It was a good ten minutes’ walk through the tunnels and round and round and round the stairs until the building finally spat me and Liesel out near Belsize Park station. We weren’t heaving for breath or anything, as we were still in sprinting-for-the-graduation-gates trim, but it wasn’t a delightful stroll either. At last we were out in the July night air, late enough now that all the posh cafés and restaurants around us were closed, a few very faint stars or satellites glittering overhead.
I stood on the corner blankly. Not out of indecision: I was full of perfect certainty. I knew exactly what I had to do, bright and clear and utterly necessary. I had to get to the Scholomance doors, and I had to go in, and I had to kill Patience. Only I hadn’t the faintest idea how to start on that project in any practical way. I’d spent the last four years of my life in a single building—a bloody big one, but still there hadn’t been anywhere in the place I couldn’t get to by walking, and the meals were terrible but they were provided for me, and I know how to set off supervolcanoes and destroy castigator demons and murder ten thousand people at a time, but I didn’t have a passport or a mobile or a tenner in my pocket. And for that matter, I didn’t even know where I was going. I looked at Liesel ungraciously. “Can you ask Alfie for me where the Scholomance doors are?”
“No, of course not. If I contact Alfie from here, while he is in the enclave, his father’s enemies will be able to trace us, and then we will have done all this,” she waved with vivid disgust at the squat round turret we’d emerged from, “for nothing. Anyway, what good would that do? Yancy said it would take mana. London is still in no position to help you with that at the moment. We must go to New York.”
I had several different competing reactions to that statement, most prominently the intense desire to demand when I had become we, and also why, but unfortunately the well-honed strategic bits of my brain pointed out that Liesel was in fact perfectly right. The only people in the world who could give me the kind of mana I’d need to get back into the Scholomance and kill Patience, and who would do that, just to save Orion from screaming in the void for however long it took the school to really go, were in fact his mum and dad, in New York.
And I hadn’t any idea how to get there on my own. There’s a terribly impressive Trans-Atlantic Gateway between London and New York, but with London’s mana store flobbing about like jelly, I wouldn’t have bet on it being stable enough to use at the moment even if I could have gone sailing back into the enclave I’d just gone to great effort to sneak out of. That left the prosaic but reliable method of getting on a plane, and that meant I couldn’t afford to ask Liesel why, because if she didn’t help me, I’d land myself in the clink for inadequately forging a passport and stealing a plane ticket, and that was if I wasn’t shoved into deep dark detention somewhere.
Of course, Mum doesn’t have a passport or a mobile either. She’d have told me to just set off into the world and trust it to get me where I’m supposed to be. That always works for her, but the world has given me the strong impression that it thinks I’m supposed to be in a dark fortress on top of a mountain somewhere, wreathed with storms and lightning cracking down as I laugh maniacally, so I didn’t really trust that approach myself.
But I was still wary about taking Liesel’s help. I’d already turned down her offer, so now I didn’t have any idea what she thought she was going to get out of shepherding me around the world like a wayward hurricane she’d have liked to aim, and that made me uneasy since I was absolutely certain she did think she was going to get something out of it. What if it was something I didn’t want her to have? It could have been something as simple as wanting to get herself in good graces with Orion’s mum, who was in line to be the next Domina of New York, but flying across the Atlantic seemed like a fairly large outlay for the small chances of that return.
But I do a lot of things in my life warily, so this time wasn’t particularly novel. I let her summon us a taxi and off we went to the airport. She radiated exasperation when I needed help turning a small notebook from Paperchase into a passport, but she also did it for me, and then had a strongly worded conversation with the ticket machine that persuaded it to meekly hand over two first-class tickets, and once we’d been ushered through security and into the concourse, she dragged me past a bunch of perfume shops that together smelled like an unfortunate alchemy lab section and found a small phone store—tucked in a nook between one shop selling handbags for five hundred pounds and another one selling iPads, because after all, what if you just desperately needed an iPad on the spur of the moment whilst passing through—where she got me a proper phone on contract.
I didn’t resist the phone. The instant Liesel handed it over, I called Aadhya. Liu had written me an annoying little jingly song with her and Aadhya’s numbers in it, concluding with the line And El is going to go and get a phoooone! so I hadn’t any trouble remembering it, now that I actually had one in my hands. “It’s me,” I said, when she answered.
Aadhya shrieked, “Oh my God, I’m going to kill you! A week! We started calling random communes! Liu called Liesel!” At the sound of her voice, her voice caring about me, I had to go blindly stumbling off to the side of the corridor, nearly running into people going by in both directions, and turn myself to face the wall so I wouldn’t just go into a fit of blubbing.
Aadhya managed to conference Liu in while I got myself under control. Hearing both their voices prolonged the struggle, though. If I shut my eyes, I could be back in one of our dorm rooms, sitting together eating a mishmosh of snack bar horrors several steps down from the worst fast-food options in the airport around me, and I couldn’t want to be back inside the Scholomance, but I did want to be with them again; I wanted the circle of their arms around me, so desperately.
I couldn’t even tell them exactly what had happened: it would have been a bad idea to start talking about maleficaria and enclaves and maw-mouths, or even just Orion dying, there in the corridor with mundanes going past two feet away and a pair of police constables already eyeing me with some skepticism after I’d gone careening wildly across the flow of traffic. But I told them I was going to New York. “And I—have to go back to the school,” I said.
“Can you?” Aadhya said. “Isn’t it—gone?”
“There’s a way,” I said. “I just need…”
“Mana,” Liu finished for me. Of course, it’s what you always need, to do anything impossible.
“Yeah,” I said.
Aadhya blew out a breath and said, “Okay. I’ll call Chloe and see if she can get us in to see Orion’s mom and dad,” without my having to say anything more, already understanding. “Text me your flight info, I’ll come meet you at the airport.”
“Thanks,” I said, and added, “Liesel’s coming with me.”
“What? Why? What’s she getting out of it?” Aadhya instantly demanded, in flat suspicion. It was very comforting to have someone else sharing my feelings.
“I don’t know,” I said, grimly. “But she’s got us the tickets and everything.”
Aadhya didn’t like it, but she told me she’d be there to pick us both up and not to do anything stupid—anything else was strongly implied in her tone—until she’d got hold of me. “Liu, how long will it be before you can come?”
Liu was silent for a moment, and then she said, softly, miserably, “You haven’t heard yet.”
“Heard what?” I said, my chest clenching.
“Beijing was hit,” she said. “This morning, our time; a few hours ago.”
“Well, shit,” Aadhya said.