And as soon as we started, I couldn’t bear to stop. It was a belly-deep relief, in every possible way. The last traces of the awful blurring drugs went fading away before the physical reality of our bodies moving against one another, the exotic wonder of someone this close to me, much harder to believe in than a thousand forgotten places. I let it fill my whole brain: the touching; the humid warm air still hanging in the room from my endless shower, miles away from the clammy coldness of the Scholomance bathrooms; the sound of our breath, quickening, and not because we were running away from something horrible. Her hands were brushing away a sticky layer of cobwebs that had resisted all the hot water in the world, her mouth warm and mint-cool at the same time.
And it didn’t have to be hard. I didn’t have to think, I could just put my arms round her and touch, and kiss, and be touched; I could have pleasure and give it back in turn. And that was easy too, ridiculously easy; I didn’t have to wonder what she’d like, because she just told me, here, or again, or yes, like so, and I didn’t have to wonder what I’d like, either, because Liesel just tried things out on me methodically, and asked me which was best, and anyway all of them were best. We moved together just like we were back running the obstacle course again, a single smooth well-oiled machine, tossing the lead back and forth between us, and I didn’t even mind whatever she was going to charge me for it. Of course something this wonderful would have a price. I didn’t care.
I was waiting for it afterwards, when we were lying crammed in on the narrow bed next to each other panting and sweaty, needing showers all over again. But Liesel didn’t say anything right away, and I couldn’t help thinking about Orion again, running the course with him, being in the gymnasium with him—a million years ago and barely more than a week, amphisbaena raining gently down outside the pavilion and his hands on my body, hearing him say my name as if I was the single most astounding thing in the universe.
My throat swelled up with longing and rage: he’d asked to come to me, he’d asked me to let him make me that promise; that had been the price he’d charged me, for this magical thing, so good and healthy and simple, and I’d paid it. I’d let him promise, and he hadn’t kept his promise. Instead he’d gone as far as he could in the other direction; he’d gone to spend the rest of eternity unreachable and screaming in the belly of a maw-mouth, in the back of my head, screaming forever, and Liesel made an impatient noise and rolled over onto me and kissed me again, and I kissed her back with desperate gratitude and let her yank me out of my head and back into my body.
We ended up having to make a mad dash for the gate in the end, despite all the time we’d had to wait. The corridors of Heathrow annoyingly insisted on remaining exactly the same length the entire time we were pelting towards the aeroplane, but I suppose that was better than if they’d stretched themselves out twice as long. We got ourselves aboard and I turned into something of a wide-eyed naif staring out the window as the ground fell away below us. Flying is one of the things you really can’t do with magic, at least not outside an enclave: only imagine how wonderful it would be to be soaring a hundred feet off the ground and then some mundane glances up and doesn’t believe you’re doing that, so rather abruptly you aren’t anymore.
My gawping lasted for maybe ten minutes or so, and then I took a deep breath and turned to see what Liesel was going to say to me now, demand of me, and instead she was already asleep and even snoring a little, just barely loud enough to hear it over the burring whine of the engines. I stared down at her and then I spread out my pod seat and went straight to sleep myself, in the comfortable familiarity of discomfort: the cot narrow and hard and cold, the air stale and recirculating through a hundred other pairs of lungs, the wall vibrating with the low whining engines, incomprehensible machinery working somewhere out of sight, keeping us all alive, suspended out of the world.
I slept the entire way. When the attendants turned up the lights and started to make the rounds to bring us a meal we were calling lunch, Precious—she’d made her own way past security and got back in my pocket afterwards—had to creep out and bite my earlobe to wake me up properly; I’d been ready to stay down. At that, I might almost as well have done. The food wasn’t as bad as the Scholomance cafeteria, which was as much as you could really say for it, although they presented it with the confident triumph of someone offering you marvels of the culinary art, complete with heavy white napkins and inconvenient cutlery that repeatedly threatened to fall down and disappear into the crevices of the seat or into spots unreachable except by someone with arms like a flamingo’s legs.
Liesel and I ate it all anyway; we had low standards. She kept not asking me for anything, and I continued to feel if not well, then at least like I had a body and it existed in a functioning world, which had seemed questionable at times yesterday. By the time we made it out of the endless bureaucratic airport queues and were blinking on the pavement in the daylight of a different continent, I was entirely grounded back in material reality. New York—or rather New Jersey; we’d landed one state over—was oven-hot and unbearably sticky, sun radiating off the black tarmac in waves, and cars and taxis blaring horns and shoving in and out to the curb in an ongoing wave that was both always the same and always different.
Aadhya pulled up to the curb in a massive white vehicle only slightly smaller than a campervan, and we climbed into the blessed relief of the air-conditioning and her arms around me, squeezing me tight: she was alive, she was here, out in the world with the sun hammering on the car windows. She’d made it out of the Scholomance, and if she had, and I was here with her, then I had, too. It was a reminder of gratitude, and I couldn’t help but feel some, even with everything else.
When the honking behind us started to reach the frenzied pitch of no we really mean it, Aad finally let go of me and started driving with slightly alarming confidence: the car wasn’t as full-on magic as Alfie’s London race car, but it had clearly been told in no uncertain terms that she knew how to drive and therefore it was going to do the right thing for her at all times. The right thing seemed to involve a lot of honking at taxi drivers and weaving aggressively through traffic. I sat in the front seat staring out at the passing road full of cars. It looked as though someone had come through with a pump and inflated everything in the scene by thirty percent, highway and cars and all, before going away satisfied.
“Are you okay?” Aadhya said, glancing over at me. “Chloe said we could come straight in, but I can call her if you need to lie down for a while.”
I wasn’t okay, but I’d had the sleep I’d desperately needed, and I wasn’t going to get any better by going to lie down for a while. Getting to New York was the only chance I had to get anywhere near a more permanent kind of okay, and I already knew it was going to be the long way round. “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We hadn’t been invited into the actual enclave. New York was on high alert, and in any case strangers don’t normally get ushered into enclaves, unless of course the enclave is under attack by a maw-mouth and desperately needs the stranger to haul them out of a ditch. Chloe met us at a pavement café somewhere in Manhattan, I couldn’t have told you where, on a side street full of townhouses. The fortress of skyscrapers mostly just loomed in the distance, although on the corner someone had knocked down a quarter of the block and put up a complicated steel-and-grey-glass tower some twenty stories high that gave the impression of having been put down by accident in the wrong place.