A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,114

for him. They’ll let him save their skins, and then they’ll cut him off the yanker and leave him down there so he does have to graduate with them. He won’t be paying attention to anything but the mals.”

I suppose the seniors really might have tried something like that. But I wasn’t really worrying about that possibility. If we actually got the machinery fixed, the seniors would probably garland Orion with laurel: they’d all be graduating through a cleansed hall, with guaranteed enclave spots. But it was plausible enough to serve as an excuse, an excuse for me to go, and her and Liu to stay behind.

And I had to go. Because Orion was going, and I couldn’t do anything about that. He’d have gone down without even a golem, the git. The only thing I could do for him, which Clarita had helpfully spelled out, was go along and give him a fighting chance. He had one now because we were going with a dozen seniors, and top seniors at that, who actually could do the repair work. And I’d only got that for him by throwing myself on the line.

I wasn’t the shining hero of the school. And yeah, everyone thought I was dating Orion, but they didn’t think I was in love with him. They thought I was using him, and clever me for doing it. People expected the worst of me, not the best; when I’d volunteered to go along, I’d made it seem like something that wasn’t completely effing insane. In their heads, if I was going, it was because I’d made the cold hard decision it was a good bet, at least for a loser girl with no prospect of getting into an enclave if she lost Orion.

We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don’t get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it’s worth taking a bet. We’re always looking to one another for signals and information. Do you think that’s the best table to sit at? Do you think that’s a good class to take? Everyone wants to jump on any advantage. Me saying I was going meant that at least one presumed-to-be-rational person thought she had a sliver of a chance of making it out, and then the enclave kids had sweetened the pot. That’s why there were now more volunteers than places, because I’d put my finger on the scales.

If I took it off again now, who knew how many seniors would start to have second thoughts? They might decide that actually I was playing a double game of my own: maybe I was just trying to wipe out a dozen of the top seniors, and delay the rest of them long enough to stop them from either smashing open the school or dragging my class along with them to graduation. That would’ve been clever, now I thought of it, and surely the geniuses coming along had thought of it, too, and were keeping a wary eye on me to see if I bailed out at the last minute.

Clarita was going; so was David Pires, the still-resentful salutorian, saluditorian, whatever you call the number two besides “not the valedictorian,” which was in fact exactly what I was inclined to call him. He was an incanter also, and he hadn’t spent his academic career hiding his light under a bushel; he’d spent it informing everyone who talked to him for so much as thirty seconds that he was going to be valedictorian, and brandishing his every mark like a trophy. He’d told me back in my freshman year, when I’d accidentally knocked over one of his precariously balanced stacks of books in the reading room. He’d yelled at me and demanded to know if I knew who he was, which I hadn’t until then, and didn’t much care to afterwards. And he was going, as far as I could tell, because he wasn’t satisfied with the guaranteed enclave spot he already had coming in Sydney; he wanted to be able to pick and choose. Getting close to valedictorian does require a muscular ego, but his was on steroids.

After the first wave of volunteering, that boy from Berlin had rounded up a couple of other senior enclavers from the bigger places, the ones we all had in our heads as the most powerful kids, and we’d huddled up in the library—Orion included for obvious reasons, my own presence tolerated—to discuss the situation with