A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,124

room and, thanks to our collective momentum, overshot the edge. Half of us hung suspended for a moment just out in the open void, the yawning impossibility of it beneath us, around us, and I would have started screaming in a whole new way, but then the yanker went taut again, snapped us back in through Todd’s room, and dumped us all into the middle of the senior dormitory corridor.

If my brain had in fact been rewritten so I couldn’t communicate with anyone, I couldn’t have told the difference at the moment. I was just sunk on my knees on the floor shaking, arms wrapped over my gut, and my whole face feeling like it was made of plastic that had melted partway off my bones. Doors were clanging all around us up and down the hall, seniors running past in groups, some of them throwing us startled looks but not slowing down at all, and at first I didn’t pull myself together enough to realize—

“Graduación!” Clarita said, and she and Angel and Maya all took off different ways, Maya stumbling and clammy blue but still going, melting into the crowd; the whole repair crew were running also: going to their allies.

Orion grabbed my shoulder, and I squawked in alarm: it was like having pins and needles shooting through my body. “We missed the bell!” he shouted over the pandemonium.

I nodded and staggered to my feet and followed him, dodging seniors; he plunged back into the stairwell ahead of me just as I heard someone shout, “El! Orion!” I paused: Clarita was standing in the door of a room just visible at the curve of the corridor, and she beckoned. “You’re not going to make it before the cleansing starts! Don’t be crazy!”

I hesitated, but Orion was already disappearing up the stairs two at a time, and I shook my head at her and ran after him. It wasn’t a very good decision. Orion had vanished out of sight, and I had to stop after only a little while to catch my breath, clinging to the vibrating railing; the stairs were moving back and forth like the pitching of a boat and my stomach was going with them. I forced myself back into motion, and Orion suddenly reappeared and grabbed me by the arm and started hauling me upwards with him. I didn’t even snap at him, just wrapped one arm tight around my gut to squash the pain in, and let him keep me from falling over as I staggered up alongside him.

But a scrabbling noise was building before we even reached the landing for the workshop level, and as we made it, a wave of tiny mals came squeaking and squirming and hopping towards us out of the corridor, in such complete flight that they didn’t even stop to try and munch on us; other waves came fleeing both up and down the staircase, all of them running in opposite directions, bowling each other over and turning into a scrabbling horde. I made a grunting effort and got myself the last few steps onto the workshop landing, panting, but the noises of the mals were being drowned out by the rising roar, like a campfire someone had rigged up to an amplifier, coming from both above and below, and the stairs were filling up with sharp-edged shadows in the brightening light. Orion stood still gripping my arm, frozen, then dragged me into the shop corridor instead. But there wasn’t anywhere to run to. Ahead of us, the wall of mortal flame, blue-white, was already filling the corridor from floor to ceiling like a whispering, crackling curtain, broken up by the shadows of mals being caught and incinerated in the waterfall of it, leaping dark shapes in final agonies and small construct mals coming apart in clatters as their power got sucked out of them. Bursts of static electricity came spider-crawling ahead of it over the panels and floor tiles as it swept towards us.

Orion’s breath was coming in short wavery gasps. I hadn’t seen him afraid down in the hall even once that I’d noticed, but mortal flame isn’t a mal: it consumes mals, it consumes anything in its path that has mana or malia to burn up. Combat magic isn’t any use against them; you can’t fight it. But to do him credit, he didn’t panic, even if he was staring down the one and only thing that he was actually afraid of; he just