A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,49
fed and busy finding quiet corners in which to make lots of little baby mals. And up here, the pest control has wiped out most of the ones living among us. The builders knew that some mals would wriggle their way up to us, so twice a year the halls get a good scouring. A very loud warning bell goes, we all run for our dormitory cells, shut ourselves in, and barricade our doors as thoroughly as we can. Then massive cleansing walls of mortal flame get conjured up and sent running on their merry way throughout the whole building, from top to bottom, incinerating hordes of desperate fleeing mals. It also helps warm up the machinery at graduation time, just before the dorms all rotate down to their new places.
If you’re wondering why they don’t also run this excellent system down in the graduation hall to clear out the mals before dumping in the seniors, the answer is they meant to, but the machinery down there has been broken since about five minutes after the school opened. No one’s going down to the graduation hall to do maintenance.
Anyway, that’s why induction happens literally the evening after graduation: it’s the safest day of the year in the Scholomance, and the place stays relatively quiet for a good month or two afterwards. So if I can’t dredge up a decent excuse for blowing a lot of power by then—like a soul-eater, not that I’m nursing a lingering bitterness or anything—I’m not going to get a better one until the end of the first quarter, and by then loads of alliances will have been formed.
I hardly got any work done the whole morning. The Zhou enclaves, which destroyed each other about three thousand years ago, had a hard time competing in my brain with the very compelling question of what I ought to do to show off. I could just make a scene in the cafeteria some morning and disintegrate a row of tables, but I writhed at the idea of wasting mana like that, and just throwing it away would make me look more than a bit thick. Or worse, people might get the idea that I had absurd amounts of power available to throw away, which I wouldn’t except if I was, you guessed it, a maleficer. And they all wanted to believe that anyway.
I gave up on my own paper and started doing the translations I owed Liu for hers instead. The only Sanskrit dictionary on the shelf today was the monstrous six-kilo one, but at least slogging through its pages was mechanical, and left a considerable portion of my brain able to keep worrying the problem. I decided I’d set myself a deadline to come up with something by the end of next week. Otherwise, I’d just pretend I’d been startled by something, maybe in shop class where Aadhya would see—
My train of thought got interrupted just then as Orion turned his head to look behind us, and I realized that was the third time he’d done it. I hadn’t really noticed before because that’s a normal thing to do; I glance over my shoulder probably once every five minutes, automatically. But it wasn’t normal for him, and before I could ask what he’d picked up on, he was up from the table, just leaving all his books and everything, and running back into the stacks towards the reading room. “What the hell, Lake!” I yelled after him, but he was already going.
I could have chased after him quickly enough to catch up, maybe, except then I’d’ve been running towards whatever it was at top speed, and undoubtedly the whatever was really dangerous. If he was already too far ahead, the aisles could just stretch enough to keep me from catching up, and then I’d be running full-tilt in the dark stacks all alone, which is just as brilliant an idea as it sounds.
I could also have stayed parked at the desk, except then I still wouldn’t know what the whatever was, and if something really bad had made it into the library, it could just as easily flee from Orion and come for me. Anyway, I’d been looking for an excuse to show off: what more could I ask for? Taking out something big in the reading room would be a great one, as long as Orion didn’t kill it before I got there. Maybe I could even save him.