They were only the cannon fodder, though: hired wizards working for the enclave. The real powers in the room weren’t wearing uniforms. I picked out half a dozen of them along the way without half trying, as if some instinct of mine was sniffing them out as potential threats. There was a really beautiful and really dangerous man in red leather pants and a long-sleeved turtleneck of iridescent black snakeskin that almost seemed to melt into his actual skin at the hard-to-see edges, who wore a single short blade at his side roughly the length of my forearm. He was standing talking quietly with a fat grey-haired woman in a flowing kaftan of embroidered silk who was slumped on one of the benches and radiating the impression of having undergone great trials just to get herself there, only when she answered him, I could literally feel her voice through the floor, wordless, as if she had the whole room under her hand, like that volcanic spell I’d used to smash the Scholomance off the world.
A tall man was leaning against one of the columns and reading a paper copy of The New York Times, wearing an elegant old-fashioned suit and hat and leather shoes, with a heavy antique gold watch on his wrist and a wolf-headed cane under his arm; he looked so much as though he could have been moved into the enclave along with the train station itself that he had to have been doing it on purpose. To move around through time, maybe? It’s a brilliant fighting technique, although most people can’t stand it any more than they can stand the unreal places. As much as I understand it, you can’t go back in time and change things; what you can do is essentially haul yourself towards the past so vigorously that you stop being here for just long enough that you can then pop yourself back into the present moment in a different spot, without any bother about physically moving there, or inconveniences like shields that might be between your two locations.
A girl with pink-and-green-streaked white hair and bushy eyebrows was sitting on the floor in an isolated corner with her eyes closed. She only had on a paper-thin black cotton dress and not a single visible weapon. She was vaguely familiar; after a moment I recognized her as one of the top seniors during our freshman year—not the valedictorian, but she’d still bargained herself a guaranteed spot after the obstacle course had opened that year, by doing a demonstration for several senior enclavers where she’d slaughtered her way through it, all alone. I certainly hadn’t been invited to the demonstration, so I didn’t know exactly how she’d done it, but she had been alchemy track, and there was a small potion bottle on the floor next to her. Her hands were clenched in her lap tightly, so I suspected she wasn’t looking forward to repeating the experience, whatever it was.
But that’s the price for using a tidy trick like that to get yourself into an enclave. They’ll expect you to use it for them again, whenever they need you to. That had been my own plan, or at least I’d thought it had been my plan, those first three years at school: to barter my power for a ticket straight to a major enclave, where they’d take me in and keep me safe the rest of my life, just to have me in reserve when something terrible happened. Something like an enclave war, and I didn’t need to have it spelled out for me in small words that we were on the verge of one.
None of them stopped us. The woman on the bench just said, “Balthasar,” a deep booming, as we went by, and nodded him on with a wave of her hand despite us tagging along behind him.
“Ruth, Grover,” he said, nodding back to them both, without breaking stride. He led us to one of the narrow brass-and-ironwork staircases going down through the floor. Going into the dark out of the brilliant light of the hall left us blinded and blinking for an unsettling moment that cleared up only as we came off the landing below and were in the narrow plush-carpeted corridor of a Gilded Age mansion block. Elegant wooden doors with knobs in the middle took turns with dim green-shaded lamps held up by brass hands, appearing at irregular intervals going down the length.
It wasn’t nearly as real a place as the transport hall above. It only took a few steps before we were at a door marked 33. Balthasar swung it open for us and let us in. I made it a few steps inside before I realized and stopped short, standing just inside the handsome sitting room—he’d brought us to his own flat. I’d assumed he was taking us to some council chamber, some garden or library or something of the sort.
Of course I couldn’t turn round and say no wait let me out. But I wanted to, because this was where Orion had lived, this had been his home, and I was here, and he wasn’t. I wanted to run away at once, and I wanted to go prowling over the whole place, looking for any last scraps and shreds of him I could gather up and squirrel away inside myself, and hold on to him like holding on to one of the lost places.
By mundane standards, it was a cozy little place, the sort that a real estate listing would call charming, meaning not quite as large as you’d like. By enclave standards, it was enormous, and with an almost unimaginable luxury: windows. The short wall of the sitting room was made entirely of panels of one-way mirrors in ironwork, and on the other side you could see a garden, a garden outside in the real world. It looked like the yard of a townhouse, nine feet square at most, but the brick walls were covered with ivy and rosebushes, and all the space was filled with large plants in pots. The windows surely didn’t open—you wouldn’t want an actual opening to the outside world in your enclave home, since dozens of mals would try to get in—but it was still real sunlight and greenery.
One long wall was entirely full of bookshelves and a fireplace, and in front of it a small sofa and two large comfortable chairs were arranged round a rug large enough for a child to sprawl upon, playing. There were photographs scattered over the bookshelves, and I wasn’t close enough to see them clearly, but there was someone in them with silver-grey hair.
“Make yourselves at home,” Balthasar said, an invitation to go on and stab myself in the chest, just as I liked. “I’m going to go get Ophelia. Chloe, would you mind helping the girls with the pantry, if they’d like anything?”
I didn’t want anything I could get in a pantry. I left Chloe showing the others how the sleek antique cupboard in the wall opened up to reveal a bank of illuminated drawers just like the old Automat food carts we’d enjoyed every year on Field Day, if those carts had been full of beautiful food that you’d actually want to eat, and also polished to a high sheen instead of nearly blackened with a century of grime and tarnish. I went down the corridor instead, slowly, to the door at the far end of it, the door that was shut. I passed a sliding door half open, going to what looked like the inside of a garage, the workshop where Orion had told me his dad had tried to keep him busy; there was another door ajar on my right, with a mirror on the wall showing a glimpse of a large canopied bed, hangings of grey velvet and mosquito-netting glimmering faintly with light, and when I paused to look at it, the mirror clouded over uneasily and I think something inside it started to peer back at me, only Precious made an alarmed squeak of warning, and I hurried on before it managed to pull itself together.
I stood in front of the closed door for a long time. I didn’t want to open it. I didn’t want to open it almost as much as I hadn’t wanted to open the door of the maintenance shaft in the Scholomance and go out into the graduation hall, expecting to see Patience and Fortitude waiting for me. No one was going to make me open this door; the Scholomance wasn’t going to bully me through it. But I opened it anyway, because I couldn’t walk away from it either, so there wasn’t anything else to do.
Orion wasn’t there. In any sense of the word. The room looked almost exactly like one of the pages of the glossy in-flight magazine from the seat-back pocket on the aeroplane, advertising toys for boys: bat, ball, a football, a basketball and a hoop mounted on the back of a door, an American football, a racquet and tennis balls still in the plastic tube, another ball, a fishing rod, two different cameras, a remote-controlled car, three Lego kits and five science kits, a television mounted on the wall with shelves beneath it holding at least four different video game systems, a computer on the desk with a gigantic monitor, neatly filled bookshelves, a row of stuffed animals.