Liesel had followed me over to the wall and was watching me talk on the phone. “Another enclave?” she demanded, just looking at my face. I nodded. “How bad?”
“It hasn’t gone all the way down, yet, but it’s too badly hit to stay up for long,” Liu said, when I passed along the question. “And they’ve asked my family for help. My mother told me they think there might be a way for us to save their enclave and build ours, at the same time. My uncle and the rest of our council members are already there; the rest of us might be leaving any minute. I’m so sorry, El,” she finished, low. “I can’t come to New York.”
“It’s okay,” I said, my throat tight, but it wasn’t okay, because the reason she couldn’t come was that by the time her plane landed, there might already be an enclave war going, and if that happened, her family and New York enclave were going to be on opposite sides. Probably the only reason New York and Shanghai weren’t already at war was because London had been hit, too: it wouldn’t have made any sense for New York to have attacked its own most powerful ally, not to mention Salta, which had been launched the year before we went into the Scholomance and had been carefully staying totally neutral.
But it didn’t make any sense for a maleficer to hit all of those enclaves either. If you were trying to suck power out of enclaves, surely you’d be delighted to have them blaming one another and going to war instead of hunting for you. Instead the pattern was looking nearly random, jumping all over the world.
“Why would anyone be doing it that way?” I asked Liesel, over tea and biscuits in the first-class lounge, trying to drown out the lingering ghostly taste of trumpets that kept coming through my mouth. “Hopscotching from one continent to the other?” I was being cautious about my word choices, although the lounge was mostly empty, only us and a handful of other travelers scattered around the wide expanse of vaguely Star Trek–like furniture. It wasn’t as though Liesel couldn’t guess what I was referring to.
Liesel shrugged. “There is no obvious reason. Whoever it is, we can only say that they are not being efficient.”
We had five hours left to kill before our morning flight. We stuffed ourselves from the buffet like the until-recently-starving urchins we were—the staff looked annoyed with us after our first trip loading up our plates, as if they thought we were being greedy, and then became vaguely impressed after our third round—and then we discovered there were even private rooms with beds and showers, too.
I let Liesel shower first, because I didn’t want to feel any obligation to come out. I stayed in for nearly an hour, washing over and over, trying to scrub away the lingering jangly edges of Yancy’s potion and memories I didn’t want: the maw-mouth exploding all over me, the agonized eye looking up at me, the mouth begging to live. The last glimpse of Orion’s face as he shoved me through the gates, with Patience coming to swallow him up. Liesel’s cleaning spell hadn’t wiped any of those away. The shower didn’t either. I kept trying until I was pruny and exhausted with the effort, but they went on rotating steadily through my head like they’d been put on a loop.
When I finally gave up and came out, the room lights were off and both Precious and Liesel were asleep, one in a nest of tissues and the other on the bed with a small glowing ball of an alarm spell hovering near her head and the faint comforting soap-slick shimmer of a good warding spell over the door. A warding spell we didn’t even need, because of my brilliant scheme, which had wiped out all the maleficaria in the world and handed Orion over to Patience in return. I was still involuntarily glad to notice it there.
I didn’t want to sleep; between the drugs and the horror, I was sure I’d wake up screaming, and possibly trying to alter reality around me. I only sat down on the other side of the bed with an empty magazine, but it couldn’t hold me; the intoxicating sense of safety unlocked the muscles I was trying to keep clenched tight, and at some point I slid down the bed and just went under.
I’d been right, though. I didn’t wake up screaming, but that was because Liesel woke me up before I got that far, holding a silencing bubble over us with one hand as she shook my shoulder with the other. The half-devoured face had been floating over the putrefaction, and it had been Orion’s face, and his one eye had looked up at me and his mouth had said, “El, I love you so much,” just like he’d said it at the Scholomance doors before he’d shoved me out, and then I sat up out of it and I was looking at Liesel instead, frowning at me in the dim light, the small room, with the soft muffling weight of the silencing spell around us, and I put my hands over my face, panting, full of agony and rage I couldn’t let myself feel.
“Sorry,” I said, rusty and resentful, when I’d got my breath back under control. “I won’t fall asleep again.”
“You will,” Liesel said, not even arguing, just stating a fact. “You must calm your mind, not stay awake.”
“Do you happen to have any Oblivion Water handy? Drops of Lethe, maybe?” I said, ostensibly with sarcasm, but I admit that if she’d pulled out a bottle, I’d have let her put them in my eyes without hesitating, even though I knew to the word what Mum would say about that, even aside from the stupidity of mixing anything more in with whatever concoction Yancy had given us.
“Mixing with that potion we drank?” Liesel said, and then she cupped my cheek and we were in bed together, alone here in this little room, floating in the void, and when I said, waveringly, “I’m not,” meaning that I still wasn’t interested in the grand alliance—which I wasn’t, although I had to admit the immediate prospect made it loads more tempting—she said peevishly, “Yes, yes; well?” meaning she’d taken no for an answer on that and was offering me a shag anyway, without strings attached.
And of course I had no business believing that; Aadhya and Liu would have yelled at me for days. The first lesson you learn in the Scholomance is that you don’t get anything you need for free, so if someone’s giving it to you, there’s a reason, and I didn’t know what Liesel’s was. But whatever her reasons, at the moment she was here, and where she was touching me it was only her hand on my skin and the faint sandalwood smell of the free soap, and there wasn’t any room left over in my head to go circling back to Orion, Orion, Orion, and maybe I was looking for a way I could shove him away, out of the gates of my mind, for at least a few minutes, because when Liesel leaned in and kissed me, I kissed her back.