stood there staring at it sort of blankly, like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening to him.
I straightened up and shut my eyes, getting ready to start casting, and then had to push him off; he was trying to grab hold of my hand, which I needed rather urgently right then. “What are you doing?” I said, trying to get loose: he was being stupidly persistent about it. Yes, I really sincerely hadn’t any idea: whatever was Orion doing, trying to hold hands with me in the moment of what he thought was his imminent demise, and then as soon as I spared it that much of a thought, the answer became so obvious that I felt like a complete idiot. “You are dating me?” I yelled at him, in a fury, and he turned around with his face screwed up in pinched determination and grabbed my face and kissed me.
I kneed him with as much energy as the situation called for, since I also needed my voice, and then pushed him down to the floor so I could turn back to the onrushing fires and conjure up my own wall of mortal flame, just in time to put it around us as a firebreak.
IT GOT VERY HOT inside our dubious shelter, but the protection didn’t need to last long. The cleansing wall rolled past us in less than a minute and went on its merry devouring way along the corridor. I dismissed my own wall—it was a bit resistant about being unconjured without getting to actually consume anything, but I managed to shove it away—and we were left there alone in the newly scorched corridor, with the faint charred-mushroom smell of burnt maleficaria coming out of every vent.
I kept standing resolutely upright and staring after the wall of flame that had passed as if I thought any moment now it might come back. It wasn’t going to: the end-of-year cleansing is quick and thorough. The walls of mortal flame start in pairs and sweep away from each other towards the next one down the corridor, all of which are placed and timed so they don’t leave any places to hide. The same time the wall had been going past us, the two walls in the stairwell had met on the landing. They’d both winked out, and the wall that had swept over us was probably finishing up a little further down the corridor. However, I was much more inclined to watch for a wall of mortal flame coming back than I was to look down at Orion, since I’d have to see his expression and might have to actually say words to him at that point.
Then I nearly went over as the whole place began to heave and surge beneath my feet. The walls and floor outside the ring where my protective wall had been were all still scorching-hot, so I had to crouch inside the tiny space with him, both of us clinging to each other with one arm and holding out the other like a clumsy two-headed surfer trying desperately not to topple over and sear ourselves on the heated walls. At least I couldn’t have heard anything he tried to say to me. The gears were going, a hundred times louder than when I’d been safely tucked inside my room for graduation, and the stairway outside began to really move, squealing horribly. The familiar landing of our own res hall ground slowly into view and then continued on to vanish further below; it was all the way out of sight before the stairs locked into place again with a heavy clanging thump, and the grinding noise stopped.
A moment later all the sprayers turned on at once, and the corridor instantly filled with clouds of steam. We were left sopping-wet in a humid cloud of fog so thick we could barely see or breathe for a moment, but the walls were already baking off the moisture, and the hollow roar of the drain vacuums began to suck up the excess, leaving just the drowned-rat pair of us gasping in the middle of a sparkling-clean corridor. The end-of-term bell clanged away, and faintly echoing in the stairwell I heard doors clanging open in the dormitories above and below.
Beneath our feet, a more muffled grinding was still going: that was the senior dorm level winding the rest of its way to the bottom. If the cleansing machinery had run, down there Clarita and Wen and the