I knew that New York had its front door in Gramercy Park, a private gated garden square that was somehow—yes, somehow; I’m sure the enclave hadn’t anything to do with it—still hanging on in the middle of Manhattan. Orion had made a point of showing it to me on a map, as if he’d wanted to be sure I could find it. The enclave owned a shifting assortment of the surrounding townhouses and flats—they sold and bought new ones every so often, following the vicissitudes of the housing market; one of the many perfectly mundane ways New York arranged to have what I gathered was a blazing amount of money even by enclave standards—and a substantial stake in an insanely expensive hotel on the corner, whose rooms were quietly borrowed whenever they were empty.
But presumably that entrance was barricaded at the moment, under the circumstances. Instead Balthasar took us uptown on the subway to Penn Station—a massive and hideous low-ceilinged place filled with noise and grime and cheap fast-food shops—and in the back of a cramped newsstand, where the woman on the cash register nodded to him, he opened up a tiny door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and we stepped through and went down a short dark corridor.
My whole body was still tight with misery and the remains of anger. So I didn’t even notice at first, but with every step down the corridor, the sensation got stronger until my stomach was full of it: a low queasy seasick feeling just like in London, only not quite as bad, and I slowly realized that it hadn’t been their mana store, sloshing around. I’d just felt it more strongly over there, maybe because of the damage. This was what Mum had meant, the feeling of the malia that enclaves were built upon, only I couldn’t understand how they couldn’t feel it, all the time; how they could stand it. “Do you feel it?” I whispered to Aadhya, low, but she only looked back at me puzzled, and when I explained it, she shut her eyes and stood for a moment, frowning, and then she said, “Maybe? It doesn’t really feel like being on a boat to me. It’s like driving, maybe, with the engine going.”
Chloe had turned round from an open archway at the other end to wait for us anxiously. We slowly went to her, and the archway deposited us in an astonishing entrance hall on the scale of Kings Cross, a gargantuan vaulted ceiling mounted on stone pillars, full of lamps and arches. It was the exact opposite of the carefully crafted layout of London’s fairy garden with all its deft concealed angles that let the space move to where it was needed. Twenty-six enormous archways led out of the hall just as if they were going to trains, only they were full of the pallid grey clouds of an overcast sky, churning with possibility: New York’s famous gateways. The one going to London stood pitch black, completely shut down.
The hall was certainly imposing and dramatic, but I hadn’t any idea why anyone had built it inside an enclave, with the attendant waste of space. It wasn’t as though New York City had loads of room going begging. But by the time we’d got halfway across the stubborn floor, which persisted in being exactly the size it was, exactly like the endless corridors in Heathrow, I’d realized they hadn’t. This was a real place. Someone had literally built this whole enormous building solidly on the outside, and they’d just—moved it in. It was equal parts amazing and outrageous: how had they done it without anyone noticing?
The Scholomance had been really constructed, too, but that was why the iron skeleton of the structure had been built in tidy individual sections in the factories of Manchester, each one quietly shipped to the final destination under cover of night, popped in through the doors—wherever those were, which hopefully I’d be told soon enough—and bolted on to the rest of the growing structure from inside. There had also been a lot of elaborate spells that had encouraged those sections to stretch out along the way. The largest classrooms and the cafeteria had all been built out of negative space, and the outer walls had all been at least halfway fictional.
No one had built this marble hall in sections, and it hadn’t been inflated, either. Every last square inch of the ground was so perfectly solid that probably you could have brought a mundane into the place without so much as a ripple. “How did you get this place in here?” Aadhya was hissing to Chloe as we hurried after Orion’s dad.
“What?” Chloe jerked to glance around: couldn’t even be bothered to notice the everyday local miracle. “It’s just the old Penn Station. The enclave bid on the demolition, and then brought it inside while they pretended they were knocking it down.”
“What vandal would demolish this place to build that rat’s-nest we just came out of?” I said, in flat disbelief. Chloe just shrugged, but as soon as I’d asked, I had the strong suspicion that the enclave had made it very much in the private interests of whatever marauder or twenty had made it possible for them to snaffle the place right out of the city. Using a building made for transport, with probably a million mundane people gone through each of those archways, going somewhere different, full of purpose and bent on journeying—that was the kind of psychic foundation you couldn’t make or buy, no matter how rich an enclave you were, and undoubtedly it had made it significantly easier to build all these gateways.
The place was full of wizards rushing through at almost exactly the same pace as the mundanes in the station outside, with the same sense of urgency. There were small guard stations flanking each archway, charming brass-and-iron follies with a single seat inside, clearly intended for some bored guard to spend the day sitting in. Only at the moment, there were ten grim-faced and heavily armed wizards stationed next to each one of them instead. The gateway going to Tokyo—that was the one they reckoned Shanghai was most likely to hit, presumably—had at least thirty guards, and they’d installed a huge spiky steel wall in front of it that looked more suited to a medieval siege than its surroundings. It was even decorated with scowling brass heads of eagles, and enormous talons protruding from the bottom edge.
Despite the elevated security, no one stopped Balthasar bringing us through. The guards were easy to pick out in their uniform of thick tufted armor—undoubtedly highly practical, meant to muffle and absorb all sorts of magical attacks, although it did make them look vaguely like angry sofas. They were all carrying the same weapons as well, long metal poles with a thin slice of an axe blade and a focusing crystal mounted on the top, again sensible; if you can jab a physical object right up close at an enemy wizard, you can often get a spell off past their defenses.