others would come out into a nearly empty graduation hall, scorched from end to end by an even bigger wall of mortal flame. Some smaller mals would have hidden under larger ones, or under debris. Some of the sirenspiders could probably have made it, thanks to their shells. Patience and Fortitude would have survived, too; it would have taken a solid week of a direct bath in mortal flame to wear those away. But their thinner tendrils would all have burnt up, and the eyes on their surface. The seniors would be able to go straight for the gates, all of them.
Or maybe it hadn’t worked after all, and the seniors would instead be dumped into a starving horde that had been stirred up like a nest of wasps and was waiting for them with open jaws. We wouldn’t know one way or another, not until next year. When it would be our turn to go. We’d made it to our senior year, the one in two odds we’d beaten so far. Only our chances had been modified by Orion, changing the house rules under us, and when he took hold of my shoulders, I didn’t shove him off again.
“You saved my life,” he said, sounding baffled about it. I gritted my teeth and turned to look back at him, ready to inform him he wasn’t the only one who could be useful on occasion, except he was staring at me with an absolutely unmistakable expression, one I’d seen fairly often in my life: men occasionally aim it at my mum. Not the kind of expression you’re thinking of; men don’t lust after Mum in a leering kind of way. It was more like looking at a goddess, accompanied by thinking that maybe you might get the goddess to smile at you if you, I don’t know, proved yourself sufficiently worthy, and I’d never once imagined anyone pointing anything remotely like it at me.
I had absolutely no idea what to do with it, other than possibly knee Orion again even harder and flee. That was really appealing the more I thought about it, but I didn’t get the chance; instead he shoved me to the floor, straight into a half-frozen and half-scalding puddle, and fired off half a dozen targeted blasts over my head to destroy a small pack of gorgers who had evidently survived in the ceiling inside the pocket of safety I’d created, and were now jumping down to have us for a celebratory feast.
Which was exactly the moment when a dozen people came off the landing, just in time to see me on the floor at Orion’s feet, him standing heroically over me, his hands full of glowing smoke and the scorched and smoking corpses of the gorgers in a neat circle around me, just as the last one came thumping down.
* * *
READER, I RAN the fuck away.
It wasn’t difficult; everyone wanted to talk to Orion, to hear how he’d done it, how he’d slaughtered the mals and fixed the machinery and saved the seniors—I was fairly sure that by the end of the day, no one would remember that there had actually been any team involved at all, much less that I’d been on it. If I’d wanted to stay with him, I’d probably have had to wind both my arms around his waist and cling like a really determined ivy, but the crowd moved me away without any effort on my part at all.
All I had to do was make sure that I was getting pushed off in the right direction to do what any sensible person does at the end of term: I went straight for the workshop, where I had two shining minutes all to myself before anyone else got there. The supply containers are all purged completely and refilled from scratch at end of term, so I didn’t even have to worry about mals. There were five forging aprons hanging by the big furnace, made of some heavy flame-resistant fabric; I grabbed the one that looked closest to Aadhya’s size, spread it out on a workbench, and started loading it up.
I went for book chest materials first, because if you have a particular project firmly in mind, and you sacrifice an opportunity like being first into the shop after a resupply, you’re more likely to find what you need. Straight away I scored another four pieces of purpleheart, two bars of silver for the inlay, a set of