that came at our heads, which I suppose was good practice at that. Clarita did get a bit less hostile to me after the first time we all cast her spell together successfully, in a practice session on Wednesday. That might sound like the hour was late, given that graduation was on Sunday, and it was, but that was also probably as good as we could possibly have hoped for. Casting a single spell with a circle of people isn’t like going to a yoga class with an instructor who encourages you to all go at your own pace; it’s like learning a choreographed dance with four people you barely know for an aggravated director who yells at you if you put a toe out of line.
We were all looking round at the shield, pleased with ourselves, when the big air shaft overhead exploded open and a hissingale the size of a tree came writhing down at us: it literally wrapped us up completely in pulsing snaky limbs and started trying to rip us apart, without noticeable success. I confess I yelped, which mortified me because none of the seniors so much as paused for a second. They’d all spent the last six months doing obstacle-course runs in the gym; you could probably have crept up to one of them sleeping and exploded a balloon next to their heads, and they’d just have killed you before they opened their eyes.
David Pires just said, “Got it,” and stepped out of the spell, leaving the rest of us to hold the shield; he drew a deep breath for what I’m sure would’ve been a really impressive casting, except before he could start, Orion ripped apart the hissingale like he was pulling open a stage curtain, and dragged the limp mass of it off us.
By Friday, when the five of us put the shield wall up, it felt roughly as strong as the major school ward we’d repaired down in the stairwell. And even as we were all congratulating ourselves, the repair team all screamed out loud and started jumping up and down hugging each other. After about five minutes of us yelling furiously for them to tell us what was going on, Yang and the other English-speaker—Ellen Cheng, from Texas—explained that Wen had just figured out a way to separate the parts into three collapsible pieces. They’d be able to build them up here and install them in under five minutes.
All the seniors on the team suddenly realized that we had decent odds to get through this alive, and if we did, they would emerge from the Scholomance as shining heroes, with guaranteed spots to any enclave they wanted. By the time graduation day was upon us, the maintenance kids were actually savagely competing to see who could do it the quickest: to keep the shield as tight as possible, only the four fastest of them were going—two to do the work and two spares, in case the rest of us couldn’t keep all the mals off them—along with Wen and Ellen and Kaito Nakamura, who were coming in case it turned out we needed some unexpected part.
It was just as well we had some cause for optimism, because otherwise, I’m fairly certain that at least half of our group would have balked when we got to the sticking point—namely, the way down.
The whole point of the school’s design is to keep the bit we’re in completely separated from the bit with the gates. If it were easy to get down, it would be easy to get up. The maintenance shaft we’d seen on the other side of the stairwell wall, packed full of argonet, wasn’t even on the blueprints. Not even the maintenance-track seniors had any idea where it would come out, or for that matter if it would be safe for us to go through whatever wards were on there to keep the mals out. They thought it would be all right, because presumably it had been built for those professional maintenance crews who’d been meant to be coming in here to fix things, but they couldn’t find a word about it in a single one of their manuals, even the old ones.
That was even sensible: if everyone forgot about it and didn’t think it was there, it would stop being there, more often than not, and that would be one unnecessary point of vulnerability closed up. The mals in the graduation hall had probably dragged it back