all make it out, the freshmen all die, and they keep dying until the school gets shut down completely so they can do a full extermination on the place, if they even can. How is that fair, either?”
“Of course it’s not,” Clarita said cuttingly. “If we got out that way, over your bodies, that’s malia whether or not we took the hit for it directly. Most of us don’t want that.” She didn’t actually turn and glare at Todd across the room, but the emphasis didn’t escape any of us. I would’ve been furiously angry with him in her place: three and a half years slogging to the very top of the mountain, and this was what she’d got for it. Not only did she have to worry about just how expendable Todd was going to consider her, she was going to come out with her reputation attached to him. Everyone would always think of her as the valedictorian who’d chosen to stick with a poacher, however little choice she really had.
“I don’t want it,” she added. “But we also don’t want to let you buy your lives with ours. That’s what I hear seniors saying. Not, let’s rip open the school, but why don’t we make you, your class, graduate with us. Your class are the ones Orion has saved the most.” Chloe flinched visibly, and a lot of the other kids at our table tensed. “So? Are you all willing to do that, graduate early, to save the poor little freshmen? If not, you